Abstract
Ponytails, sports bras, and tampons may not readily come to mind when imagining the significant factors that enabled women’s sports participation. In Qualifying Times, Jamie Schultz provides a feminist history of these “ostensibly banal elements” (p. 8) of women’s sports participation in the United States during the twentieth century. Applying the work of feminist historian Gerda Lerner who asked, “What are the points of change in women’s historic experience by which we might periodize the history of women?” (p. 8, emphasis in original), Schultz challenges the masculinist bias wherein historical significance is located in political or economic events such as war or financial booms and busts. Instead, Schultz imbues analytical value to the everyday, and does so not in an attempt to shed light onto that which is rendered invisible in traditional historical accounts, but rather, as she argues, “it is precisely because they seem so commonsense and commonplace that they are powerfully connected to gender ideologies” (p. 8).
In a clear and accessible voice, Schultz offers a nuanced history of U.S. women’s sport participation focusing each chapter on a different “point of change” (tennis fashion, tampons, rules on competition, sex testing, sport bras, the athletic revolution of the 1970s and the following fitness revolution of the 1980s, and cheerleading) to illustrate the recursive, nonlinear progression of U.S. women’s sport participation throughout the twentieth century. Through her analysis of archival materials, advertisements, sports media, and other cultural artifacts, Schultz convincingly demonstrates how these points of change did not always symbolize progressive advancements. Rather, they were often accompanied by backlash and regression.
This book will be of interest to gender scholars, particularly those who are interested in women’s sports. It would serve well in upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses on history, sociology of gender, and women’s studies. It should certainly be required reading in any course on gender and sport.
Schultz rightly notes that the points of change identified were not so for all women; social class, race, and other social locations intersected and shaped how women experienced these points of change, as well as how the points of change impacted the sociohistorical context of women’s sport participation along the axis of difference. To this end, Shultz asks: why were some women considered “suspicious” in the history of sex testing, what types of bodies do we see in sports-bra advertisements and in cheerleading? This intersectional analysis is incorporated, to differing degrees, in each of the chapters. Schultz admits that the points of change discussed are largely about the lives of “white middle-class women with the means and opportunities to engage in organized physical activity” (p. 12) and encourages future scholarship that embraces intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and athleticism.
Overall, Qualifying Times provides a nuanced history that navigates the ever-present tension between what it means to be a woman and what it means to be an athlete in the United States. The discussion of the points of change in women’s sport moves through and beyond the gender binary and is aligned with contemporary theorizing on gender and sport. Schultz challenges the female athlete paradox to argue, “Although there are tensions between femininity and athleticism, I am not convinced that the two are antithetical to one another. The contemporary American sportscape allows for both concepts to coexist, overlap, and at times integrate” (p. 196). Each chapter nicely illustrates this coexistence, overlap, and integration. However, a discussion and/or justification of why these specific points of change were selected and considered significant to the history of women’s sport participation could have been provided. Moreover, important connections across and between the points of change could have been explored in more detail. For example, how does the use of female physicality in tampon advertisements in the 1940s and 1950s (chapter two) inform the use of female physicality in sports bra advertisements in the 1990s/2000s (chapter six)? How do the discourses of competition (chapter three) inform the debates surrounding whether cheerleading is a sport (chapter seven)? Doing so would have enhanced an already sophisticated historical analysis of women’s sport.
In A Locker Room of Her Own, editors David Ogden and Joel Nathan Rosen offer the third edited collection in a series on fame, celebrity, and athleticism. Unlike the previous two collections in the series, A Locker Room of Her Own specifically addresses the issue of gender, given its focus solely on female athletes (male athletes presumably do not have gender). Both the foreword and the introduction debate whether former Olympian and fallen hero, Marion Jones, should have been included in the second collection in the series, Fame and Infamy. In the end, the editors decided to exclude Jones from Fame and Infamy, despite the similarities in her rise and fall with the other male athletes in the volume, and assert the need for a separate collection on female athletes, because women “are most typically perceived to be quintessential interlopers in this historically male-dominated milieu” (p. xvii).
Rather than challenge or complicate the female athlete paradox (the notion that femininity and athleticism are oppositional and therefore female athletes negotiate this contradiction in various ways), as Schultz does in Qualifying Times, the editors of A Locker Room of Her Own operate squarely from that perspective. Female athletes are “inherent outsiders in sport” (p. xvii). Therefore, when celebrity athletes such as Marion Jones experience a fall from grace (Jones was found guilty of doping and was part of the BALCO scandal of the 1990s), Ogden and Rosen argue, this fall differs from that of male athletes given that female athletes were never “insiders” to begin with. They explain, “The fact is that whether female athletic celebrity has any relevance at all in day-to-day life remains at best ambiguous, something that each and every one of our contributors addresses head-on” (p. xix).
The chapters in this volume address the question: “How do female athletes balance existing ideals of femininity while making their mark in the world in which men set the standards?” (p. xxii). Each chapter focuses on a famous elite-level female athlete (Babe Didrikson, Billie Jean King, Sheryl Swoops, Florence Griffin Joyner, Danica Patrick, Venus and Serena Williams, Marion Jones, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League), providing a brief discussion of the biographical background of the athlete, key events or moments in the athlete’s career, and analyses of how female athletes achieve celebrity status in a male-dominated sport world.
For feminist scholars well versed in contemporary feminist theorizing, the book fails to advance the contemporary scholarship on gender, offering few novel insights on the cultural significance of female athletes. To their defense, the editors primarily wish to engage the questions of why the notion that female athletes are “outliers” persist and how might this be corrected. The chapters do offer insights on that central question. For fans of women’s sports who wish to learn more about these famous female athletes from an academically informed perspective, this book may be of interest.