Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader

PSYCHOSOCIAL IMPACTS OF ATHLETIC PARTICIPATION ON AMERICAN WOMEN

Fines of five dollars for first offense, ten dollars for second, and suspension for third, will automatically be imposed for breaking any of the above rules. y PSYCHOSOCIAL IMPACTS OF ATHLETIC PARTICIPATION ON AMERICAN WOMEN Facts and Fables Don Sabo Patriarchal myths are encoded within American culture and transmitted through art and literature, religion and law, fables and folkways. These myths help to legitimate structured sex inequality in all sectors of society, including sport. Feminist theorists argue that patriarchal myths in American sport are more than mere cultural beliefs or “gender stereotypes.” They are historically constructed ideologies that exaggerate and naturalize sex differences and, in effect, sustain men’s power and privilege in [relation ] to women (Messner and Sabo, in press; Birrell and Cole, 1986; Hargreaves , 1986). These same ideologies have also kept sport researchers from seeing women athletes as they really are as well as what they are capable of becoming. This paper identifies six beliefs about American women athletes which are grounded more in myth than empirical reality. Each myth is examined in light of current sport research which includes findings from three recent nationwide surveys which the author helped to design and execute. The first of these latter studies, the American High School Survey (AHSS), is a longitudinal analysis of a national, two-state, stratified probability sample of 569 female students. This study is unique because it overcomes a critical defect present in most previous studies of the effects of athletic participation, namely, their reliance on cross-sectional rather than longitudinal analysis and the resulting inability to adequately discuss change (see Melnick, Sabo, & Vanfossen, 1988). The second study, the 1985 Miller Lite Report on Women in Sports (MLR), Negotiating Masculinity and Femininity 61 From Don Sabo, Journal of Sport and Social Issues (12:2) pp. 83–93, copyright 1988. Reprinted in Sport in Contemporary Society: An Anthology, D. Stanley Eitzen, ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Inc. 62 WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES is the first nationwide survey of “active and committed” adult female athletes (Pollock, 1985). A random sample of 7,000 members of the Women’s Sports Foundation were surveyed in fall of 1985 and questioned about participation in sports and fitness activities. Finally, The Wilson Report: Moms, Dads, Daughters and Sports (TWR) focused on how family factors influence girls’ athletic participation (Garfield, 1988). Telephone interviews were conducted with a national random sample of 702 mothers, 302 fathers, and 513 of their daughters aged 7– 18. Whereas the AHSS provides solid methodological grounds for making causal inferences, the data reported in the MLR and TWR are descriptive and interpretations are made with caution. The goals of this paper are to (1) identify several “myth-conceptions” about women athletes, and (2) scrutinize their merit in light of sport research . The intent is to move sport research and theory away from androcentric assumptions and their resultant biases (Hall, 1987). The Myth of Female Frailty The “myth of female frailty” in sports holds that women lack the necessary physical strength and energy to fully participate in athletics. As Lenskyj amply documents, such beliefs helped justify women’s exclusion from sports and fitness activities. The belief in the fragility of female physiology is evident in 19th century medical writings which depict upper-class women as being inherently weak, sickly, hypochondriacal, and intellectually incapable of understanding medical matters and their own bodies. Well-to-do women were considered especially vulnerable to a variety of ailments. Because of their “innate” frailness, many medical scientists reasoned that women’s activities had to be limited to the more moderate demands of motherhood and homemaking (Ehrenreich and English, 1979). Likewise, American sociologist W. I. Thomas argued in 1907 that women’s peculiar anatomical traits were “very striking evidence of the ineptitude of women for the expenditure of physiological energy through motor action” (1907). The most recent evidence of the belief in female frailty issued in May of 1986 when the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued thirteen pages of “Safety Guidelines for Women.” Women were advised to consider 30 minutes of moderate exercise followed by a “day of rest” as a safe limit to avoid injury. These prescriptions were challenged by women’s sports advocates and researchers who point out that ACOG’s recommendations were not based on rigorously scientific studies of women athletes. In contrast to ACOG’s medical prescriptions , studies show that very few physical...