Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader

STRONGER WOMEN

y STRONGER WOMEN Mariah Burton Nelson Boy, don’t you men wish you could hit a ball like that! —Babe Didrikson Zaharias Laughing, Patrick would scoop his wife, Gail, off the floor and carry her around the house like a squirming child. This was early in the marriage, and Patrick, an ecologist from Maryland, thought it was funny, a joke. Gail, a history professor, didn’t like it. Feeling helpless and angry, she would ask to be put down. He would refuse. Later, Gail became a dedicated runner. Patrick argued that she was running too much, or in the wrong way, or at the wrong times. They would quarrel, and he would yell. Patrick didn’t literally lift her off the ground then, but to Gail the sensation was similar: Patrick’s criticisms felt like physical restraints, as if he were trying to prevent her from going where she wanted to go. Patrick says Gail used running as a “weapon” against him, a way “to escape out of our relationship—to literally put physical distance between us.” Gail says running became “the focus of a power struggle over who would control me.” . . . The way Gail gained strength, and keeps gaining strength, is through sports. Women can become strong in other ways, without being athletes, but athletic strength holds particular meaning in this culture. It’s tangible, visible, measurable. It has a history of symbolic importance. Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, Billie Jean King: their athletic feats have represented to many Americans key victories over racism and sexism, key “wins” in a game that has historically been dominated by white men. Sports have particular salience for men, who share childhood memories of having their masculinity confirmed or questioned because of their athletic ability or inability. Along with money and sex, sports in this culture define men to men. Sports embody a language men understand. Women also understand sports—their power, their allure—but historically , most women were limited to a spectator’s perspective. When a woman steps out of the bleachers or slips off her cheerleader’s costume Competing Bodies 159 Excerpted from Mariah Burton Nelson, “Strong Women,” The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football. Dare Press, 2005. http://www.mariahburtonnelson.com. 160 WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES and becomes an athlete herself, she implicitly challenges the association between masculinity and sports. She refutes the traditional feminine role (primarily for white women) of passivity, frailty, subservience. If a woman can play a sport—especially if she can play it better than many men—then that sport can no longer be used as a yardstick of masculinity. The more women play a variety of sports, the more the entire notion of masculine and feminine roles—or any roles at all assigned by gender—becomes as ludicrous as the notion of roles assigned by race. Female athletes provide obvious, confrontational evidence—“in your face” evidence, some might say—of women’s physical prowess, tangible examples of just what women can achieve. . . . An avid equestrian as a child, Gail thought of herself as “just one of those girls who loved horses.” No one suggested that a girl who trains and competes in equestrian events is every bit as athletic as the boys her age who earn letters in baseball or track. Lately, thinking about her lifelong love affair with sports, she realized that she “was really being an athlete the whole time.” She rode during her first marriage, which lasted 13 years. She taught riding and spent an inordinate amount of time at the barn, as equestrians do. Her husband did not object, but nor did he ask questions about her teaching, or speak proudly of her to his friends, or take an interest in her career. “What I did was okay because it was not considered important,” says Gail. “He never took it seriously.” During her second marriage, Gail’s horse grew lame and had to be put out to pasture. She discovered she “couldn’t just sit around” so she began running. For three months she was “in agony,” then she fell in love with the hypnotic process of landing, step by step, on the earth, as well as the fleeting moments of flight in between. She was 42. At first, Patrick did not object. When her training was occasional, her schedule flexible, he didn’t mind. “I was supportive when she started out because she had gotten a little overweight,” Patrick recalls. “I was...