[MUSIC] It's really in the 20th century that women's sports begins to seriously grow and a crucial decade here is the 1920s. The 1920s globally is a decade of experimentation, Picasso and Cubism of new sexual freedoms of the birth and growth of modernism. And in this context women began to claim more rights and some of the old patriarchal strictures begin to be called into question. And so in the 1920s women begin to start playing a bigger range of sports and you also get the development of some of the really the first female celebrity athletes. One of them is a woman named Gertrude Ederle, whose a fabulous swimmer. She, in 1926, becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel. She's dubbed the queen of the waves and becomes very famous and in the early 1930s, you get the first genuinely superstar female athlete in the person of the incredible Mildred Didrikson. Mildred Didrikson becomes known as Babe Didrikson, that's what she's known as, because she hits the baseball so far when she's playing junior baseball that people compare her to the great New York Yankees superstar Babe Ruth. So Babe Didrikson is, some people have called her the best female athlete of the 20th century. Who knows whether that's true or not. But she wins two gold medals in the 1932 Olympics. She also sets world records, or at least it was said that she could, she wanted that, she swam that fast in swimming. She goes bowling for the first time and bowls 200. She supposedly could punt an American football 60 or 70 yards. And later in her career although she dies tragically young in her early 40s from cancer but later in her career in her 30s. She begins to play professional golf and becomes a golf superstar as well. One of the cofounders of the LPGA. The first women's professional league of any kind in sporting world. So Babe Didrikson is all in the newspaper she's a famous figure but there's also a kind of backlash against her, because the world is not yet ready for a woman athlete to be so fantastic in a world where there are still these expectations that, well should women really even be playing a sports at all, residual ideas of porcelain doll femininity. And Babe Didrikson hardly changes her image to try to soften some of the criticisms. So she grows her hair a little longer. She starts wearing makeup. She gets married. There's a magazine spread baking cookies. All of this is because she's getting criticized as being too mannish. You know, maybe even being a lesbian. Horrors. And so she does these things to try to feminize her image. And this raises an issue or a concept that I'd like to introduce called the apology. The apology is an unspoken social transaction kind of like the racial bargain which we talked about earlier in the class. The apology is something that female athletes has sometimes felt they needed to make and sometimes maybe still do or maybe not. We can think about that later on. But the idea is I'm a woman and I'm playing. I'm doing something that's been a traditionally male activity playing sports. And I'm really good at it. But to show you that, well, I'm really not too much of a rebel. I'm not trying to bring down our social mores and you know, I'm not some kind of radical feminist. As part of the apology the female athlete will do things to feminize her image. So you'll get great athletes, or you got great athletes like Babe Didrikson. Okay, look, yeah I maybe can punt a football farther than you can male American but, look, I bake cookies too. So it's the apology, it's kinda like saying ,I'm sorry that I'm so good in this traditional male domain. I apologize and let me show you that I can do these feminine things. Again, this is all at the level of symbol. It's not a spoken apology. But you see it happening, certainly in the early history of women's sports. Now, another example of the place that you see the apology is in the interesting story of this so-called All America Girls Baseball League in the United States. This is the subject of a well-known movie, a great movie actually, with Gina Davis, called A League of Their Own. So, during World War two, American men are away fighting World War two, or fighting in the battlefield. And, so this entrepreneur has this idea we'll have women play baseball to entertain people back home. And so, it's a really great league with these fantastic players and very exciting games. But the women are expected to wear these short kind of revealing sexy shirts, and to wear makeup, and to look very beautiful. And it's kind of the apology in action. The statement being, look, we're playing baseball, it's a traditionally male activity, but we're still women, we're still feminine women. So that apology being made at the level again of symbol as the apology is always made. So, the All America Girls' Baseball League is actually disbanded after World War two as men return and begin to play in the major leagues again. And the 1950s and early 1960s in the United States certainly has been talked about as a period of the retrenchment of the so-called cult of domesticity. It's pretty conservative period where many women, American women during World War Two, had started to work in factories and playing baseball and