100 Years of 100 Things: Women's Sports

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. We're using the station's 100th anniversary to explore the century-long arc of history for a hundred different things for people that matter to our lives today. We're up to thing number 76. It's 100 years of organized women's sports. Think what you will about the recent political slogan, Save Women's Sports. Many people with that slogan on their lips may never have cared about women's sports before, right?

It's been hard enough to launch women's sports, which for many have become a cause only because trans people are seen as a blight. There's a century and more of history that has gradually built something that people can even debate how to save through college athletics that began in the 19th century, through Title IX in the 1970s, through the popularity of individual stars like Serena Williams, Megan Rapinoe, Caitlin Clark. Let's talk about it.

With us for this is Jane McManus, sports journalist, an adjunct professor at NYU at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, and author of a brand-new book called The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women's Sports. Jane, always great to have you, and now in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, welcome back to WNYC.

Jane McManus: Thanks. I'm so happy to be here and talk about this.

Brian Lehrer: Your book is mostly about the last 50 years, beginning with Billie Jean King and some of her peers, but I know you can take us back further. The website of the National Women's History Museum says, "19th century America idealized white women's modesty, frowning on sports as a threat to elite females' fertility." Was something like that the infertile ground from which women's sports had to be grown?

Jane McManus: Absolutely. Well, this is actually a really great point, and we still deal with the vestiges of this today, albeit things have really moved on. There was this idea that the purpose of womanhood, that a woman's purpose was to have children and to reproduce, and as such, women were really a means to an end. They weren't an end in and of themselves. It was really only when there was this idea that keeping women healthy in service of their fertility was actually a good thing.

That's when you really had a movement that moved away from this idea of women's frailty which was so prevalent. There was even a doctor in the-- There was a German medical journal in the late 1800s which came out and said that if women overexerted themselves, for example, in running, that their uteruses would fall out. This was literally something that was part of medical science. That's why it took so long for the marathon for women to be accepted.

It was only in the 1980s that that became an Olympic event. Of course, the Boston Marathon didn't allow women until the late '60s. You really did have the vestiges of these ideas affecting women's sports up until the very modern era.

Brian Lehrer: I read that the first women's college basketball game was played at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1893. Men's college sports had begun 40 years earlier with rowing between Harvard and Yale in the 1850s. Do you know anything about what led to the origin of women's collegiate sports, and was basketball first? I think you have some family ties to Smith, don't you?

Jane McManus: I do. My daughter goes there. I'm actually going to be heading up there to go see the pioneers and where they live very soon. Yes, absolutely. Well, actually, that basketball game was just the year after James Naismith invented the game of basketball. It was actually very quick, but it was not the first collegiate event. Smith is part of a group of colleges called the Seven Sisters, which were historic women's colleges. Again, elite white women generally went there, although that has certainly changed tremendously at this point. Those are very inclusive colleges now.

At the same time, because they were a single gender environment and they were all women, there was a little bit more latitude, so you actually had sports, particularly calisthenics. Again, there was a big tuberculosis crisis in this country in the 1800s, and many women, particularly at that age, 15 to 20, would die of "frailty respiratory issues," fever, and frailty, and so the idea some arose that you could combat this with calisthenics. Actually, women's colleges were places where this idea of sports and organized sports for women started. You had rowing.

Horseback riding was certainly acceptable for women, but because men weren't on campus, you could also have things like a baseball team. Vassar had a baseball team in 1976. Smith had the first collegiate basketball game, but that was actually in keeping with what already was a tradition at those Seven Sisters environments. Just beyond that, certainly in the 1920s and early 1900s, there were girls' camps, single gender environments across the country as well, particularly in the Northeast and the East that also had a lot of sports for girls, particularly swimming and horseback riding and tennis.

Brian Lehrer: The National Women's History Museum website also makes the point that in this realm, as in so many, white women and Black women were seen differently and had different opportunities or roadblocks. I know you address race in the book for the more recent decades, but any thoughts on women's sports segregation, and let's say, the era before Jackie Robinson and baseball, before the civil rights movement?

