Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader

OLYMPIC WOMEN: A Struggle for Recognition

Pioneering Women in Sport 3 them in the expanding world of collegiate, professional, and international sports. Zirin comments that the media’s lackluster coverage of Hamm’s retirement proves that while women have gained a place on the sports bus, to this day they remain backseat riders. His essay raises the provocative question of why, more than three decades after Billie Jean King’s seemingly decisive victory in the “Battle of the Sexes,” women like Hamm still qualify as pioneers, and underappreciated ones at that. y OLYMPIC WOMEN A Struggle for Recognition Jennifer Hargreaves Introduction This chapter looks at the history of the modern Olympic Games, characterized as the most prestigious of all international sports competitions. There is a popular tendency to idealize the Olympics and to ignore that they have always been imbued with extreme expressions of male chauvinism and enduring examples of female subordination. The particular difficulties of Olympic sports for women have tended to be exaggerated examples of problems and complexities intrinsic to women’s sports in general. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is the central administrative authority for the Games. Since its foundation in 1894, it has been an undemocratic, self-regulating and male-dominated institution. At the start, all members were upper-class Anglo-Saxon men, many of whom had strong aristocratic connections, and for almost a century the IOC remained elite and exclusively male. The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was its major ideologue; he wielded power because he was the sole benefactor of the IOC, as well as its president (Mitchell 1977). Until his death in 1937, de Coubertin was intransigent in his opposition to women’s participation in Olympic competition, and made his views known through IOC publications. He claimed that Excerpted from “Olympic Women: A Struggle for Recognition,” Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports, by Jennifer Hargreaves. Copyright© 1994, Routledge. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK. 4 WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES ‘women’s sport’ was against the ‘laws of nature’ and ‘the most unaesthetic sight human eyes could contemplate’ (cited in Simri 1979: 12–13). ‘The Olympic Games’, he declared, ‘must be reserved for men’, for the ‘solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism’ with ‘female applause as reward’ (quoted in Gerber 1974: 137–8). Under de Coubertin’s tutelage the IOC resisted the participation of women in Olympic sports. From the start, the modern Olympics was a context for institutionalized sexism, severely hindering women’s participation. They were a powerful conservatizing force, making an indelible mark not only on the development of Olympic sports for women, but also on the development of international competitive sports in general. However, the original model of Olympic sports encapsulated demands for change as well as resistance to them. The history of the Games starkly demonstrates women’s struggles, failures and successes. The Early Years The first modern Olympics, which took place in Greece in 1896, exempli- fies sport as a bastion of bourgeois male privilege. Women were excluded from these Games, but there is a story about one unofficial female participant —a Greek woman called Melpomene—who ‘crashed’ the marathon in protest. Her action symbolizes the efforts of those who have struggled over the years to overcome male domination of Olympic sports. Although at the first Olympics the members of the IOC unanimously opposed women’s participation, there were other men in the Olympic movement , and in the newly formed International Federations of sport, who supported women in their struggle for Olympic recognition. These men were involved in the development of women’s sports in their respective countries. The period covering the first few Olympic Games coincides with the formative years of organized sports for women in the West [ . . . ]. It was during this time that national and international organizations for women’s sports were formed, and there was a steady growth of competitions, giving sportswomen increasing visibility and legitimacy. Ironically, the entry of women into the Olympics occurred as a result of laissez-faire arrangements in the early years. In 1900, and again in 1904, the IOC (which had the ultimate power to control the Olympics) rather casually handed over the responsibility for arrangements to the organizing committees of the host cities, Paris and St Louis. Under these conditions women were admitted to the Olympics without the official consent of the IOC (Mitchell 1977). Then, in a more formalized way, the British Olympic Association took...