"Despite women's amazing progress and their ability to cultivate strength,
build confidence and experience joy in athletic activity," she says, "the
sports culture continues to be a key location for the production of sexual
differences—between male and female bodies, between masculine and
feminine persons, and between normative heterosexuality and "deviant"
homosexuality.
"These differences," Cahn stresses, "are not neutral, but signposts of
inequality. They signal that we live in a society that continues to empower
men at great expense to the health, respect and well-being of women."
Cahn is the author of the pioneering study "Coming on Strong: Gender
and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport," which chronicled the
remarkable transformation made by women's sports in the 20th century.
For more than 100 years, Cahn says, the battle over the role of women
athletes has revolved around the question of whether sport "proves" the
inherent maleness of the athletic body. She says it isn't a question of
the relative superiority of one body over the other, "although throughout
the history of western sports, the physical superiority of the male body
has been an assumption so basic that it rarely is questioned.
"The issue can be argued ad nauseam," she says, "but what interests me
isn't whether women can beat men or male athletic records, although they
have and do. It's that when women demonstrate exceptional physical power
and dominance, their very femaleness comes into question."
She points out that while masculinity and athleticism have converged
in the public consciousness, the notion was not part of American culture
until the latter part of the last century.
Muscularity and brawn, she explains, were disdained as characteristics
of poor working-class men until the 1880s, when the working class began
to organize into unions and radical political groups opposed to the choke
hold of industrial capitalism.
The middle-class response to this threat to the status quo, Cahn
explains, was the production and promotion of what was called "muscular
Christianity"—a focus on the physical body as a way of ensuring moral
health and rectitude. For men, it embraced the kind of male physicality
that found expression in tough exercise and daring physical exploits.
In the promotion of collegiate football and other organized sports, the
"heroic" male athlete began to develop in the national consciousness.
Cahn says "The New Woman" of the early 20th century—who had so boldly
marched into previously male-only spaces like universities, the business
world and politics—also vaulted into the athletic arena, embracing
the idea of "vigorous femininity" as a counterpoint to her previously
passive physical role.
Once the athleticism was conceptually wed to maleness, however, the role
of women athletes was problematic. If sport was a "masculine" pursuit,
then it was an activity that differentiated men from women.
"The athletic woman," says Cahn, "challenged public and private assumptions
of what it is to be male or female, masculine or feminine."
"If athleticism is defined as a male domain," she says, "then women athletes
who demonstrate strength, dexterity and great athletic skill confound
established sex-role boundaries."
Like other cultural historians, her subject serves as a cultural flag
from which much can be deduced about broader, gender-based attitudes,
practices and changes. She says that because various meanings and aspects
of the word "sex" are historically intertwined and ever-changing, they
help illustrate a society's understanding of sex differences.
By "sex," she means three things. "First, the biological sex of the athlete—the
literal body and its assigned sex, male or female," she says. "Second,
gender; that is, the culturally ascribed traits associated with male or
female persons. And third, the erotic aspects of sport—the sexiness
of athletes as public competitors whose bodies are on view for audience
pleasure and the issue of sexual identity—homo-, bi- and heterosexuality—as
it relates to sports."
"The 'sports' world is still a key cultural arena in which common-sense
beliefs about sexual differences are formed and confirmed," Cahn says.
"It is a world that continues to hold inconsistent attitudes toward women
athletes because of their physicality, power, strength and sexuality."
Citing myriad examples, both hilarious and horrifying, Cahn illustrates
how, over the past century, female athletes have been celebrated as healthy,
strong, beautiful women, even as their alleged "mannishness" came to connote
their "failed heterosexuality." They were celebrated as "statuesque beauties,"
"nymphs" with "finely molded bodies" and disdained as hawkish, hairy and
button-breasted hoydens.
They (and we) were assured that athletics would give women a fresh glow
and strong bodies, and warned that it would rob them of their beauty,
natural modesty and reserve; alter their physiological womanhood; produce
an unnatural intoxication with competition; unleash sexual passion and
loosen sexual inhibitions, and unnerve men and destroy the family.
This, says Cahn, had produced the female athlete's apologetic, in which
she demonstrates her challenged femininity by wearing pastel, ruffled
or revealing sportswear and notes the presence of boyfriend, husband,
children and pie-making skills.
Cahn emphasizes that the evidence from the sports world indicates that,
regardless of scientific research and factual demonstrations to the contrary,
a double standard continues to be applied to male and female athletic
accomplishment.
As a result of a refusal to look at the record, she says, the pattern
of discrepancies in athletic operating budgets, scholarship money, coaching
positions and pay, and media coverage continues, and it imperils the health,
self-respect and well-being of women athletes of every age and skill level.