Jane McManus: This is such an important area as well, and I think it also is tied to what the idea of the expectation is for different people based on their identity. For Black women, obviously their purpose was labor for a long time in this country. In order to play sports, you have to have leisure time and space, and those are things that Black women were denied pretty systemically. There were exceptions to this, of course. Tennessee State had the famous Tigerbelles track and field team coached by Ed Temple there. They started off, I believe, in the 1950s about the time that Jackie Robinson integrated baseball.

He had the fabulous Wilma Rudolph who went on to win gold in 1960s Rome Olympics. He had a motto for the women who played for him, and it was, foxes, not oxes. Again, that's a direct line to this idea of femininity and how important femininity was. I found an interesting quote from that 1960s period of time from Arthur Daley of The New York Times. I think he's specifically referring to [unintelligible 00:07:17] but I think he was also talking women's sports more generally. He said, "Now they clutter up the joint and feminine frills have begun to debase this temple of masculinity."

Brian Lehrer: Huh. Now, listeners, as usual in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, we invite your personal oral history calls. Who among you has a women's sports story to tell from your own life or that of a friend or family member? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. For older listeners, were you a woman athlete in school before Title IX, and we'll get to Title IX, or in its early days in a way that affected you or someone you know? For older callers or women in college today or anyone in between, have you seen certain gender barriers fall or be disappointingly stubborn, have a story to tell along either of those lines?

For anyone, are you just recently becoming a fan of any women's sports who saw those T-shirts around the Barclays Center and elsewhere last year, Everyone's Watching Women's Sports, because of Caitlin Clark celebrity or Serena Williams before her, or because of your own daughter or for any other reason? Your women's sports oral history calls are welcome here at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text for Jane McManus, author of The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women's Sports.

All right, let's jump ahead to the 1970s where the timeline in your book begins. It is with tennis and Billie Jean King and her peers. Why tennis? Why then?

Jane McManus: Tennis has been such an interesting place. In some ways, it feels like things fast forwarded with tennis when they haven't with other sports. I think it probably has to do with Billie Jean King and being such a force of nature, but also, that 1973 match, the Battle of the Sexes, against Bobby Riggs where she defeated him on a court at the Astrodome in front of all of those fans with the pomp and circumstance and the spectacle, it became something that was larger than just sports. It catapulted women's sports.

Brian Lehrer: Bobby Riggs was an older male tennis pro and Billie Jean King was in her prime. Do I have that right?

Jane McManus: Yes, that's true, but he had also just defeated a woman named Margaret Court who-- It was called the Mother's Day Massacre because Margaret Court was a mother. She'd been the number one player in the world for a long time. It was this idea that Billie Jean King had to go out and reclaim women's tennis for women and the honor of it. She did that because she was able to meet the moment, and she realized that this was more than just a match.

It was really something where she had to be open to understanding what the spectacle meant and what the attention meant. That was unique also, this idea, because sports are entertainment. In some ways, you can change people's minds through sports in a way that you're not going to in a more academic setting. Now you have women's tennis being by far, for the last 50 years, most successful financially sport for women. You can be a mid-ranking women's tennis player and still make a very good living. That's something that hasn't been true for other sports up until very recently.

Brian Lehrer: Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs happened to be one year after Title IX got added to US law by an act of Congress, 1972. I'm going to read from the text for listeners who've never heard the exact words before and then ask you to explain the origin of Title IX. If I have this right, Title IX begins with these words, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." Is that the essence of Title IX?

Jane McManus: It doesn't say the word sports, you'll notice. This was originally something that was meant to integrate med schools, grad schools, educational opportunities for women, but people noticed that a lot of those educational opportunities are alongside sports opportunities at institutions of higher ed. In this country, we decided really that the idea of education-- Back in the late 1800s, there was a movement called Muscular Christianity, and it was really this idea that education was about the whole person, very much the whole man, really.

It was intellectual, it was physical, it was religious, it was the entire person. When we get then to the 1970s, education and higher ed really does have under its rooftop all of these different ideas about sports and intellectual education. When you framed a policy like that, it included sports. Once people realized that sports wasn't excluded from this, then it really did become a place where you could advocate for more opportunity and resources to go to women's sports.

