Sportsmanship… we’ve all heard that virtue extolled. But as worthy an attribute as that is, in some ways it has held back women’s athletic aspirations.

For women, displaying good sportsmanship was often emphasized over having a competitive spirit. It’s all part of the “women are too fragile for sports” mentality that has constrained women in their dreams for glory – or just for a rousing, take-no-prisoners game.

At first, some sports were even modified to accommodate women’s supposed fragility. Women’s basketball began in 1892 at Smith College, where “physical culture” director Senda Berenson (sister of the art historian and critic Bernard Berenson) started a women’s basketball program. Finally!

But Berenson believed that the women’s game should be less taxing. Or maybe she just needed to appease the Victorians of the day. She worried aloud that female players would suffer from “nervous fatigue” if games were too strenuous. Doctors agreed.

 “You can use up force to such an extent that your womanly functions become weakened,” mansplained a leading doctor of the day.*

So Berenson modified the rules. She put nine players on a team and divided the court into three areas. Three players were assigned to each area and could not cross into another area. Players passed or dribbled from section to section but were limited to three dribbles. Women could not snatch or bat the ball away from another player.

Girls just wanna have fun

Even decades later, sportsmanship remained the name of the game. As a high school basketball player in the 1960s, Debbie Millbern Powers remembers how girls were denied elite levels of play.

“Our school’s Girls Athletic Association would play other GAAs for a ‘play’ day,” she remembers. “All of the girls from various schools would be mixed together for a full day of competition. I thought it was odd that we didn’t stick with our own schoolmates to form a team to compete against other schools.

“I asked the female teacher who served as our GAA sponsor why we couldn’t play as a single team against other schools. She responded, ‘Because you girls shouldn’t be too competitive. You should only play for fun.’”**

This disparity followed Debbie to Indiana University, where she was a star player.

“After tough, hard-fought games, we were required to assemble in a classroom or lounge to socialize with our opponents,” she recalls. “I found it awkward after battling against the ‘enemy’ to smile and make small talk with them. I felt a disconnect at these gatherings as if the outcome of the game hadn’t mattered or bothered us.***

AIAW v. NCAA

Even as women’s sports became organized, the stigma held.

In 1971, women’s college athletics were organized under the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). The AIAW eschewed the so-called commercial model of college athletics, favoring the educational model. They believed athletics should enhance a student athlete’s life, not create a business in which students’ abilities are co-opted for money. “A girl for every sport and a sport for every girl” was its motto.

This is a valid argument, actually. We’ve talked before about how the gigantic men’s football and basketball budgets are defended with the claim that they pay for the rest of a school’s sports program and attract alumni dollars for the endowment fund.

But in 1973, Fern Lee “Peachy” Kellmeyer, a renowned tennis player and PE director at Marymount College, sued the AIAW, saying it violated Title IX by not allowing women to obtain athletic scholarships. The AIAW settled the case, agreeing to permit member schools to offer scholarships to women.

By 1982, though, the AIAW was defunct, but not before a fight. It sued the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for violating federal antitrust laws by establishing a monopoly over college sports. But it lost and the gig was up. The NCAA folded in women’s sports.

So perhaps Title IX, with the scholarships it has enabled, has all but vanquished the just-for-fun model of women’s sports, but it doesn’t seem that the athletes themselves mind!

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* “The Start of the University of Texas Women’s Basketball” The UT History Corner (April 25, 2016), crediting Dr. William Howard. https://jimnicar.com/2016/04/25/in-search-of-womens-basketball/

** Debbie Millbern Powers, Meeting Her Match: The Story of a Female Athlete-Coach Before and After Title IX (Ft. Augustine, FL: Leeper Publishing, 2014), p. 67.

** Meeting Her Match, p. 89.