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Account: s7451176
Coming
on Strong
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Coming
on Strong
Gender and Sexuality in
Women’S Sport
Second edition
Susan K. Cahn
University of Illinois Press
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
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First Illinois paperback, 2015
© 1994, 2015 by Susan K. Cahn.
Reprinted by arrangement with the author.
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cahn, Susan K.
Coming on strong : gender and sexuality in women’s sport /
Susan K. Cahn.—Second Edition.
pages cm
First edition title: Coming on strong : gender and sexuality
in twentieth-century women’s sport.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03955-3 (hardcover : acid-free paper) —
isbn 978-0-252-08064-7 (paperback : acid-free paper)
1. Sports for women—History—20th century. 2. Sex discrimination
against women—History—20th century. 3. Gender identity. I. Title.
gv709.c34 2015
796.082—dc23 2014035978
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To my parents,
Gretchen and James Cahn
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vii
Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1. The New Type of Athletic Girl 7
2. Grass-roots Growth and Sexual Sensation in
the Flapper Era 31
3. Games of Strife
The Battle over Women’s Competitive Sport 55
4. Order on the Court
The Campaign to Suppress Women’s Basketball 83
5. “Cinderellas” of Sport
Black Women in Track and Field 110
6. No Freaks, No Amazons, No Boyish Bobs
The All-American Girls Baseball League 140
7. Beauty and the Butch
The “Mannish” Athlete and the Lesbian Threat 164
8. “Play It, Don’t Say It”
Lesbian Identity and Community in Women’s Sport 185
9. Women Competing/Gender Contested 207
10. You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe
A “Revolution” in Women’s Sport? 246
Epilogue. “Are We There Yet?” The Paradox of Progress 281
Notes 315
Index 389
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ix
preface
As a sports-minded teenager of the 1970s, I marveled at the
courage and skill of the pioneer female athletes of my generation.
Prompted by new federal legislation against sex discrimination
and, more generally, by feminist demands for female access to
traditionally male realms of society, the sports world seemed to
undergo a rapid, almost instant transformation. Within a few
short years, girls’ and women’s athletic leagues, tournaments,
sports camps, and city, state, and national championships sprout-
ed to serve women at the high school, college, and professional
levels. The media took note as well, giving extensive coverage to
such female tennis and gymnastic stars as Billie Jean King, Chris
Evert, Kathy Rigby, and Olga Korbut. As one of the grateful ben-
eficiaries of these changes, I eagerly joined my high school bas-
ketball team and thrilled at my good fortune—the chance to be
involved in what I assumed was the first-ever interscholastic
sporting opportunity for girls.
Delighting as I did in the chance to play in organized competi-
tion, I was not concerned with the blatantly second-class status
of women’s sport in budget matters and the media; it did not
occur to me that it could be otherwise. And though I had ached
to play Little League baseball as a young girl, I never wondered
why baseball remained off limits to girls. My concerns were per-
sonal and immediate, mostly about jump shots and playing time.
I did suffer twinges of embarrassment knowing that I still har-
bored a secret wish to play halfback on my high school football
team. And though I suspected that what made me “right” in
“jock” circles might be making me all “wrong” in the nonathletic
social scene, I assumed these were the private dilemmas of a girl
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x p r e F a C e
born on the cusp of a new era. I had some vague images of
women athletes of the past, like the amazing Babe Didrikson or
the lithe Althea Gibson. But if I thought of them at all, it was as
anomalies of an earlier age—athletes who had miraculously done
it on their own in an age when women didn’t play sports. As far as
I knew, no tradition of women’s competitive sport paved the
way for my pioneering generation.
Years later my training in women’s history and feminist studies
has led me to reconsider those suppositions. I know now that his-
tories get buried. Questions deemed insignificant may be worth
asking. And interpretations oblivious to gender are most likely
misguided and incomplete. As a graduate student I began to won-
der about the tradition of women’s athletics in the United States.
Was it a linear story, a steady climb from exclusion to inclusion?
Or had specific time periods, classes, or cultures supported
women’s athletics before the 1970s? Which women played
sports, and what had doing so meant for them? If women had
participated in the past, why had sports remained such a bastion
of male activity and identity?
This book, which began as my Ph.D. dissertation for the
University of Minnesota, addresses these and other questions
designed to recover, and gain insight from, a history that for the
most part has been ignored by both popular and scholarly writ-
ers. It is not a comprehensive histor y of women’s athletics.
Rather, it is a study of how gender and sexuality have been cul-
turally constructed within and through twentieth-century U.S.
women’s sport. Precisely because women in sport crossed into a
“male” realm, both critics and advocates articulated their beliefs
about femininity, the female body, and the meaning of woman-
hood, leaving a rich body of historical evidence on how common-
sense beliefs about womanhood and manhood are made and
altered over time. By looking at how athletes, educators, sporting
officials, promoters, and journalists have clashed and compro-
mised over gender issues in sport, we can learn something about
how ordinary and influential people create society’s gender and
sexual arrangements, and how their actions are conditioned by
the circumstances and beliefs of their time.
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p r e F a C e xi
As I worked on my dissertation and then this book, several
institutions and many individuals provided financial, intellectu-
al, and personal support. I am grateful to the Graduate School
and the History Department of the University of Minnesota for
assisting me financially at the dissertation level. A University of
Minnesota dissertation fellowship, a dissertation special research
grant, and a grant from the McMillan Travel fund provided ex-
tremely helpful support. Subsequently I have received financial
assistance from a Clemson University Faculty Development
Grant and a Julian Park Publication Fund grant from the State
University of New York at Buffalo.
The financial support I received enabled me to travel in several
regions of the country collecting oral histories from athletes who
competed in high-level competition from as early as the 1930s
and as late as the 1970s. A few of these women had been famous
athletes of their day. The vast majority, however, received little
recognition during their playing days and have received even less
attention from historians or other scholars. I owe them a great
debt for sharing their time, stories, and knowledge with me. They
provided me with a level of detail about women’s athletic partic-
ipation that is unavailable in written sources. More important,
they gave me critical insights into the experience and perspectives
of women athletes, information that transformed my own think-
ing about women’s sport history. I would like to thank them for
their great intellectual contribution to this project and at the
same time acknowledge that their interpretations and mine were
not the same in every instance, and that my own questions and
interests have taken this study in directions that may not reflect
their priorities. I would also like to thank them for their hospital-
ity and for the thoroughly enjoyable experience of getting to meet
them and listen to their life stories, which collectively paved the
way for athletes of my and future generations.
I am also grateful for the generous help of archivists, friends,
colleagues, and editors. As I worked with a variety of historical
collections, I benefitted from the knowledge and assistance of
archivists, especially those at the University of Wisconsin,
Tennessee State University, Smith College, Radcliffe College, and
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xii p r e F a C e
the Chicago Historical Society. My adviser at the University of
Minnesota, Sara Evans, encouraged me throughout and after my
years in graduate school, offering her unwavering support in all
phases of the research and writing of this project. Professors
Mary Jo Maynes and Janet Spector also generously shared their
time and ideas and offered insightful criticisms and challenging
questions as well as personal support along the way. Members of
my dissertation writing group read numerous essays, conference
papers, and chapter drafts from the project’s inception to its
completion. I would like to thank Davida Alperin, Greta Gaard,
Priscilla Pratt, and Diana Swanson for their advice and comrade-
ship. In revising the manuscript for publication, several colleagues
have read chapters and made valuable suggestions. Pamela Mack,
George Chauncey, Jr., Kath Weston, Don Sabo, Wanda Wakefield,
Tamara Thornton, and Liz Kennedy have all given generously of
their time and ideas. Cindy Himes Gissendanner and Mary Jo
Festle, scholars who also study U.S. women’s sport history, have
been especially helpful and gracious in their willingness to share
ideas and sources. Thanks also to Scott Henderson, who provided
invaluable help in the final stages. Finally, I am grateful to Joyce
Seltzer, my editor at The Free Press, who went to bat for this proj-
ect early on and then offered her constant encouragement and
support. Her high standards and excellent advice have made this
a better book.
In addition numerous friends and family members read chap-
ters and/or offered encouragement, helpful criticisms, and laugh-
ter in just the right doses. I owe many thanks to Maureen Hon-
ish, Nan Enstad, Sharon Doherty, Linda Silber, Barbara Appleby,
Betsy Scholl, Robin McDuff, Elizabeth Martín-García, Lotus
Cirilo, Lisa Cahn, Kathleen Duffy, Shelly, Ellen Mamer, my
brothers, Steven and Peter Cahn, and my parents, Gretchen Cahn
and James Cahn. Finally, I would like to thank Birgitte Soland,
who doesn’t even like sports. Her powerful intellect, generous
heart, easy laughter, and abiding love have made this a better
book and enriched my life immeasurably.