Brian Lehrer: We have a couple of great-looking oral history calls on the line. Let's go to Michael in Upper Manhattan. You're on WNYC with Jane McManus. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hey, Brian. Love the show. [unintelligible 00:12:47] my mom was an Olympic athlete that won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960 at the age of 14.

Jane McManus: Wow.

Michael: In addition to that, after she had won that, she set a world record at the European Championships and then made the decision to go pro, which meant that she was teaching swimming lessons and a lifeguard because she wanted to go to college and just have a normal experience. There was no Title IX. She went to the University of Oregon. There were only a couple of programs across the country at that point that she could have gone to, so she quit the career very young because of that.

Jane McManus: Wow, what an amazing story that is and so emblematic of the times. It was a real stop for, especially after college, even up until the 1980s, really, for many women. Women in this country wanted to play basketball before WNBA and the ABL. Boy, that is [inaudible 00:13:48].

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Michael. Listeners, Jane's line is dropping out a little bit here and there. I know we're missing a word or two here and there. It's basically fine, but we hear it. We apologize. Christine in Greenwich, you're on WNYC. Hi, Christine.

Christine: Oh, hi. I just wanted to call in and let you know that in the '70s in the Boston area, I, as a girl was not allowed to go to gym class. The boys would go to gym and the girls would stay inside for "special art." 1979 is when I remember being allowed to finally go to gym class as a girl, and all the girls in my class rejoiced. We were happy to get to do that. Then in high school, fast forward, 1986, there was no girls' soccer team. I had played soccer just in my town, but I wanted to play at my school, my high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I tried out and I made the boys' varsity soccer team in 1986. There were three girls that were allowed to play because soccer was considered a non-contact sport, so they let us be on the boys' team. Wow, have times changed. That same school not only has a girls' varsity soccer team, but they have a girls' varsity ice hockey team. I'm just thrilled that times have changed and girls pretty much can do what they want when they want for sports. I'm not that old and look what I grew up with, really having to just fight to get any kind of exercise, sport, or fun as a girl.

Brian Lehrer: Christine, thank you. Great call. Here's another one who I think wound up playing on what was mostly a boys' team because there wasn't a girls' team. Kathleen in Morristown, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Kathleen: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hello.

Kathleen: Hello. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: [unintelligible 00:15:40], I can hear you.

Kathleen: Oh, okay. My sister actually was a very good swimmer and got the first varsity letter on a boys' team in 1974. Swimming. There was no girls' team, so she went on the boys' team.

Brian Lehrer: How does she look back on that, if you know?

Kathleen: I don't know because I'm texting her saying I'm on the radio here. [laughter] I think she probably thought it-- We thought it was so cool. Everybody just thought it was really amazing, and I'm sure she did too. That was a very, very long time ago.

Brian Lehrer: Kathleen, thank you very much. Wow, I think we have a contemporary story about a girl playing on a boys' team. Here's Philip in Pine Bush, New York. You're on WNYC. Hi, Philip.

Philip: Yes, hi. I'm the quarterback coach at Middletown High School, and the head coach, Tim Sternfeld, is very open to bringing this young girl on who was on the softball team. When I arrived, I saw her and I thought she was a kicker. I said, "Oh, are you a kicker?" She says, "No, I'm a quarterback." I threw her there and she was pretty amazing. She threw a touchdown pass, and it's for Middletown High School in the Hudson Valley. I was very proud to have the coach bringing on-- We also had an 8th grader starting quarterback for the varsity, and behind him was the girl, Sierra. She was great.

Brian Lehrer: Philip, thank you very much. Are you surprised, Jane, to hear all these stories of the rare girl playing on what's mostly a boys' sports team?

Jane McManus: Not at all. That is the story for so many women. I still have students in my class sometimes who will tell a story like this, being the only girl who played on a baseball team or a soccer team when there were limited opportunities in her area. That's my story too. I was the only girl playing pickup basketball for a long time. I'm 54. I think actually this is a pretty common kind of like fighting your way or [inaudible 00:18:04] is actually part of the process for a lot of women and girls who play sports.

