Ch 4 Separate World, Separate Lives, Separate Sporting Models

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Ch 4 Separate World, Separate Lives, Separate
Sporting Models

• Ch 4 by Lynn Couturier and Stevie Chepko in Women
  In Sport Greta Cohen, Ed. Notes by N. Bailey

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Introduction to Ch. 45 History

• The next two chapters are a historical view of
  the issues and controversies around women in
  sport within the context of the womens
  liberation movements
• Places womens sporting experiences in the
  context of various historical eras in which the
  events occurred

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The Culture of Differences

• Defines women as different or subordinate to men
• Current issues and controversies rooted in the
  old idea of differences subordination
• Women first and women only was a strategy for
  women to gain power within this culture of
  differences (self-define)

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Women Are Not Men

• Women have been defined by what they are not.
  (How women differ from men defined them)
• If women are different from men, their place in
  culture must be different from men.
• Victorian ideas of fundamental nature of women
  inferior to men
• Sport where boys learned to be men

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Men First, Men Only

• 1840s Social reform grows out of the Second
  Great Awakening, a Protestant fostered religious
  revival
• Muscular Christianity movement associated moral
  righteousness with physical activity.
• England to the U.S. Luther Gulick, James
  Naismith, Fred Leonard proponents of the crusade

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Instill Christian Values Through Sport
(1890-1900)

• Philosophical justification for sport in the
  schools
• Democracy was taught on the playing fields and
  playgrounds to immigrant boys.
• Lessons in democracy competition, courage,
  sportsmanship.
• Gulicks Public School Athletic League

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PSAL

• Originally separate from the Board of Education
• Track meet in Madison Square Garden 1903
• Baseball, track and field, marksmanship
• A test of manhood
• A way for men to differentiate themselves from
  women (testing manliness via sport)

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Gulick Writings Sport Manliness

• boyhood and manhood have thus for ages long
  been tested and produced by athletic sports.
  Athletic sports are thus, to some extent at
  least, a measure of manhood. ref text p.60
• Girls not allowed they can folk dance
• Era of industrialization, so the farmer moved to
  town

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Three Functions of New Sports Creed

• 1st - Improvement of public health in cities
• 2nd - Morality and pass on the values of the
  middle class culture
• 3rd - Character building, particularly about
  controlling sexual urges

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Sport and Manly Qualities

• Strength, physical skill, and courage accepted by
  the middle class culture ideal for young men
• Participation by a male in any female activity
  called into question his manhood
• Football became the epitome of manly sport

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Football Catalyst for Intercollegiate Sport

• 1890s football embraced by eastern colleges
• Students controlled and organized the competition
  between colleges.
• Games were violent. Some students died.
• By 1905 President Roosevelt called a meeting to
  discuss the future of football

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Outcomes of that Presidential Meeting

• Formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic
  Association of the U.S. 1905
• 1910 changed their name to the NCAA
• Faculty control at the college level
• Philosophy of the Muscular Christians spread to
  the high schools and they also adopted the
  sporting model
• Men only, moral domination in culture

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More Than A Game

• Sport in the U.S. in the male sphere of
  influence had wide-ranging implications for
  womens participation. p. 62
• If sport was how culture indoctrinated males
  into the male sphere, how could women ever
  challenge the model? p.62
• The culture of differences ensured male hegemony
  over sport. p.62

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Women First, Women Only

• For decades following the Civil War, Womens
  place private, domestic
• Womens and mens roles complementary
• Science of the day superiority of white ruling
  class
• Anthropometric craze of the time women
  physically and intellectually weaker
• However, women superior to men, morally and
  spiritually

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Conservation of Energy Theory

• Related to the spermatic economy theory finite
  amount of vital force or energy.
• One area of activity sapped another
• So, over-expending in unnecessary areas to be
  avoided
• Function of woman was motherhood, so save energy
  for that
• Presumed connection between nervous system and
  reproductive organs avoid shock, etc.

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Womens Frailty

• If women were at risk in institutions of higher
  learning, wouldnt they be at an even greater
  risk on the playing field?
• This notion didnt apply to African American
  women. They toiled long hours as domestics,
  farm workers,wage workers in mills and factories.
  Physically demanding jobs

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Women Not So Frail

• Immigrant Population Womens work needed to
  sustain the family
• College would unsex women
• Beecher argued for women becoming the teachers
  for they were ideally suited for working with
  children
• Light exercise as a means of protecting against
  the rigors of college

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Female Physical Educators Physicians

• Unique role. Only faculty member with
  responsibility for student health
• Tracked student health via anthropometric
  measures
• Maintained status by insisting on female
  leadership for female students
• Good manners important to their survival as
  professionals. Paranoia about appearing
  unfeminine.

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The Gibson Girl

• New Woman was more athletic and more engaged in
  the world around her
• Played a variety of sports and games.
• Clothing styles changed to accommodate movement
• Early feminist movement suffrage, own property,
  labor activism, benevolent societies

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Our Foremothers in Physical Education the
University

• Men held the vote, so the movement had to appeal
  to the men.
• Need to domesticate politics
• Physical Educators mirrored college educated
  women of the era single, dedicated, influential
  old girls network
• Social activists Settlement houses, Ida B.
  Wells campaign against lynching, unionists

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Womens Relationships

• Men were thought to require sexual restraint
• Women were not sexual
• Womens relationships with other women
  flourished. Called romantic friendships
• Didnt threaten men because women were thought to
  be asexual
• Homosocial world Wellesley Amy Morris Homans
  at the Boston Normal School in 1908

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Key Themes of These Leaders

• Female scholars were intellectuals challenging
  womens domestic roles
• Formed supportive and cohesive communities that
  embraced reform, rejected marriage, and pursued
  careers and 3rd
• Experienced a tremendous backlash in the 1920s

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The Backlash

• Attack on the homosocial world created by these
  women
• Eugenicists cried race suicide since less than
  half married.
• Fear than immigrants would supplant the older
  American stock
• Plus Freuds sexuality theories embraced by
  culture female friendships deviant

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Separate Sphere Maintained

• CWA governed BB, and then field hockey, swimming,
  track and field, and soccer.
• Committees made the rules, published them
• Invented the policies governing participation
• Overlap between several organizations leadership
• Competition within schools v. inschool

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Girl Scout PresidentMrs. Herbert Hoover

• Instrumental in the formation of the Womens
  Division of the National Amateur Athletic
  Federation national standards for womens sport
  competition
• Women in Phys Educ ruled
• Not so with the AAU which sent a womens track
  field team to Paris in 1922
• The women said horrible thing to do. P.73 .

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Separate Spheres Survived

• But not wholly intact
• Maintaining femininity while participating in
  politics, education, sport was essential for
  acceptance of women by culture.
• Sport participation was problematic femininity
  needed to be maintained
• Relied on female uniqueness requiring female
  leadership

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The end

• Thats All For This Slide Show