In the years since its first publication, there have been many
fine scholars of sport whose work has informed my own. Some of
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p r e F a C e xiii
you are in the footnotes, but there are many others to whom I
also owe a debt of gratitude. In particular, I want to thank Pame-
la Grundy and Jaime Schultz for their critical feedback on my last
chapter. I also want to thank Pippa Holloway and Rita Liberti for
helpful readings and discussions; Hershini Bhana Young for
sharpening my thinking on race and sport; and David Herzberg
and Michael Rembis for many conversations about bodies, fit-
ness, and health as historically situated. Finally, I’d like to thank
my “basketball at the Bob” crew for reminding me that sport is
about enjoyment of many kinds, and Tandy Hamilton for teach-
ing me how much can be observed by looking away from the ball
as well as directly at the action.
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Coming
on Strong
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INTRODUCTION
In the early 1980s a talented young Czech immigrant to the
United States took the women’s tennis world by storm. Martina
Navratilova lost only six matches from 1982 to 1984, and by
1985 had accumulated 8.5 million dollars in winnings, more than
any other player in the sport’s history. 1 The refreshingly candid,
lithe, muscular Navratilova symbolized the advances women had
made in the athletic world and, more broadly, in traditionally
male activities involving money and power. As an outspoken crit-
ic of sexual inequality in sport, she represented both the ongoing
struggte and the impressive gains women had made in more than
a decade of challenges to the historic barriers to women’s partici-
pation in sport.
As Navratilova and other female athletes gained celebrity sta-
tus, many observers heralded their accomplishments as proof that
modern women had finally cast off the physical and psychologi-
cal shackles of past centuries. Yet others looked less favorably on
these developments, perceiving women’s entrance into sport as an
unsettling and unwelcome intrusion into the realm of masculinity.
In the tennis world Navratilova’s mounting victory toll invited
subtle condemnation and not-so-subtle ridicule from tennis
experts, fans, and the press.
Some wondered whether Navratilova even belonged on the
women’s tour anymore, given her apparent invincibility. Noting
her high-tech, precision-oriented training methods, they charac-
terized her as a “bionic sci-fi creation” of her training team-a
kind of unnatural, even monstrous “Amazon” who “has the
women’s game pinned to the mat. ” 2 Rather than bask in hard-
earned glory, therefore, Navratilova felt continually pressed to
1
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2 INTRODUCTION
counter her public image as some kind of hulking predator who
kept “beating up all those innocent girls. ” 3 This image, reflected
in media comments like “She’s simply too good,” placed her at
odds with, and not within, the women’s tennis circuit. 4
By implication these representations also suggested that she
was at odds with her sex; “the bleached blonde Czech bisexual
defector” who “bludgeoned” and “teased” her hopelessly inferi-
or opponents appeared to be something other than a “natural”
female. 5 One of her frustrated “victims” suggested to a reporter
that for Navratilova to play that well, she “must have a chromo-
somic screw loose somewhere.” 6 Navratilova’s stunning accom-
plishments could have been construed as an example of one ath-
lete’s successful attempt to use her natural talents, hard work,
and state-of-the-art training regimen to reach new levels of ath-
letic excellence/ Yet many Americans simply could not separate
the concept of athletic superiority from its cultural affiliation
with masculine sport and the male body. Her startlingly “mascu-
line” accomplishments generated farfetched explanations; con-
temporaries portrayed her as an extraordinary product of sci-
ence, technology, or-worse-chromosomal defect.
Martina Navratilova’s tarnished reputation suggests that even
in this age of apparent progress, the historic association between
athletic prowess and masculinity has endured. Highly skilled
female athletes continue to meet with profound skepticism. At
times, not only their femininity but their biological sex comes
into question. Several enthusiastic young athletes from Lewisville,
Texas, found this out during a girls’ soccer match in the fall of
1990. On watching their daughters’ team go down to defeat, two
irate fathers stomped onto the field and demanded that the
opposing side send its three best players to the bathroom so that
an officially designated parent could verify their sex. These men
could not fathom the fact that girls were capable of such talented
play. After the game one of the aggrieved fathers belligerently
“complimented” the winning team’s nine-year-old star, goalie
Natasha Dennis, by saying “Nice game, boy!” and “Good game,
son.” Nonplussed by the implication that her athletic ability
derived from what might be between her legs, Dennis pluckily
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INTRODUCTION 3
suggested that someone should instead take her accusers “and
check and see if they have anything between their ears. ” 8
Experiences like those of Martina Navratilova and Natasha
Dennis are as old as women’s attempts to break into the male
sporting tradition. Athletics have long been the province of men.
In the Western world, not only have men dominated the playing
fields, but athletic qualities such as aggression, competitiveness,
strength, speed, power, and teamwork have been associated with
masculinity. For many men sport has provided an arena in which
to cultivate masculinity and achieve manhood.
Consequently women’s very participation in sport has posed a
conundrum that Americans have grappled with for more than a
century. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, American
women made determined collective efforts to break down the
barriers to female athletic involvement. They claimed sport as a
right, a joy, and a signal aspect of women’s emancipation. These
attempts elicited both approval and scorn, generating a series of
controversies that spanned the century. The matter went far
beyond the issue of decorum-which kinds of behavior were
deemed appropriate for the female sex. The controversies sur-
rounding female athleticism broached fundamental questions
about the content and definition of American woman- and man-
hood. Would women engaging in a traditionally male activity
become more manlike? What exactly were “manly” and “wom-
anly” qualities, and did they have to be limited to men and
women, respectively? And if athleticism was not essentially mas-
culine, did this mean that all gender differences were mutable and
not ordained by, and permanently ensconced in, nature?
When women athletes insisted on their right to sport, alarmed
and intrigued observers wrestled publicly with these very ques-
tions. In 1912 the Ladies Home Journal published an article
titled “Are Athletics Making Girls Masculine?” Author Dudley
Sargent, prominent physical educator and director of Harvard
University’s Hemenway Gymnasium, wondered along with many
of his contemporaries whether female athleticism would make
women into masculine facsimiles of the “opposite” sex. 9 Or, con-
versely, they worried that women could “feminize” sport, dilut-
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4 INTRODUCTION
ing its masculine content and eroding the boundary between male
and female spheres of activity.
Sargent gave voice to the central, underlying tension in
American women’s sport-the contradictory relationship between
athleticism and womanhood. In subsequent years others exam-
ined the same question, often in a harsher light than the relatively
sympathetic Sargent. Journalists responded to Mildred (“Babe”)
Didrikson Zaharias’s stunning athletic accomplishments of the
1930s through the 1950s by mocking her “mannish” appearance.
They described her face as hawkish and hairy, her body as a
whipcord, and her personality as a “conqueror type” that includ-
ed “an unusual amount of male dominance.” 10 Under the weight
of such allegations, even supporters of women’s sport felt pressed
to concede that some female athletes excelled because of their
genetically constituted “android tendencies.” 11
The apprehensions of skeptics did not go unanswered. Over
the course of the century, advocates of women’s sport developed
numerous and often competing strategies to cope with the disso-
nance between masculine sport and feminine womanhood. The
boldest among them accepted the charge of masculinization but
claimed its positive value. They contended that women’s athleti-
cism would indeed endow women with masculine attributes, but
that these qualities would benefit women as well as men, con-
tributing to female emancipation and eliminating needless sexual
distinctions.
Female physical educators responded more cautiously. Several
generations of professionals sought to protect the reputation and
h~alth of female athletes by devising separate, less physically tax-
ing versions of women’s sport. In effect educators created a
respectable “feminine” brand of athletics designed to maximize
female participation while averting controversy. By contrast, pop-
ular promoters of community and commercial sport attempted to
feminize the athlete more than the activity. They touted the femi-
nine and sexual charms of female competitors, making sporting
events into combination beauty-athletic contests. These and other
sport advocates engaged in protracted battles for the control of
women’s sport, each side promising that under its authority
women’s athletics would gain respect and acceptance.
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INTRODUCTION 5
Individual athletes developed personal strategies to resolve the
tension between their love of sport and the cultural condemna-
tion of “mannish” or “tomboyish” athletes. Some made special
efforts to demonstrate femininity through their dress, demeanor,
and off-field interests. Other, more defiant types refused the com-
promise. With their “tough” manners and aggressive play, they
embraced a style that critics called “mannish” but that they
themselves saw as perfectly consistent with womanhood. Still
others opted for a middle course, claiming allegiance to conven-
tional definitions of femininity while at the same time trying to
stretch their boundaries to include athletic activities.
