Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

For decades, women journalists were restricted to the women’s pages of newspapers. They were not allowed into the sports pages - but it did not prevent them from covering sports. In their women’s sections, they covered athletic events that were otherwise ignored. In doing so, they exposed sports to an audience that may not have been reading the sports section. In addition, the women’s page editors who tried to cover men’s sports often experienced discrimination. They shined a light on their marginalization and documented what many women in sports experienced. In part, it was a combination of these experiences that led to Title IX. This paper will focus on the sports content in the women’s pages and the sports coverage by the women’s page editors in the 1940s through the 1960s.