Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women's Sport

5. From "Women in Sports" to the "New Ideal of Beauty"

5. From “Women in Sports” to the “New Ideal of Beauty” The advent of sex testing and the National Institutes in the 1960s were attempts to control gender normativity in the face of an undeniable and impending explosion in women’s sport participation. Both were important precursors to what many felt was an athletic “revolution” in the 1970s, an era replete with points of change. Symbolic of this transformation, editors devoted the June 26, 1978, cover of Time, a weekly publication that rarely featured sportswomen (or any women, for that matter), to “women in sports” (see figure 5.1).1 The simple title, in stark yellow font, appears as a banner across the figures of two intercollegiate lacrosse players caught in the throes of competition. The focus is on one woman from Penn State University. The photographer has captured her with stick raised and in midstride. Between the top of her knee-high sock and the hem of her pleated skirt peeks the muscular thigh of an athlete. Nothing about her gaze or body position suggests an awareness of the camera’s presence. It is an action shot as opposed to the “poised and pretty” image that historically predominates the coverage of sportswomen.2 The corresponding story, “Comes the Revolution,” is one of athletic achievement and autonomy: “Spurred by the fitness craze, fired up by the feminist movement and buttressed by court rulings and legislative mandates, women have been moving from miniskirted cheerleading on the sidelines for the boys to playing, and playing hard, for themselves. . . . They have come a long, long way.”3 A second cover story, published four years later, concurred: “You’ve come a long way, sister.” But in language that conspicuously paralleled the earlier piece, its message took on a decidedly different cast. “The sports for which 124 chapter 5 you were once only a cheerleader now serve as your after-work recreation and, thanks to Title IX, part of your school-age daughter’s curriculum. Spurred by feminism’s promise of physical, domestic and economic freedom, you have done what few generations of women have dared or chosen to do. You have made muscles—a body of them—and it shows. And you look great.”4 The emphasis is on, as the title of the cover story articulates, “the new ideal of beauty.” The accompanying cover illustration shows a model clad in a red, faintly transparent leotard and matching thigh-high leg warmers (see figure 5.2). Despite the article’s praise of female muscularity, she exhibits almost none. With windswept hair, she stands provocatively, arms akimbo, legs apart, and looks levelly—suggestively—into the camera. She is, as the caption asserts, “coming on strong.” Figure 5.1: “Women In Sports,” Time, June 26, 1978. Courtesy of PARS International Corp. From “Women in Sports” to the “New Ideal of Beauty” 125 Generally speaking, the covers of Time “serve as benchmarks to history,” and, taken together, the two covers described in this chapter suggest important points of change in women’s physical culture. Specifically, they express what Naomi Wolf calls the “beauty myth,” a “backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement .”5 The complementary articles go further. In 1978 Time reported that the female athlete is “acquiring a new sense of self, and of self-confidence in her physical abilities and her potential. She is leading a revolution that is one of the most exciting and one of the most important in the history of sport.” Readers learn that girls’ and women’s participation had virtually erupted since the early 1970s, by nearly 600 percent at the high school level and, at the time of publication, more than one hundred thousand women Figure 5.2: “Coming on Strong,” Time, August 30, 1982. Courtesy of PARS International Corp. 126 chapter 5 competed in intercollegiate sports. “Such statistics are impressive,” writes the unnamed author, “but they merely reinforce the most significant aspect of the explosive growth of women’s sport: the new, refreshingly unapologetic pride of the female athlete.” The piece celebrates the changing landscape of U.S. sport and the physical, psychological, and social benefits that female athletes were beginning to reap. In contrast, the 1982 cover story fetes sport and physical culture for altering women’s bodies and the ideal feminine form: “As a comely byproduct of the fitness phenomenon women have begun literally...