Ironically, many of the collective and individual strategies ath-
letes and their advocates employed to defuse the tension between
sport and womanhood actually deepened the gender divide in
athletic culture. Efforts to create a separate, distinct women’s
brand of sport effectively defined “feminine” sport as a lesser
version of male sport: less competitive, less demanding, and less
skillful. Commercial promoters were far more willing to com-
mend top-notch athletes for their “masculine” excellence. But by
going’to great lengths to highlight the feminine attractiveness and
sexual charms of female competitors, promoters implied that by
itself, athleticism remained a manly trait, one that must be com-
pensated for by proof of femininity.
=o=
Forced to deal with a constant barrage of criticism from diehard
defenders of a male sporting tradition, generations of twentieth-
century female athletes and their advocates successfully carved a
niche for women in a sporting culture whose deep identification
with masculinity nevertheless remained unyielding. With “real”
sport and “real” athletes defined as masculine, women of this
century have occupied only a marginal space in the sports world
and an even more tenuous position in athletic governance.
Consequently many, perhaps even most, women have until
recently been profoundly alienated from sport, and thus from the
physical competence, confidence, and pleasures that sport makes
available. However, those women who persisted in athletics found
in sport a positive, even life-transforming experience. While dis-
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6 INTRODUCTION
missing, defying, or simply putting up with the societal hostility
toward women athletes, they created a vibrant female sporting
tradition. Generations of women athletes have promoted physical
competence, celebrated the joy of play, developed a deep apprecia-
tion for athletic competition and excellence, and forged loving,
supportive bonds among women in a nontraditional setting.
The persistent but unsteady tension between female athleticism
and male-defined sport forms a central thread in the history of
women’s sport, illuminating not only women’s complicated
standing in the athletic world but the vital interplay between
sport and the surrounding culture. From early-twentieth-century
controversies over the intrepid “athletic girl,” to midcentury
racial politics surrounding African American women track stars,
to more recent legislative struggles over gender equity in school
athletics, women’s athletic history offers a lens through which to
understand both the complicated gender dynamics of sport and
the social experience of women athletes. A century of women’s
efforts to obtain a meaningful place in the sporting world pro-
vides critical insights into the history of gender relations in
American society.
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CHAPTER 1
THE NEW TYPE OF
ATHLETIC GIRL
=o=
In the fall of 1911 Lippincott’s Monthly described the modern
athletic woman: “She loves to walk, to row, to ride, to motor, to
jump and run … as Man walks, jumps, rows, rides, motors, and
runs.” 1 To many early-twentieth-century observers, the female
athlete represented the bold and energetic modern woman,
breaking free from Victorian constraints, and tossing aside old-
fashioned ideas about separate spheres for men and women.
Popular magazines celebrated this transformation, issuing favor-
able notice that the “hardy sun-tanned girl” who spent the sum-
mer in outdoor games was fast replacing her predecessors, the
prototypical “Lydia Languish” and the “soggy matron” of old. 2
With the dawning of the new century, interest in sport had
burgeoned. More and more Americans were participating as
spectators or competitors in football, baseball, track and field,
and a variety of other events. At the same time women were
streaming into education, the paid labor force, and political
reform movements in unprecedented numbers. Women’s social
and political activism sparked a reconsideration of their nature
and place in society, voiced through vigorous debates on a wide
range of issues, from the vote to skirt lengths. Popular interest in
sport and concern over women’s changing status converged in the
growing attention paid to the “athletic girl,” a striking symbol of
modern womanhood.
The female athlete’s entrance into a male-defined sphere made
7
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8 COMING ON STRONG
her not only a popular figure but an ambiguous, potentially dis-
ruptive character as well. Sport had developed as a male preserve,
a domain in which men expressed and cultivated masculinity
through athletic competition. Yet, along with other “New
Women” who demanded access to such traditional male realms
as business and politics, women athletes of the early twentieth
century claimed the right to share in sport. They stood on the
borderline between new feminine ideals and customary notions
of manly sport, symbolizing both the possibilities and the dangers
of the New Woman’s daring disregard for traditional gender
arrangements. 3
The female athlete’s ambiguity created a dilemma for her advo-
cates. Given women’s evident enjoyment of such “masculine”
pursuits, could the “athletic girl” (and thus, the modern woman)
reap the benefits of sport (and modernity) without becoming less
womanly? The Lippincott’s Monthly article was titled “The
Masculinization of Girls.” And while it concluded positively that
“with muscles tense and blood aflame, she plays the manly role,”
women’s assumption of “the manly role” generated deep hostility
and anxiety among those who feared that women’s athletic activ-
ity would damage female reproductive capacity, promote sexual
licentiousness, and blur “natural” gender differences. 4
The perceived “mannishness” of the female athlete complicat-
ed her reception, making the “athletic girl” a cause for concern
as well as celebration. Controversy did not dampen women’s
enthusiasm, but it did lead some advocates of women’s sport to
take a cautious approach, one designed specifically to avert
charges of masculinization. Women physical educators took an
especially prudent stance, articulating a unique philosophy of
women’s athletics that differed substantially from popular ideals
of “manly sport.”
The tension between sport and femininity led, paradoxically,
to educators’ insistence on women’s equal right to sport and on
inherent differences between female and male athletes. Balancing
claims of equality and difference, physical educators articulated a
woman-centered philosophy of sport that proposed “modera-
tion” as the watchword of women’s physical activity. Moderation
provided the critical point of difference between women’s and
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 9
men’s sport, a preventive against the masculine effects of sport. It
was this philosophy, with its calculated effort to resolve the issue
of “mannishness,” which guided the early years of twentieth-cen-
tury women’s athletics.
=o=
Interest in women’s athletics reflected the growing popularity of
sport in industrial America. In a society in which the division
between leisure and labor was increasingly distinct, many
Americans filled their free time with modern exercise regimens
and organized sport. It was in the middle and latter decades of
the nineteenth century that two pivotal traditions developed-
that of “manly sport” and that of female exercise. Each would
influence the turn-of-the-century boom in women’s sport and
shape the views of female physical educators.
Traditions of “manly sport” developed over the course of the
nineteenth century as large-scale transformations in the American
economy, class relations, and leisure habits helped spawn new
forms of athletic culture. In an antebellum society destabilized by
rapid commercialization and the first stages of industrial revolu-
tion, the emerging middle class took an inordinate interest in cul-
tivating self-discipline and a strictly regulated body. Not only did
they perceive the growing numbers of poor, immigrant, urban
workers as an unruly mass in need of disciplined activity, they
also worried about their own capacity to subdue momentary pas-
sions for the controlled, regulated habits of body deemed neces-
sary for climbing the ladder of success. Exercise-as well as diet,
health, and sexual reforms-offered a means to these ends.
Guided by a Victorian philosophy of “rational recreation” and
a religious ideal of “muscular Christianity,” male sport and exer-
cise began to flourish in the years before the Civil War. Physical
culture specialists prescribed rigorous routines designed to
improve both body and mind. A strict regimen of physical exer-
cise was expected to contain sexual energy, breed self-control,
and strengthen a man’s moral and religious fiber through muscu-
lar development. The physically fit Victorian man could then
channel his mental and physical energies into a life of productive
labor and moral rectitude.
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10 COMING ON STRONG
By contrast, a much-less-respectable sporting life developed
outside the middle class. Bachelor clerks, artisans, and shopkeep-
ers joined other adventurous men in an informal sporting frater-
nity. They created a rich social and athletic life by organizing
baseball clubs and frequenting prizefights, boat races, footraces,
and gambling dens. Their ranks included men from the “lower
orders” as well as men of higher social standing, who-chafing at
the restrictions of polite society-enjoyed a rough-and-tumble
life-style in which gambling, drinking, and hard living mixed
with athletics. 5 Together these activities made up the “sporting
life.” In rejecting the dominant ethos of self-discipline and
delayed gratification, it presented a rebellious underside to prop-
er Victorian culture.