whatever In the 50s it's more about women, you really belong in the kitchen, apple pie, the apron, smiling, hand your husband his lunch as he goes off to work and so forth, the Eisenhower years in America. All of this begins to change, though In the late 60s or much of it anyway in the late 60s and early 70s with the growth of the feminist movement. So the 60s and 70s is this time of upheaval globally, they civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests in the Unites States of Revolution, upheaval abroad. And women's issues is one of the terrains of struggle and change. And so people talk about the 60s and 70s as a period of second wave feminism in the United States. The first feminist wave was in the early 20th century and was really organized around the right to vote. Suffrage was the cause. In second wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s which happens in the United States but is also a global in a movement. Simone de Beauvoir's the second sex posed in 1949 is a foundational text for second wave feminism for feminism in the 60s and 70s. And in second wave feminism the demand is really for complete equality. Women were saying, you know we wanna have the same rights to become a lawyer or a businessman. To go whatever school we want. Not to be treated as sex objects. We want an equal place in business and politics and life everywhere. This is what second wave feminism is all about. Now as second wave feminism is happening in the 60s and 70s it's reflected and goes along with changes in women's sports. Because what you see in the early 1970s is really women becoming a more forceful presence in sports and outspoken female athletes like Billie Jean King becoming prominent on the national stage. One of the funny, but also like symbolically loaded sporting moments of the 1970s. Is the so-called battle of the sexes where Billie Jean King squares off in the Houston Astrodome, the great coliseum of America of that era. She squares off goes off against a guy named Bobby Riggs who's a former tennis champion who styled himself as a so called I'm a male chauvinist pig and even though I'm in my 50's I can beat any woman on the planet because men are bigger and stronger and more superior.. So, they have this big publicity thing, and they play this match. And, Billie Jean King beats Bobby Riggs, and is this sign of victory for women in the moment of second-wave feminism. So, in the 1970's, you have this new visibility of female athletes, outspokenness of female atheletes. You also have, in the United States, in 1972, Title Nine. Title Nine is federal legislation that's complex but essentially mandates that girls be given the same opportunity in sports as men. So it obligates high schools and colleges in particular, to establish women's sports teams, to make sporting opportunities available to women as much as much as men. And this leads to gigantic changes in the United States where the numbers of women's sports teams, the possibilities for girls to participate in sports expand exponentially or right up to the present, girls and women's sports is a big deal all across the United states and the world really now. And a lot of that goes back to the 1970s and in the United States in the Title Nine. So you could think about famous American athletes now like Serena Williams or Mia Hamm as daughters or goddaughter of Title Nine. And this new movement towards equality for women and society and on the playing field. Now the story is different in different parts of the world. One thing that's happening, this is in the 1970s is still the period of the cold war and Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, actually do quite a bit to promote women's sports too. There's this sort of idea in Communism that we're all equal and women have a place with the men and then march towards the great red dawn of a Communist future. And also communist governments are trying to use sports as a propaganda vehicle to show hey, we're communists, we're doing great, we're producing these great athletes, we can beat the evil Yankee capitalists at the olympics and these other venues. So Communist regimes invest quite a bit of money in women's sports and they produce these fantastic female athletes, Russian gymnasts like Olga Korbut or the East German figure skater, Katarina Witt. And just as in Title Nine kind of legacy of participation of women's sports in the United States. The Cold War sets this kind of template, the idea that women have a role in the playing field that you see now in the Post-Cold War moment. In the relative opportunities and participation of women in former Eastern block countries in sports. For example, now, the tons of great Russian women tennis players that we have. So the story is a little bit different in different parts of the world but in general we see this movement towards greater female participation in sports by the end of the 20th century. And this all raises the question, which I wanna take up in the next lecture, what about women's sports now? How even or uneven is the playing field, and what can we say about gender identity and sexuality in women's sports today? I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]