Brian Lehrer: This was on the courts of Prospect Park, your childhood, right?

Jane McManus: [laughs] Well, I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Brian Lehrer: Oh.

Jane McManus: Yes, but when I got to New York, I played pickup all over the city wherever I could, but the Prospect Park YMCA was a big part of my young adulthood in the city.

Brian Lehrer: I see. Young adulthood. I want to get back to Title IX and what's going on in the world right now because I think of the current so-called Save Women's Sports movement along with the war on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I wonder if it weren't for the trans athlete issue, the same political forces might be calling for the repeal of Title IX because it would be seen by them perhaps as giving special privileges to women's college sports, which they might say on the merits, is not as popular as men's college sports or have as much student demand so the existence of women's college sports teams shouldn't be guaranteed by law, it takes resources unfairly from the men's teams.

Was there a backlash to Title IX, the sports provision in the '80s, as there was to so many other feminist advances from the '70s?

Jane McManus: Absolutely. There were court cases, there were repeals, there was basically just ignoring it. When I worked at the Journal News in New York, when I moved and got my first full-time job covering sports, one of the stories was the Westchester Girls Soccer Championships was out of season with the state championships because they played at the same time the boys' teams did. There was a lack of fields and so the girls just got pushed off to a season where they couldn't play for a state title. This was the kind of thing that went on all the time.

It wasn't really until the mid-2000s, I think, that things stabilized. Women's sports have always been faced these kinds of headwinds for the most part, and I wouldn't be surprised if that happens again. The Trump administration did come out and say that they didn't think that name, image, and likeness, the money, the revenue that was brought in to colleges through name, image, and likeness, should be allocated according to the principles of Title IX.

That means that according to the Trump administration, that schools can allocate that revenue more toward men's sports, should they choose to do that. There's more to come.

Brian Lehrer: Make the argument against, because if he might say-- I didn't know this particular story that you're referring to, but if he says, "Well, if the athlete who's a star, who's bringing in revenue is a guy, then why should that revenue go proportionately to women's sports?" Push back on that.

Jane McManus: Well, I think it just is about the principle of Title IX and whether or not there is equity. You have to think these are-- Universities are not sports leagues, it's not the NFL where their job is to maximize revenue. The job of the university is to educate students. Usually, when you think about the NCAA, and I know we are now conflating the NCAA, as it's just another in the lineup of leagues in this country, but really, the NCAA was established to oversee college sports and this idea that college sports, by virtue of them being young people who weren't being compensated, that there were higher principles in mind, principles of fairness, principles of equity, principles of sportsmanship and character development, and all of those things that we associate with sports at that level that we don't necessarily associate with pro sport.

I think you have to decide as an institution what your priorities are and what your guiding principles are, and if it's going to be revenue generation. I think that's certainly the way we're going, but it is not in line with how college sports were founded in this country.

Brian Lehrer: We're in our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, number 76. It's 100 years of organized women's sports with sports journalist and NYU adjunct professor in the Institute for Global Sport, Jane McManus, who's also got a new book called The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women's Sports, and your oral histories. Jessica in Montclair, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jessica.

Jessica: Hi. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thanks for calling.

Jessica: Thank you. In 1976, when I was 10 years old, my mom and I sued, or actually threatened to sue because it didn't go all the way to court, the small suburban town in New Jersey, where we live, [unintelligible 00:22:55] Montclair, because they had no girls' athletic program at all. I had tried playing soccer on the boys' soccer league, but they really bullied me really terribly. My mom said that there needs to be sports for girls so that this doesn't happen. It did lead to the town beginning, like what has been over the last nearly 50 years, a very successful girls' athletic program.

Something that I learned from that experience is that the only reason that women's sports exist is because the boys would not let us play. Now, as the mother of an adult transgender child, I see that if we had been sensible in the beginning and the boys would let the girls play, sports would never have been separated by gender in the first place. They just don't need to be separated by gender. It's much more sensible to separate sports by something like height or weight or skill class, the way we do with wrestling or boxing, and whichever those factors according to the specific needs of that sport.