In both its rough and respectable forms, male sport cultivated
an ideal of virile, athletic manhood. This ideal took deeper root
after the Civil War, when industrialization, urban concentration,
immigrant-community formation, and the expansion of educa-
tion made sport accessible to a greater number and variety of
men. Organized athletics of the late nineteenth century spanned
class and ethnic differences. German Turnverein gymnastic soci-
eties, Scottish Caledonian track clubs, and Irish, German, and
Italian baseball clubs allowed immigrants to join the American
sporting scene while cultivating ethnic solidarity. Upper-class
Americans cultivated their own sporting tradition in elite, exclu-
sive metropolitan athletic clubs like the New York Athletic Club.
For recreation outside the city, they turned to country clubs that
offered cricket, tennis, golf, and yachting. 6
The expansion of higher education spurred the growth of sport
on college campuses as well. By the century’s end, informal stu-
dent sport had developed into highly organized collegiate athletic
programs under the control of paid administrators and profes-
sional coaches. Crew, track, and football played an important
role in schools’ institutional growth, generating revenue and pub-
licity while attracting students and a loyal alumni. Competitive
intercollegiate sport was complemented by physical education
programs in which exercise specialists introduced young males to
military drill and European systems of gymnastic exercise/
By the turn of the century, the advent of commercial sport
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 11
media, especially the new sporting sections of daily newspapers,
further popularized both professional and amateur athletics. The
press attracted nationwide fan interest and granted a new
respectability to professional prizefighting and baseball. At the
amateur level the media promoted athletic contests sponsored by
the newly founded Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). 8 Press cover-
age also helped generate interest at the grass-roots level. Between
1900 and 1915 neighborhood and working-class associations
began to form athletic clubs, industrial teams, and church-spon-
sored leagues, providing the first organized athletic opportunities
for urban laboring men. 9
Significantly, this apparent democratization of sport occurred
at a time when the lives of impoverished workers and immigrants
seemed further and further removed from the comfortable ones
of white-collar workers and businessmen. The tensions spawned
by class injustices and other social inequities nurtured turn-of-
the-century protest movements in which industrial workers,
farmers, women’s rights advocates, and radicals seriously chal-
lenged the social order. Under these circumstances the dramatic
increase in the popularity of men’s sport coincided with a con-
certed effort among men of the upper ranks to protect their social
position and authority.
Athletic life offered one method of reinforcement. The image
of virile athletic manhood proved reassuring, especially for pro-
fessionals, merchants, and white-collar workers whose work in
the new corporate economy no longer required physical labor. 10
Fortified by rigorous exercise, well-to-do men could cultivate
their physical superiority, restore their confidence, and regain the
“hard” edge required for effective leadership. Earlier, more per-
sonal Victorian concerns about individual masculine character
now shaded into a public interest in restoring the collective man-
liness of a beleaguered Anglo-Saxon elite.
Political thinkers extended this logic to their concerns over the
creation of a mighty and powerful nation. Worried that the mid-
dle- and upper-class American male was losing his virility and
that the nation as a whole would soon endure the weak leader-
ship of soft, effeminate men, turn-of-the-century politicians like
Theodore Roosevelt looked to “the strenuous life” for a remedy.
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12 COMING ON STRONG
Those who no longer toiled at physical labor could forge their
masculinity on the ball fields and gridirons. Through arduous
sport they would acquire the health benefits of vigorous exercise
and, more important, valuable training for war and the moral
and physical traits of commanding leadership. Faced by what
they viewed as the artificiality and effeteness of urban industrial
existence, “strenuous life” devotees drew on a nostalgic image of
a simpler, pastoral life of physical rigor and unchallenged male
dominance that they hoped to re-create in the realm of sport.
While proponents of manly sport hoped that sport could
renew middle-class manhood, Progressive Era reformers of the
early 1900s argued that sport and recreation could serve as a
training ground for working-class and immigrant youth as well.
Reformers perceived an excess of energy in working-class boys
who, left to their own devices, might turn their fervor toward
sexual and criminal delinquency. Through school athletics, settle-
ment houses, Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCAs),
church leagues, and playgrounds, welfare workers reached out to
underprivileged youth through sport. They speculated that if ath-
letic training could reinvigorate pampered boys, it could also pro-
vide safe outlets for the passions of working-class youth. 11
Thus, as organized sport gained in popularity, it intensified the
association between athleticism and masculinity. American men
confronting the changes wrought by industrialization, urbaniza-
tion, and mass immigration looked to sport as a crucial avenue
for defining and expressing their manhood. It is not surprising,
then, that women who tried to carve out a place in the athletic
world met with some resistance.
=o=
Turn-of-the-century women, when confronted with deeply
entrenched notions of manly sport, turned to their own traditions
of female exercise and athletic participation. Disturbed by evi-
dence of female frailty, proponents of women’s health had begun
advocating moderate exercise for women as early as the 1830s.
Antebellum advice columnists, educators, feminists, and health
reformers called for improved female health through “physical
culture.” Subsequently members of two late nineteenth-century
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 13
professions, medicine and physical education, further developed
these arguments and became strong advocates of female exercise.
Nineteenth-century medical science characterized women as
the physiologically inferior sex, weakened and ruled by their
reproductive systems. Given evidence of women’s poor health-
chronic fatigue, pain and illness, mood swings, and menstrual
irregularities-experts theorized that the cyclical fluctuations of
female physiology caused physical, emotional, and moral vulner-
ability and debilitation. Formally educated doctors eager to
secure their professional status took a special interest in women’s
health problems. In the name of medical science, they claimed to
be authorities on the female body, capable of diagnosing and
treating woman’s condition. One such treatment was moderate
exercise, designed to strengthen and regulate the female body. 12
Medical rationales for female exercise interested women edu-
cators, who found them useful in their efforts to justify women’s
pursuit of higher education. As the number of women in college
jumped from 11,000 in 1870 to 85,000 in 1900, educators had
to counter widespread assertions that mental strain would cause
nervous disorder and reproductive dysfunction in female stu-
dents. 13 Based on “vitalist” scientific theories, which posited that
bodies had a finite amount of circulating energy that was drawn
to different parts of the body by activity, conservatives warned
that education presented a serious danger by pulling necessary
energy from the female reproductive system to the brain. 14
Educators found an antidote in the claim that physical education
would prevent these potential traumas. An exercise regimen
would theoretically return energy to the body and strike a proper
balance between physical and mental activity.
The concern over college women’s health cracked open the
doors of academe to women physical educators. In the 1880s
physical culture specialists founded the Sargent School and
Boston Normal School of Gymnastics to train women as instruc-
tors of physical education. A decade later graduates began to fan
out around the country in newly established college P.E. depart-
ments. Soon these departments created degree-granting majors,
so that in addition to instructing every female student in a course
of mandatory physical exercise, physical educators trained the
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14 COMING ON STRONG
next generation of professionals. 15 Thus, buttressed by institu-
tional support, scientific theories, and a newly formed organiza-
tion of male and female professionals-the American Association
for the Advancement of Physical Education (later changed to the
American Physical Education Association, or APEA)-women
physical educators approached the new century with optimism. 16
Interest in physical education found its complement in the
growing popularity of women’s competitive sport inside and out-
side of academic institutions. While physical culture experts had
been promoting controlled, regimented exercise, others had
begun to encourage women to take up more active, competitive
athletic games. As with men’s sport, these activities split along the
divide between rough and respectable.
Nineteenth-century newspapers occasionally reported on high-
ly unconventional women ballplayers and runners who competed
for prize money before a paying public. In the 1880s New
Orleans promoter Harry H. Freeman put together a touring
women’s baseball team, which folded under rumors of illicit sex-
ual activities. 17 Other women entered the boxing or wrestling ring
in events that combined spectacle, sport, and gambling. In 1876,
for example, Hill’s Theater in New York City featured a contest
between two pugilists, Nell Saunders and Rose Harland, with the
victor to receive a silver butter dish. 18 These athletes violated
every Victorian standard of proper feminine behavior. Brazenly to
occupy male athletic space, to engage in physical competition,
and to parade the female body before the public prompted not
only allegations of “unladylike” behavior but charges of prostitu-
tion-the ultimate public female degradation. 19
Women’s sport gained credibility more readily among the
wealthier classes, where it took root in an established tradition of
upper-class leisure. Outdoor amusements like croquet, horseback
riding, archery, swimming, golf, and tennis allowed well-to-do
women of the post-Civil War era to display the latest styles in
outdoor apparel along with the abundant free time of the rich.
