Assignment 12: Using Science To Promote Sexism in Athletics

For a class I took last summer, I listened to a lecture Dr. Barbara Drinkwater presented in May 2009 to the American College of Sports Medicine entitled “The Evolution of the Female Athlete:  Myth versus Reality.”  This lecture details how “science” has been used, mostly by men, to keep women from pursuing and achieving their goals in the field of athletics.  It is a great example of sexism in our sports-crazed culture.  From a conflict perspective, it seems that men have dominated the sports world and have viewed the role of women in it as adoring spectators rather than as participants.  Attempts of women to break into this world have been thwarted by men using “scientific” reasons to prevent or discourage them, which are cloaked in the rubric of the structural functionalist:  that bodily differences explain gender inequality in sports, and keeping women off the courts and playing fields (at least at the highest levels) will effectively maintain societal stability by protecting their wombs for reproduction of the species.

(Note:  Although this lecture was once online, I couldn’t find a link to it to post here.  Luckily, I took quite a few notes while listening to this thought-provoking lecture, and this post is based on those notes.)

In her lecture, Dr. Drinkwater traced the modern history of women in sports, beginning in the late 1800s, focusing on myths versus realities, addressing three questions:  What obstacles did women face in their quest to become athletes?  Who helped them? Who hindered them?  In looking at these questions, Dr. Drinkwater demonstrated many ways in which “science” actually got in the way of the development of the athletic capabilities of a whole group of athletes, in this case women.  In most cases, scientific-sounding pronouncements that were just plain wrong were used to promote prejudice and discrimination against women who wanted to be athletes.  Here are some examples:

In the late 1800s, the social environment was not very hospitable to women.  In 1879, for example, a noted social psychologist, Gustave LeBon, wrote that women’s inferior intelligence is too obvious to be disputed, and women’s brains are closer to gorilla brains than to men’s brains.  A medical doctor of the time wrote that the average woman is “rather less intelligent” than man.  These “scientific-sounding” pronouncements must have been wrong, because in 1902, Marie Curie somehow managed to win the Nobel Prize in Physics with her supposedly inferior female brain.  In sports, in 1882, Maude Watson won the first women’s tennis singles title at Wimbledon, in the same year that a Florida newspaper reported that the articulation of the radius and ulna is imperfect in women, so that when the racquet hits the ball, it tends to knock it high in the air.  That article went on to pronounce that it was a “scientific fact that tennis is not a game for the human female.”  I wonder what Venus and Serena Williams would make of that?

 Other“scientific” pronouncements about the capabilities of women concerned the effect of intellectual activity on the female uterus.  In 1873, for example, a statement by a prominent professor at Harvard Medical School asserted that the rigors of higher education actually diverted blood from the woman’s uterus to her brain, making her irritable and infertile.  This kind of over-concern for the women’s uterus is a theme that continues even to this day with regard to females in athletics. 

Despite the efforts of male scientists to discourage them, however, women somehow managed to participate in sports in the late 1880s.  The first women’s lacrosse game was in 1886, and the first women’s tennis championship (France) was in 1887.  In 1888, the modern bicycle was invented, and Amelia Bloomer invented bloomers so that women could ride it.  Susan B. Anthony wrote in 1896 that bicycling did more to emancipate women than anything else because it gave women the feeling of freedom and self-reliance.  The invention of bloomers also allowed women to play baseball, first on bloomer girl baseball teams, and later just wearing what the men wore.  In 1896, women played basketball too, wearing those bloomers, in the first intercollegiate game between University of California Berkley and Stanford.

Despite this good start for intercollegiate competition for women, it was stifled with the help of “medical opinions” that focused on concerns with infertility effects of physical exertion, as well as “medical” assertions that if women competed in sports, they would somehow turn into men.  Other “scientific” evidence of the time asserted that women could not play strenuous sports because they breathed differently than men.  This idea was debunked by a female doctor in 1910 who pointed out that the constrictive clothing women wore when trying to compete in sports (such as whalebone corsets) is what caused women to breathe differently than the men when they were exerting themselves.

Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, was openly hostile to participation by women in the Olympic Games.  In 1914 he said that participation in the Games by women would be impractical, uninteresting, and improper.  He limited their participation to just the floor exercises and required them to wear long skirts.  A few years later, Suzanne Lenglen won the French Open tennis championship in 1920 wearing a then-scandalous knee-length skirt and a sleeveless blouse, and in doing so, became the first female celebrity athlete.  It could be said that this is where the objectification of women in sports began.  Most female professional tennis players wear shorts, not skirts, for practice, and only wear the skirts and dresses in tournaments to please their sponsors.  The sponsors, of course, like their female tennis players dressed in the short skirts and skimpy dresses that appeal to the male audiences!  Talk about objectification!  As a tennis friend of mine once noted, if skirts really helped you play better tennis, don't you think men would have figured out a way by now to wear them too?

In the early 1900s, women wanted to compete in track and field as well in the so-called female sports, but the International Olympic Committee (IOC) turned them down.  A few French women decided to form their own international organization and put on the first international track and field competition for women.  Thousands watched it, leading the IOC to reconsider and allow women to have five track and field events in the 1928 Olympics.  Unfortunately, six of the nine runners in this distance event collapsed, leading to the conclusion that women were incapable of running this distance. Doctors of the time gave their "considered medial opinions" that women could not be endurance runners, and that distance running made women become "old too soon."  This myth persisted for over 30 years, and it was not until the 1960 Olympic Games that women were allowed to run races longer than 200 meters.

The 1920’s brought a return to the infertility theme, when a 1936 article in the Scientific American asserted that feminine muscular development interferes with motherhood.  There was absolutely no scientific research on women athletes to back this up, and almost no research of any kind was done on female athletes until the 1960s. 

Although the 1970’s were what Dr. Drinkwater called the golden era of female athletes with the passage of Title IX and Billie Jean King’s 1973 trouncing of Bobby Riggs, a 50-year-old man who bragged that he could beat any woman in tennis.  After King's resounding victory, a 1974 Sports Illustrated article acknowledged that the inequalities imposed on women in sport have been justified by misconceptions of the physiological differences, real or imagined, between the sexes. 

One such misconception, however, popped up in 1978, when a Chicago newspaper cited a gynecologist’s opinion that women should not engage in jogging because their uteruses can’t take the repeated impact caused by heels striking the ground.  It turned out that this doctor’s opinion was based on a sample of one!  Later that year, Little League Baseball banned girls and said in 1974 that girls can’t throw overhand because of differences in the structure of their pectoral muscles, and when they do throw overhand, it results in a lob.  Another doctor contradicted this, however, by pointing out that if girls throw differently, it is because they have not had the training, experience and practice that the boys have had.  This same doctor bravely noted that Little League Baseball had promoted a doctrine of male superiority that has no scientific basis in fact.  Little League Baseball stuck to its no-girls policy until the National Organization for Women filed suit against it and won in 1974.

In the 1980’s, a growing body of scientific research done of female athletes finally began to appear and showed that there was basically no difference between male and female athletes when training, conditioning and acclimatization are the same for both sexes.  Imagine that!

Dr. Drinkwater ended her lecture by noting that women athletes today owe a debt of gratitude not to the scientists and doctors, but to the brave women athletes who went ahead and followed their dreams despite all of the “scientific” noise to the contrary.  It was interesting to me to learn about the role that “science” and “medicine” have played to keep women from pursuing athletic endeavors.  It is important to remember the scientific-sounding pronouncements can so unquestioningly be used by those who want to promote a certain social agenda.  We all need to be reminded to look critically and carefully when “scientific” and “medical” claims are made to support exclusionary positions or decisions that seek to limit what certain groups can and cannot, or should or should not do.  A current example from professional tennis is a case in point.  In many tournaments, women still earn less prize money, and this is justified by the fact that their matches are the best of three sets, while the men's are best of five.  The idea that women tennis players are somehow physically incapable of going the distance in a five set match is ludicrous, yet that is the "scientific" reason given for the difference.  For this and other questions, we need to ask what evidence supports the proposition; do the best we can to determine the credibility of that evidence, and to look for and evaluate any evidence that may support a contrary position.  There steps were not followed in the cases of questionable science and medicine used to keep female athletes from pursuing their goals, as Dr. Drinkwater described.  I think this same caution applies not just to question involving athletic endeavors, but to activities in other spheres as well!