The importance of-- and if we don't do that, then trans kids have nowhere to play sports because what are they going to do to have their own leagues? There aren't enough of them. Excluding them is a violation of every civil rights principle that we have.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica, thank you so much for your call, and wow, so much in there about the past and the present and the potential future. Jane, I know you do write about the trans athletes issue in your book. Do you think Jessica has a possible solution there? Rather than separating into men's and women's teams at all, do it by height and weight and other characteristics?

Jane McManus: Absolutely. There's a place for that for sure, and I agree that the idea of inclusive play is very powerful, especially for kids who feel marginalized and kept out of spaces where everybody else gets to have fun. The idea that we expand the idea of who can play and how, it just makes sense. There's no physical reason that a 10-year-old can't play anywhere, really. People aren't different enough to really make an argument that it's a safety issue because it just isn't. The issue is exclusion. I agree.

I don't see the need to exclude people who could be on a team and have fun. Develop character in the same way that we talk about sports developing character for everyone.

Brian Lehrer: Why isn't it for you a safety issue? Those are the stories that have broken out as anecdotes. Trump brought them up again in his speech before Congress the other day with an individual who they highlighted, whose story they told, who was allegedly a victim of that or fairness. I know plenty of people left of center who think it's unfair to have people growing up with male bodies they were born with compete against girls or women just based on the law of averages of what physical bodies are. What do you say to that?

Jane McManus: Well, actually, I played sports against trans athletes and with trans athletes. I played roller derby for seven years, which I always bring up when it comes to this issue because I played a full-contact sport on roller skates against the bodies that are being talked about as being so dangerous for women to play against. I certainly didn't have that experience. To me, I've been knocked down by small women, by big women, by trans players, by everybody, and I've knocked them down.

I think when you're talking about, as the caller said, that the skill level is similar enough, then that's not going to be a factor. There's nothing inherent to maleness or to femaleness that makes them excellent or terrible at sports. The other thing is there's not really enough differentiation among kids based on sex to segregate them at the lower levels of play. I believe those arguments are a bit of a red herring.

Brian Lehrer: Even in high school when they're more or less fully grown?

Jane McManus: Well, high school, again, is a bit different. I'm talking about lower levels, recreational levels of play where that caller was talking about. Again, and I don't apply that argument necessarily to the highest levels of the Olympics and the last heat, those governing bodies may have something to say about that and have better ways of looking at their sports. At recreational levels and at youth levels, where the great majority of people in this country are actually going to encounter this issue about whether or not who should play and how, I think that inclusive play is a great way to look at things.

Brian Lehrer: Last thing before we run out of time, media coverage. You used to work for ESPN, for example, as some of our listeners may know. Is there a chicken and egg issue? They don't cover it because they don't see enough interest, but then there isn't enough interest partly because they don't cover it, or where would you enter the media question?

Jane McManus: I would have said that's the case about five years ago. I think that ESPN has seen the light on this issue in a big way because the audiences have arrived. They've had record-breaking ratings for the women's basketball, for NCAA women's basketball games. This is the highest-rated year for regular season games in women's basketball. Of course, NCAA women's basketball is something that ESPN owns the rights to. Just from watching, they've started doing really casual bumpers. By that, I mean promos for the women's tournament already on the network.

That's the kind of programming that you didn't necessarily see 10 years ago. I do think that they now see that there's a marketplace there. Social media and athletes like Megan Rapinoe with 2 million followers really proved that people care about women's sports and athletes. I think now you're starting to see that the networks are taking note.

Brian Lehrer: That's our 100 Years of 100 Things episode on 100 years of organized women's sports. Callers, thank you for some great stories and questions, and Jane McManus, thank you so much. Jane McManus is a sports journalist, an adjunct professor at NYU, and author of the brand-new book The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women's Sports. Jane, thanks as always.

Jane McManus: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

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