When women with money and time to spare gathered to play
fashionable games, they entered a culture of conspicuous leisure
that also included dining, bathing, and drinking at the nation’s
most exclusive resorts and clubs. For these women sport was
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 15
both a liberating, adventurous pastime and an enjoyable way to
display their wealth and to strengthen elite social ties. 20
When clubs began opening tournament play to women in the
1870s, several sports moved beyond the recreational level to
more serious levels of competition. Sporting organizations like
the National Archery Association, the United States National
Lawn Tennis Association, and the United States Golf Association
sponsored the first women’s national championships in archery,
tennis and golf in 1879, 1887, and 1895 respectively. 21 While
tournament competition allowed a few athletes to train vigorous-
ly and pursue athletic excellence, most women continued to enjoy
leisurely paced games played for fun and fresh air. These activi-
ties formed a socially acceptable pastime consistent with the
refinement expected of “proper ladies.” When Alfred K Starey
wrote that “archery, like tennis, is too refined a sport to offer any
attractions to the more vulgar elements of society,” he expressed
a common class attitude. The notion that “refined” women
played suitably “refined” games protected elite sportswomen
from violating the boundary between proper womanhood and
“vulgar” women of other classes. 22
The bicycle craze of the late 1880s and 1890s opened up ath-
leticism to middle-class as well as elite women. Cycling won
widespread acceptance and broke new ground for women’s right
to public outdoor exercise. Frances Willard, leader of the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, was one of an estimated
thirty thousand women who took up cycling in the 1890s. She
was unusual, however, in that she learned to ride at the age of
fifty-three and then proceeded to write an extended essay, “A
Wheel Within a Wheel; How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle.” She
explained that although the first women to ride publicly were
“thought by some to be a sort of semi-monster,” severe criticism
had abated by the 1890s, and she “could see no reason in the
world why a woman should not ride the silent steed so swift and
blithesome.” In recommending the virtues of “the silent steed,”
Willard also expounded on the broad social import of women’s
new pursuit. The bicycle, according to Willard, was not merely a
“vehicle of so much harmless pleasure.” Rather, it promised to
lay to rest the “old fables, myths, and follies associated with the
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16 COMING ON STRONG
idea of woman’s incompetence” in athletic activities, at the same
time augmenting the “good fellowship and mutual understanding
between men and women who take the road together … rejoic-
ing in the poetry of motion. ” 23
However, while feminists like Willard, medical experts, and the
ordinary cyclist sang the praises of cycling, critics claimed that
excess riding caused women serious physiological damage. They
cautioned against the risk of uterine displacement, spinal shock,
pelvic damage, and hardened abdominal muscles. Avid cycling
reputedly could also harden the facial muscles into a hideous
“bicycle face,” notable for its protruding jaw, wild staring eyes,
and strained expression. 24 The same athletic activity that spelled
liberation to women like Willard signaled danger to more conser-
vative observers.
Despite such warnings, the bicycle merely whetted the appetite
of many young women for more competitive activities. They
brought their keen athletic interest to the high schools and col-
leges they attended in rapidly expanding numbers. Students
formed baseball and crew teams and enjoyed a variety of other
sports either informally or through organized intramural play. In
1891 Bryn Mawr students further formalized these arrangements
by founding the first college Women’s Athletic Association
(WAA). 25 The same year the invention of basketball by YMCA
worker James Naismith provided women with a game that would
soon change the tenor of college women’s sport. The game was
instantly and immensely popular among female students. Their
spirited play ushered in a new period in women’s sport-years in
which concerns about the masculine character of sport enlivened
the debate over the healthful versus harmful effects of athletics
on women.
=o=
As the United States entered the new century, women across the
nation secured greater access to athletics. Concurrent develop-
ments in elite sport, school athletics, and public recreation gave
female athletes a foothold in the early-twentieth-century world of
sport. These advancements would gradually bring the “athletic
girl” into sharper cultural focus.
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 17
Sport for wealthy women entered a new era when prominent
society women founded the Chicago Women’s Athletic Club in
1903. Designed as a lavish setting for exercise and leisure, the
club featured a gymnasium, a swimming pool, bowling alleys,
fencing rooms, a Turkish bath, and various sitting and dining
rooms. 26 Soon thereafter, women organized a New York and an
Illinois Women’s Athletic Club, followed by similar ventures in
major cities around the country. Like their nineteenth-century
predecessors, most club members continued to participate in
sport as an enjoyable and carefree form of elite sociability. Yet a
smaller group of women began to assert the value of more seri-
ous athletic training. They ambitiously pursued competitive
opportunities, especially through tournament play in the popular
sports of golf and tennis.
Some rebels further flouted convention when they dared to
pursue such “men’s” sports as auto racing, polo, shooting, and
long-distance walking. Eleonora Sears, a Boston Brahmin and
descendant of Thomas Jefferson, made a name for herself in these
sports, as well as in tennis, squash, and equestrian events. She
was dne of the first well-known women publicly to appear in
pants and short hair, confidently donning slacks, boots, and a
riding hat. As a polo player she had the audacity to ride astride
and wear jodhpurs. Attending a 1909 International Women’s
Conference in London, Sears wandered over to the polo club,
where-finding the American and English teams competing for
the International Cup-she caused a public outcry by requesting
(and being denied) a place on the U.S. team. Sears had not only
unusual athletic ability but the privilege, the means, and the
attendant confidence to ignore the constraints that confined most
women to a much narrower sphere of athletic activity. 27
Similar opportunities did not exist for working-class girls and
women, whose long workday usually precluded leisure activities
beyond nighttime neighborhood strolls and occasional movies or
dancing. However, as part of a broader series of “child-saving”
measures being urged on the nation-reforms such as child labor
laws, compulsory education, and public health regulations-mid-
dle-class urban reformers began providing recreational activities
for working-class youth. The Playground Association of America
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18 COMING ON STRONG
was formed in 1906 to organize play groups and athletic activi-
ties for city boys and girls. It aimed not only to provide an alter-
native to the dangerous life of the street but to instill physical and
moral discipline, instructing poor immigrant youth in
“American” concepts of cooperation, democracy, achievement,
and subordination to the group. 28 As a result of Progressive Era
activism, young working-class women obtained their first orga-
nized athletic opportunities. As schoolgirls they could take part
in activities offered by settlement houses, Young Women’s
Christian Associations (YWCAs), city playgrounds, and public
schools. 29 After leaving school, women occasionally found oppor-
tunities in workplace recreation programs that offered annual
outings and field days featuring games and races for female
employees. 30
For young middle-class women college campuses provided a
crucial site for athletic experimentation, a place away from home
where athletic ventures were one of the numerous ways in which
· young women explored their independence and charted a new
generational course. Student social life at some schools thrived
around active women’s sport programs. In 1904 the student
newspaper at the University of Minnesota extolled the “Athletic
Girl” as “the truest type of all American Co-eds.” 31 And at
Radcliffe and Smith, campus life reached a pitched frenzy during
the annual class basketball tournaments, which matched the best
players from each year’s class in a highly ritualized, intense series
of games. With songs, pranks, and banners, the entire student
body turned out to exhort their classmates on to victory. 32
Tournaments and other campus-based athletic competitions
were the mainstay of extensive intramural programs initiated and
coordinated by students. The most avid competitors also joined
intercollegiate varsity clubs, which-though fewer in number-
provided athletes the additional benefits of travel, off-campus
socializing, and the prestige of representing one’s school in pub-
lic. To celebrate female athletic achievement, WAAs devised an
elaborate system of awards, culminating in the varsity letter.
College yearbooks of the time featured striking photographs of
formally posed women’s varsity teams, looking proudly into the
camera with college letter sweaters in full display.
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 19
=o=
With her exuberant physicality, disregard for Victorian notions of
female restraint, and her intrepid incursion into a male cultural
domain, the athletic woman captured the spirit of modern wom-
anhood. But her unorthodox behavior also subverted the com-
monly accepted view of sport as a fundamentally masculine pur-
suit. The complex set of meanings surrounding women’s partici-
pation in sport led observers alternately to praise and damn the
“athletic girl.”
Some physical educators and women’s advocates saw sport
as an avenue toward female self-reliance and independence,
applauding the aggressive, unremitting quality of play that left
women “hot, breathless and disheveled” by game’s end. 33 Like
feminists of the time, they reasoned that crossing barriers into
“male” spheres contributed to a fuller realization of womanliness,
free from the debilitating, restrictive femininity of old. They
argued that athletics imbued women with such “human” (rather
than “feminine”) attributes as loyalty, teamwork, and a democrat-
ic ethos while “allowing them to forget, for the time being, that
they are girls. ” 34
Against a background of expanding consumerism, others
emphasized the benefits of sport for female health and beauty.
