Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Why doesn’t Ms. Magazine have a sports column? Why doesn’t every Women and Gender Studies textbook have at least one chapter highlighting athletes? They should. Women in sports push back against the policing of their bodies – what they look like, what they wear, what they can do, where they can be. This paper argues that each step toward a more gender-just society happened within and because of bold actions by women playing sports. Athletes create the waves of feminist change. From the late 1800s through today, sportswomen created reform: they shucked off their corsets; left the domestic sphere; became political; fought for pay equity; called out sexual harassment; fought gender testing. Swimmers and cyclists produce the first wave; Title IX, tennis, crew, and marathon-ing give us the second; Scurry / Chastain, Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby, and the Williams sisters produce the third wave; and USA gymnasts, Ibtihaj Muhammad, and Caster Semenya are ushering in the fourth. We owe reform to athletes who redefine the very definition of woman and create the political forward motion that brings about social change. Some scholars have flirted with the idea that sport was (and is) a vehicle for women’s rights. In 1994, Theberge and Birrell wrote, “Developments in sport are inseparable from conditions in the wider society, so that changes in women’s relationship to sport may signal or even influence transformation in women’s position in society at large” (167). This paper challenges “or even influence” to assert that women athletes transform society.