[MUSIC] This time, I want to open up the question of women's sports, and the bigger issues around gender identity and sexuality, as they play themselves out on the playing field And in the bigger sporting universe. And I want to begin with an image, 2007, the Women's Soccer World Cup in Beijing. The Brazilian team has just come in second, and it's a fantastic team. It features Marta. Maybe the greatest women's soccer player in the history of the world, but as the game ends, the Brazilian players hold a little protest. One of them holds up a sign that says, [FOREIGN] in Portuguese it says we need support. And it turned out that the Brazilian women, were paid very badly. They were only getting $35 a day in expense money. They were staying at a lousy hotel. They hadn't been paid bonuses that they were promised. Their equipment wasn't that great and all of this in a context where the Brazilian men's team But it was full of players earning tens of millions of dollars, gigantic Nike contract despite the Brazilian men's team's mixed performance in recent years. So here you have this clear imbalance between the money, the publicity, the fame, the support for women's sports and men's sports and the differences between why the Brazilian national men's team and women's team are treated. And so, here we see in a nutshell, the predicament of women's sports. On the one hand there's been gigantic progress in terms of women and sports. 150 years ago, women were not allowed to play sports at all and now women's sports is a big thing. Until 1979, soccer was actually banned, organized soccer, organized women's soccer was banned in Brazil under the military dictatorship. So on the one hand you have the great Brazilian women's soccer team and the growth of women's sports, but on the other hand, women athletes still too often getting treated as second-hand citizens. And we've talked about, and a big theme in this course is how sports and society always go together. And so I think what's happened in sports parallels whats happened in the world, whats happened in the world at large. We've seen a lot of progress towards equality for women but there is still many ways in which women don't have enjoy the same kinds of rights and power that men do. Just look at boardrooms or the halls of state around the world, the fact that women still don't earn as much as men often for doing the same jobs. The certain places around the world where women are denied basic rights. So we have, great progress on the one hand and on the other hand major limitations still. Now we'll return to the issues around women's sports today and the very complex dynamics of gender and sexuality and men and women. In the sporting world, in the present. But, what I want to do to understand these issues in a little bit deeper way, is to go back and to talk a little bit about the history of women's sports. And, we can begin in the Victorian age, in Britain in the 1800's. And, Queen Victoria is ruling Britain. And this is the time when Britain is a great imperial power. They're divvying up parts of the world. They're masters of commerce and the seas. And they're also exporting their games like soccer and cricket. To the far corners of the globe. Now, the 1800's in Britain is also the time when sports in general was beginning to take off. The first professional leagues, the codification of rules and institutions and bureaucracies. But women are sidelined in all of this in the Victorian age in the mid-1800's. Because you have this idea of what's been called porcelain doll femininity. This is the idea, the ideology that women are delicate, frail creatures and that if they exert themselves too much they may faint or their uterus will fall out and they won't be able to have kids or whatever, all of this kind of. Gender folklore. And so women are wearing these elaborate corsets, and long dresses, and hats. All the idea that women are like delicate porcelain who cannot be jostled and do difficult and violent things. And sports, of course, involves lots of running around and knocking into people, and so forth. So the idea in the Victorian Age is, well, women really shouldn't play sports at all. And by the late 1800's, you do begin to see the development of the first forms of female sports. But because of this residual idea of porcelain doll femininity, women are really only allowed or encouraged to play very lady-like, country club sports where they won't have to break a sweat. Or at least too much of a sweat. So croquet, for example, or golf or tennis. And women are expected to play these things in these elaborate costumes to not show too much of their bodies to. To protects themselves from the sun and so forth. >> I should add that at the start it's really only more affluent and white women who are playing sports at all with others excluded. >> So the earliest women sports reflecting the idea of person all feminity. Are these country club gentile sports. And women are certainly not allowed to play football or to wrestle or to do these more manly things. Now ,by the early 1900's, you start to see women's sports begin to grow beyond these country club Sports. For example, you have women beginning to play basketball. Basketball was really invented and codified by James Naismith in the 1890's, and women start to play basketball, too. But reflecting these old ideas about women and their physical limitations compared to men. You see the invention of the so-called bear named after Claire Bear, who's a famous, actually an important female pioneer in the sports world in the 1890's. She invents the so called Bear-Spalding rules for basketball and this is the idea that women really can't be expected to run all the way up and down the court every time, that would just be too much for them because after all, they're such frail flowers. And with Bear rules, what you have is often a court with three different zones. And so two or three, there was some variation in this, but you might have three women who play just in one zone, three women who play just in the middle zone, and then three women who play offense on the other zone. So you see, women, the teams, you're not allowed to run from one zone to another. You stay and wait for the ball to be passed to you. And this is all based on this idea that women shouldn't run too much. And there are other special basketball rules that apply to women. For example, women are not allowed to grab or try to steal the ball under Bear-Spalding rules. The idea that this would be unladylike. So into the early 20th century, you see women beginning to move into sports, the country club sports, basketball, but there are still these very powerful ideologies that say that women must play in ways where they won't exert themselves too much and that they certainly shouldn't be allowed to play violent, manly games. As we'll see in the second part of the lecture, things began to change more in the world of women's sports as the 20th century progresses. [MUSIC]