Advertisers, the popular press, and health and beauty experts
increasingly characterized health by the body beautiful. 35 Exercise
columns in popular magazines instructed women on the need to
exercise, claiming that both beauty and improved health would
follow. In “To Reduce Flesh” Marie Montaigne explained: “The
charm of a well proportioned figure is not to be overestimated,
and it is one which almost any woman can possess by the expen-
diture of systematic effort, acquiring incidentally good health
with her good figure.” 36 Beauty expert J. Parmley Paret echoed
this reasoning, urging all women to exercise because “feminine
beauty, in both face and figure, is largely dependent on it. ” 37
Some extended this argument by linking athletic beauty to evo-
lutionary gains for the species. Dudley Sargent, founder of the
prestigious Sargent School for women’s physical education,
claimed that both “good form in figure and good form in motion
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20 COMING ON STRONG
… tend to inspire admiration in the opposite sex and therefore
play an important part in what is termed ‘sexual selection.’ ” 38 By
this reasoning the quest to continue the species would condition a
man to select a fit, athletic woman as a mate.
Despite their confident claims for a new feminine beauty, sport
advocates had to answer criticisms that athletics would masculin-
ize the female body and character. They took time to assure skep-
tics that the modern athlete would not be “the loud, masculinely
dressed, man-aping individual, but the whole-hearted, rosy-
cheeked healthy girl … happy, smiling and simply radiating
good health. ” 39 They also cultivated allies among well-respected
health officials who could help refute opponents’ claims. In one
show of support, the editor of Nation’s Health dismissed fears of
mannishness as a groundless absurdity: “There is no reason why
in games of speed and skill girls should not be the equal of boys
… and there is no more reason why athletics should coarsen
their fibre than that equitation should make them ‘horsey.’ ” 40
Try as they might, though, health and physical education
experts failed to persuade the skeptics who were convinced that
sport would turn the female body into a facsimile of the male.
Such corporeal suspicions were often rooted in deeper concerns
about the social implications of female athleticism. The female
athlete kindled acute anxieties about the erosion of men’s physi-
cal supremacy and the loss of distinct male and female preserves.
With her physical daring and spirited temperament, she took her
place alongside politically minded suffragists and feminists,
young working women known for their cheap finery and bold
manners, and more staid but powerful professional women.
Together they formed a threatening cadre of New Women whose
public presence prompted shrill calls for a return to more familiar
patriarchal arrangements. 41
Disturbed by the upset of a traditional gender order, conserva-
tives voiced their fears in somatic terms as they discussed the pre-
dicted consequences of female muscular development. Even a
strong supporter like Dudley Sargent admitted: “It is only by tak-
ing on masculine attributes that success in certain forms of athlet-
ics can be won. ” 42 Similarly Dr. G. L. Meylan concluded that
women’s small shoulders and large hips disqualified them from
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 21
gymnastic expertise. While acknowledging that gymnastic train-
ing might overcome such limitations, he nevertheless advised
against it because, “of course, we should not care to see our
women teachers of physical training … approach the masculine
type. ” 43 Few observers could loose the concept of athleticism
from its locus in the male body.
Critics believed that sport posed other dangers to the female
body as well, predicting both reproductive damage and the loss
of sexual control. The nineteenth-century medical belief in
women’s biological weakness and instability due to menstruation
survived the turn of the century, leading many “modern” doctors
and exercise specialists to reiterate earlier warnings against stren-
uous sport. They walked a fine line, on the one side promoting
mild exercise as a way to curb mental strain and regulate the
“fluctuations of the functional wave,” yet at the same time pro-
hibiting vigorous competition on the grounds that “emotional
stimulation must be avoided, and decided concessions must be
made to the depression, physical and psychical, the lessened inhi-
bitions and physiological control during the fluctuations of
puberty and menstruation. ” 44
References to psychic ailments, lessened inhibitions, and loss
of control hinted at emotional and sexual dangers that awaited
the overenthusiastic athlete. Medical experts and educators per-
ceived the female psyche as naturally prone to stress and nervous
illness. Many warned that the nerve-straining violence of unmod-
ified sport was a proven cause of neurosis. Citing the sudden
death of an overzealous high school ballplayer and the “uncom-
monly fat” condition of many retired athletes, they peppered
their articles with horror stories of the harmful and “possibly
fatal” consequences of unregulated physical competition. 45
In the figure of the “overzealous girl,” so incited by competi-
tion that she could not stop, experts focused on the “powerful
impulses” roused by competition, impulses that would cause her
to all too easily succumb to the “pitfall of over-indulgence. ” 46
Cheered on by the “wild huzzahs,” the “adoration” and
“applause of the multitude,” she was likely to give in to “the
intoxication of outstripping her competitors. ” 47 The exact nature
of the “powerful impulses” or “over-indulgence” remained
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22 COMING ON STRONG
unstated, yet the language suggests a thinly veiled reference to
female sexuality.
Perceptions of sexual danger in sport were fueled by wide-
spread societal fears about female passion, unleashed and out of
control. Alarmed observers throughout the country commented
on the eroticism of the New Woman. Magazine articles like the
1913 piece titled “Sex O’Clock in America” rang the death knell
for the image of the passionless Victorian lady, fading quickly
before the figure of the passionate, explicitly erotic modern
woman. 48 Certainly by 1914 an exuberant sexual energy, clearly
independent of maternal function, divorced the New Woman
from nineteenth-century purity and propriety. Young working-
class women who shocked observers with their colorful dress,
street smarts, and audacious manners attracted the most notice.
But the changing habits and sexual mores of the sports-loving
middle-class female athlete also evoked concern.
Discussions about sexuality in athletics typically concentrated
on the uncontrolled passions of adolescent females who compet-
ed in high school and college sport, a constituency comprised
overwhelmingly of middle- and upper-middle-class girls and
women. 49 Working-class women, whose sexual habits received
constant attention in other realms, formed too small a con-
stituency within women’s sport to merit significant comment. By
contrast, the privilege and privacy of wealth seemed to protect
upper-class athletic women from sexual scrutiny. Middle-class
female students, however, were already at the center of more gen-
eral debates on women’s education. The nervousness produced
by their academic presence readily spilled over into veiled discus-
sions of the sexual hazards of female athleticism.
Critics claimed that women students risked their modesty,
mental health, and maternal capacity when they abandoned self-
restraint for the exhilaration of competition. Dr. Angenette Parry
advised special caution for “college girls,” who “are the ones
who chiefly go in for athletics in excess.” 50 Even those who sup-
ported women’s sport advised that because adolescent girls were
“temperamentally more inclined to overdo,” they required care-
ful supervisionY Concerned educators and medical experts
painted a portrait of the frenzied coed for whom “the tempta-
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 23
tion to excess is apt to be overwhelming.” 52 They concluded that
if left unregulated, these conditions made “moderation an
impossibility. ” 53
=o=
Criticisms of the collegiate athletes’ morals and muscles posed a
distinct challenge to the limited authority and marginal position
of women physical educators, who were just beginning to lay
claim to professional status in the academic world. 54 With a sub-
stantial increase in female college enrollment in both single-sex
and coed institutions, jumping from 85,000 in 1900 to 283,000
in 1920, physical educators found a ready-made constituency for
athletic training. 55 But they also faced the unenviable task of
defending women’s physical activity and their own expertise in
academically oriented, male-dominated schools. Confident of
their abilities to instruct women in good habits of exercise but
somewhat fearful of the “masculine” reputation of sporting com-
petitions, women in P.E. tempered their support for competitive
sport.
Between 1890 and World War I they gradually articulated an
athletic philosophy captured in the word moderation. On the
assumption that zealous competition threatened female health
and morality, they sought to replace it with moderate competi-
tion based on “the smallest amount of exercise which will call
out a vigorous response.” 56 With this approach physical educa-
tors endeavored to protect their own professional interests and
shield young women from the supposed physical and moral dan-
gers of uncontrolled “masculine” athletic games.
Intellectual guidance and confirmation were sought from the
more prestigious professions of science and medicine. Since the
mid-nineteenth century, physicians had championed moderate
exercise as both prevention and cure for physical and mental
deterioration caused by natural weakness, menstrual havoc, cul-
tural confinement, and intellectual strain. 57 Slightly modified ver-
sions of this medical doctrine were introduced directly into the
P.E. curriculum when several colleges hired women physicians to
head their physical education departments. Early-twentieth-cen-
tury physical training directors like Dr. Eliza Mosher at the
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24 COMING ON STRONG
University of Michigan, her cousin Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher at
Stanford, and Dr. J. Anna Norris at the University of Minnesota
added the weight of medical authority to the fledgling field of
women’s P.E. Although they committed themselves to improving
female health and, in some cases, to challenging the notion that
menstruation was a disabling or pathological condition, they
tended to abide by medical concepts of pervasive female illness
and the dangers of excessive physical activity. 58
Strengthened by their intellectual and institutional ties to med-
ical science, physical educators confidently set forth to implement
their philosophy of moderation. However, they faced an obstacle
in students who found “masculine” competitive sport more
appealing than repetitive, formalized exercise regimens. Women
educators devised a solution based in female separatism. By
establishing separate women’s departments that offered specially
modified “female” versions of “male” games, educators differen-
tiated women’s activities from more strenuous male versions of
sport. They carved out a separate realm of play in which women
could gain the traditional benefits of sport-health, fun, “sports-
manship,” and a cooperative ethos-without fear of sexual harm
or the taint of masculinity.
The separatist strategy and cautious, protective approach to
female health and sexuality were shared by a generation of
women active in turn-of-the-century educational and reform cir-
cles. While not necessarily advocates of women’s political rights,
female physical educators often viewed their mission as consis-
tent with a broad-based “woman movement,” dedicated to rais-
ing the status of women and expanding the realm of female activ-
ity and influence. Many women active in Progressive Era reform
and women’s organizations accepted the prevailing view that nat-
ural differences in biology and sensibility divided men and
women. They scorned “masculine” aggressiveness and competi-
tiveness and sought to protect women from the dangers of public
life as well as to empower them. They introduced protective legis-
lation for women workers, founded women’s schools and
refuges, and relied on extensive female political and social net-
works to push their agenda.
Physical educators expressed a similar commitment to building
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 25
female networks and protecting vulnerable women. They viewed
sport positively but feared the possible exploitation of women
athletes who competed without benefit of trained female supervi-
sion. In particular, female professionals worried that male pro-
moters would make a sexual spectacle of the female athlete, forc-
ing her to reveal and overexert her body in the interest of com-
mercial profit and male entertainment. Their suspicions were not
unfounded. The media frequently reduced the young female ath-
lete or sports fan to no more than her sexual attributes. Two
stanzas-whose double entendre metaphors can’t have been lost
on contemporary male readers-of a poem by prominent sports-
writer Grantland Rice (an advocate of women’s sport) on the
woman baseball fan capture the lurid aura surrounding women’s
appearance on the sporting scene:
The type of girl which keeps each head cavorting in a whirl,
Is the nectarine of nature which we dub “The Baseball Girl.”
She’s got “proper curves,” you know, well rounded out and neat,
She has the “speed”-nor do we refer unto her feet.
She ;lways “makes a hit” to boot, and, what is very nice,
She’s ready at the proper time to “make a sacrifice.” 59
This type of treatment appalled physical educators. They, too,
celebrated women’s physical freedom and athletic enjoyment. But
their interest went hand in hand with a commitment to improve
women’s health, to preserve gender differences, and to protect a
female sexual sensibility believed to be more delicate and vulner-
able than men’s.
Motivated by these concerns, women educators took aggres-
sive steps to institutionalize their belief in moderation and to
extend their professional control. Within the APEA concerns
about unregulated female competition led to the formation of the
National Women’s Basketball Committee (which became the
Committee on Women’s Athletics, or CWA, in 1917). College
P.E. directors formed regional organizations and later a national
association, the National Society for College Directors of
Physical Education for Women (later the National Association of
Physical Education for College Women, or NAPECW). 60 With a
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26 COMING ON STRONG
unified voice, these regional and national networks affirmed the
importance of moderation in extracurricular sport and in the
core curriculum.
Based in a view of women as naturally inferior and weak, the
P.E. curriculum became a mechanism for monitoring and guiding
student physical performance and well-being. Aimed at strength-
ening the vulnerable female body, health exams; follow-up con-
sultations; lectures on “parenthood training”; posture inspec-
tions; special classes for the “defective student”; and hygiene
cards on which students reported on their daily diet, exercise,
sleep, and dress habits became the norm on many campuses. 61
Through such techniques of measurement, supervised training,
and inspection, well-intentioned physical educators developed a
regime of student surveillance. Even as they worked to free their
female charges from the corsets and imposed frailty of an earlier
time, these women helped to create new forms of discipline and
control for the modern female body. 62
Beyond overseeing the curriculum, women physical educators
took command of student athletic life, making the prohibition of
varsity sports a central item on their professional agenda.
Because of the perceived health dangers of aggressive competi-
tion, professional leaders urged P.E. staff members to monitor
student-run Women’s Athletic Associations (WAAs) and set strict
policies on competition. 63 The question of competition remained
open to debate, but by 1920 the tide of opinion had swung deci-
sively against varsity intercollegiate competition for women.
Educators restricted competition to on-campus, intramural activi-
ties designed to limit physical strain, competitive zeal, and public
spectatorship while appealing to students of all ability levels and
not just a talented few.
Students did not necessarily agree with these policies and per-
sisted in questioning the ban on intercollegiate sport. 64 Yet in the
end they had little choice but to comply. The most fervent ath-
letes were often physical education majors who were under addi-
tional pressure to accept the status quo. The instructors who laid
down the law against competition were their teachers, mentors,
and future employers. Students respected professors’ opinions, or,
if not, could oppose them only at their own risk. They never
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 27
mounted a serious protest, especially since thriving intramural
programs offered substantial athletic opportunities that seemed
to satisfy the majority of interested students.
The P.E. profession’s commitment to athletic moderation reflect-
ed not only a shared female perspective but a particular set of
class values. The medical notion of the frail, nonphysical female
with a delicate sensibility could only describe middle- and upper-
class women who did not have to work at hard physical labor or
contend with the harsh life of the streets. 65 Physical educators
took leisure time and advanced schooling for granted. Their pro-
tective creed of moderation emerged out of middle-class institu-
tions and affected primarily middle-class women.
Exercise specialists made their class assumptions explicit when
they advanced the idea that athletics substituted for the physical
labor of earlier housewives. Writing for Good Housekeeping,
Sarah Comstock advocated sport as a “substitute for those invig-
orating forms of work and play that filled the days of primitive
women.” Because the contemporary woman envisioned by
Comstock no longer toiled over the wash, she needed “some out-
door sport that will make up for the exhilaration she misses by
sending that blouse to the laundry. It isn’t fair that the laundress
should monopolize the benefits. ” 66
In concentrating on the leisured modern housewife or, more
typically, her school-age daughter, physical educators idealized an
image of womanliness rooted in notions of refinement, self-
restraint, and efficiency-core attributes of “respectable” middle-
class culture. Smith College P.E. Director Dorothy Ainsworth
impressed on her students an ideal of “greater womanliness, fair
play and self control.” And Wisconsin’s Blanche Trilling
expressed a similar belief that athletic training would contribute
to American womanhood “not only in building up sound bodies,
but also in bringing the girls to a realization of true dignity in
manners. ” 67
Aiming for the “best type of well-developed, controlled and
efficient womanhood” did not absolutely exclude the poor, immi-
grants, or women of color. 68 But calls for self-restraint, refine-
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28 COMING ON STRONG
ment, and efficiency celebrated a “womanliness” rooted in the
privileged position of the “lady.” It depended for contrast on a
view of women of color and the working class as robust, unruly,
insensitive to pain or exhaustion, and rough in manners. 69
The class contrast was especially evident when physical educa-
tors commented on the few working women who came under
their purview in industrial training schools or business recreation
programs. They suspected the working girl of poor hygiene and
unseemly interests fostered by the pernicious amusements and
nightlife of the modern city. The physical training director of the
Manhattan Trade School for Girls described her wish “to create a
love for simple, wholesome pleasures that will take the place of
the strenuous and unwise recreations that are so alluring to the
young business girl.” Once involved in “joyous, active exercise,”
the working girl would develop “judgment, accuracy, self-con-
trol, and harmonious working with others. ” 70
Such lofty ambitions formed a veneer over more coercive
methods and objectives. Trade~school recreational instructors
used physical exams and strictly supervised exercise routines to
inspect students for physical, mental, or moral defects that could
then be “checked or forcefully corrected” through alterations in
dress, posture, hygiene, and comportment. 71 They aimed to incul-
cate habits of “bodily efficiency” and “hygienic living” that
would enable young women “to adjust themselves to their new
environment of the work room. ” 72
While using supervised exercise to adjust the shopgirl to her
work environment and prepare the female collegian for her role
as a proper bourgeois woman, physical educators also attempted
to strengthen educated women for motherhood. By the early
twentieth century, decades of declining birthrates and poor health
among middle- and upper-class white women caused serious
alarm among wealthy Americans of Anglo-Saxon Protestant
descent. With cries of “Race Suicide,” they predicted that immi-
grant populations and the “prolific poor” would soon over-
whelm white, native-born “racial stock.” Fears of population
decline among the “better classes” called attention to the low
maternity rates of educated women. While many scientists con-
tinued to dwell on the dangers athleticism posed to the female
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The New Type of Athletic Girl 29
reproductive system, some eugenicists looked to sport as a way to
increase the fertility and improve the physical vigor of middle-
and upper-class American women. A reinvigorated motherhood
would allow the “fittest” race to expunge weaker strains and
take its natural place atop the social order.
Under the banner of eugenics, physical educators negotiated
the tension between fit motherhood and masculine athleticism.
While they warned that lack of exercise left women unfit for
motherhood, they also counseled that overexertion would dissi-
pate female reproductive resources and, as a result, the race. 73
Arabella Kenealy, a British doctor widely read in the United
States, claimed that women who acquired masculine attributes
through competitive sport purchased them at the cost of a future
generation’s manhood: “A woman who wins golf and hockey
matches may be said … to energize her muscles with the poten-
tial manhood of possible sons … since over-strenuous pursuits
[could] sterilize women as regards male offspring. ” 74 Under a
program of supervised moderate exercise, however, physical edu-
cators championed the abilities of fit women to produce strong,
healthy sons, and thus a mighty nation.
In their formulation of policies and philosophies, physical edu-
cators held to a definition of womanhood particular to their late-
Victorian middle-class upbringings. Because of the biases they
themselves encountered as women in male-dominated schools,
they deemed it specially important to project the dominant image
of “respectable” womanhood. Strict adherence to middle-class
standards of feminine behavior would smooth the road to a
secure position within academe, at the same time producing a
generation of physically fit, socially acceptable young women
who had been spared the harmful effects of masculine sport.
=o=
Between 1900 and 1920 women’s sporting pursuits accounted for
only a tiny fraction of all athletic opportunities. Yet, in the con-
text of the growing popularity of sport, athletic women of every
class confronted the contradiction inherent in being both
“woman” and “athlete.” For them the gender tension proved
both limiting and fruitful. It cast suspicion on the femininity of
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30 COMING ON STRONG
women in sport, yet it also contributed to the dynamic image of
the “athletic girl” who refused to be excluded from a domain of
masculine privilege and pleasure. The female athlete embodied
the New Woman, in bold motion, treading fearlessly into forbid-
den realms and discovering her unique character. Noting that “no
sport is too reckless, too daring, or too strenuous” for the experi-
enced female athlete, author and amateur athlete Anna de Koven
pronounced that the tomboy had moved from disgrace to honor
as the symbol of a “new type of American girl, new not only
physically, but mentally and morally. ” 75
This image of the modern female athlete embraced women of
all classes, but assumed different meanings in different settings.
Physical educators successfully limited competition for middle-
class college students while providing a significant degree of ath-
letic opportunity through intramural sport programs founded on
the principle of moderation. Women active in exclusive sports like
golf, tennis, and equestrianism participated with fewer restric-
tions. Insulated from public reproach by wealth and status, they
competed vigorously in private athletic and country clubs. The
freedom from scrutiny that elite women gained from privilege,
working-class women derived from neglect. Before 1920 only a
smattering of neighborhood athletic clubs and social welfare insti-
tutions offered athletic programs for women. However, the few
organized activities open to working-class girls and women rarely
insisted on modified rules or restricted competition.
Until World War I these class-specific sport milieus coexisted
peacefully, encouraged by the growing popularity of sport and
the mixed but often warm reception accorded the modern
woman’s athletic interest. The “athletic girl” won acceptance in
part because she seemed to epitomize the spirit of New
Womanhood, but also because as long as the numbers of women
participating in sport remained small, the female athlete did not
yet jeopardize men’s actual control of the sporting world. This
situation was a temporary one, however. The expansion of
women’s sport in the late teens and early 1920s fostered a highly
competitive style of play that threatened many men’s sense of
superiority and clashed head-on with physical educators’ careful-
ly constructed philosophy of moderation.
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CHAPTER 2
GRASS-ROOTS GROWTH AND
SEXUAL SENSATION IN THE
FLAPPER ERA
=:::::>0=
In 1927 American tennis sensation Helen Wills won the first of
her eight women’s singles championships at England’s prestigious
Wimbledon tennis tournament. That year marked the beginning
of Wills’s absolute reign in the world of tennis. Combining “man-
like strokes” with “feminine grace,” she began a streak of unin-
terrupted victories that lasted until 1933. 1
The young star from Berkeley had begun her tennis career on
the private courts of northern California. As the daughter of a
physician father and doting mother, she received all the educa-
tional and athletic benefits of an upper-middle-class upbringing.
Yet, when she burst upon the national scene in 1923, winning the
first of her seven U.S. singles titles at Forest Hills, New York, she
won instant popularity as a “commoner” who had broken into
the snobbish upper-class world of championship tennis. Her fresh
face, girlish beauty, and trademark plain white visor enhanced
her reputation as a simple yet poised and graceful young champi-
on. Within a few short years she achieved the status of a national
hero, revered by the public as “the American girl” or simply “our
Helen.”
Wills’s success and popularity in the late 1920s capped a
decade of tremendous growth in women’s sports. While stars of
tennis, golf, and swimming gained national celebrity status, in
communities across the country ordinary female athletes took to
the playing fields with less fanfare but an equal amount of enthu-
31
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32 COMING ON STRONG
siasm. 2 As interest and participation levels rose, so too did
women’s skill level. When Helen Wills racked up victory after
victory against female challengers, the caliber of her play so
impressed observers that some suggested she should begin enter-
ing men’s tournaments. Wills seemed uninterested in pursuing
this option and stated that men were still the superior tennis
players. However, she did acknowledge the possibility that some
day the best women might defeat top-ranked male tennis
players. 3
In a decade of extraordinary progress for women athletes,
Wills’s prediction did not seem farfetched. After all, in 1924 a
twenty-year-old backstroker from Chicago, Sybil Bauer, shocked
the sportsworld by breaking the world (men’s) record in the
backstroke. Two years later teenage phenomenon Gertrude
Ederle, an Olympic medal winner from New York, gained inter-
national renown by becoming only the sixth person to swim the
English Channel-two hours faster than the five men who pre-
ceded her. 4
The energy and skill of female athletes held Americans in
thrall. Most striking was the sportswoman’s expressed love of
competition and her dedication to victory. In 1920 French tennis
star Suzanne Lenglen, who reigned supreme in European tennis
and would soon tour the United States to take on the best
American women, informed the readers of Collier’s magazine
that serious female players “are out to win. No mercy is shown.”
In sport, she added, “There is no such thing as ‘ladies first.’ ” 5
Helen Wills apparently heeded Lenglen’s advice, using her steely
resolve and legendary powers of concentration to cut down
opponents “without even a pretense of mercy. ” 6
A fascinated public observed the phenomenon with one part
admiration and one part consternation. When figures like Wills,
Lenglen, or Ederle pursued and achieved athletic excellence, they
incorporated masculine qualities of strength, speed, and agility
into a new standard of womanhood. Feminists heralded female
athletic success as an advance for all women. But traditionalists
looked on in anxious wonder, suspecting that the changes might
also signal a loss of masculine privilege and superiority. If women
were no longer a fragile, timid group in need of protection, men
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Grass-roots Growth and Sexual Sensation in the Flapper Era 33
could not be assured of their own role as powerful protectors,
and consequently relations between the sexes would have to be
reconsidered.
The resulting unease found expression in media reactions to
Helen Wills as she extended her remarkable string of victories.
Her performance began to strike some observers as more disturb-
ing than pleasing. Reporters who had earlier lauded the
“American girl’s” charm, now described Wills’s winning streak as
a product of cold, relentless play; she was a “heartless crusher of
lesser talents” and a “killer type of fighter” whose “austere and
inexorable” style had “all the warmth and animation of a
deceased codfish. ” 7
Whether praised or panned, Wills and other women athletes
occupied a central place in a popular discourse preoccupied with
assessing the meaning and relative power of womanhood and
manhood. As athletic opportunities spread rapidly at the grass-
roots level and women made new inroads into national and inter-
national sport, the female athlete exceeded the bounds of “mod-
eration” proposed by cautious experts, earning a reputation for
physi
