Radical changes have occurred in women’s sports in the United States, especially in the last two decades, having a lasting impact on many aspects of American culture and society. While women have not achieved parity—especially in professional salaries—it is no longer a man’s game.

Victorian notions that women were physiologically inferior and that sports would diminish a woman’s femininity began to give way to new notions about sport and gender after the First World War. Two new perspectives towards sports emerged: one stressing equal rights and access to a system already in place; the other, promoted initially by female educators in the 1920s and picked up later by radical feminists, advocated alternative sports (based on the notion that women were indeed different from men).

While proponents of the equal-rights view believed that facilities should be equal for both sexes, and that women would begin to catch up with men once the effects of their socialization were overcome, female educators tended to be more critical of the commercialism and excessive competitiveness associated with organized sports and wanted games that complemented what they considered “female” characteristics.

The passage of Title IX as part of the Educational Amendment of 1972 led to the triumph of the equal-rights approach to sports. In order for colleges and universities to receive federal funding, it became necessary for them to provide equal funding for men and women. A redistribution of funding occurred to establish facilities and teams for women in places where there had been none before. Discrimination is still evident, with men’s college football programs eating up vast resources and women still receiving in 1996 only one-third of all scholarship money. Overall, male athletes receive $179 million dollars more per year than female athletes. The change has nevertheless been a momentous and irreversible one.

Moving together in terms of body types, sports considered anathema among women before—body-building and wrestling, for example—are now engaged in with great enthusiasm. Others have been transformed as women have begun to incorporate men’s approaches to particular games, or have become more physically capable of performing the same feats. Basketball has seen a radical transformation partly as a result of the success of the equal-rights approach to sport. In the 1940s the game most commonly played was “girl’srules” basketball, akin to the game called netball in Britain. On the grounds that many women could not tax their hearts the same way as men without doing themselves permanent physical damage, educators developed the game in which women were confined to particular zones and were not allowed to dribble more than a few paces before passing. This allowed for the emergence of a more passing-oriented game with less physical contact than men’s basketball. By the 1960s this game was already losing ground, and by the 1980s the game had all but disappeared except in a few elite colleges.

One irony of this transformation is that women who had taken on coaching positions in the women’s game found themselves displaced by men who were more familiar with men’s basketball. This was also an effect of Title IX generally since better-funded women’s teams meant that coaching such teams became more attractive to men. The visibility of some very successful women coaches, however, has challenged this gender imbalance.

The notion of gender difference has survived, however. There has been no rush among women to establish American football teams; this is not expected any time soon. Even in basketball there is the assumption that women’s height disadvantage requires that their game be one based less on dunking the ball through the hoop and more on shooting (with lower field-goal percentages, since the basket is further away).

In another major sport, softball, the move towards the men’s game hasn’t occurred.

Perhaps because this game has been played on an informal basis by both sexes in parks and colleges across the country it has retained legitimacy apart from traditional baseball.

Moreover, the proficiency of women in throwing fastballs, spitballs and curve balls underarm has been such that the game has an appeal that is different from, but complementary to, that of men’s baseball. Moreover, baseball officialdom has been very slow to recognize the need to attract women as individuals and athletes to the sports arena; instead, it has tended to rely on the notion that it is a “family” game, the whole family turning out to watch the son perform. While women may have been content with such a role in the past, the fact that little-league baseball is losing out to rising sports like soccer suggests that this is no longer the case. The one short-lived attempt to establish a women’s baseball league, memorialized in A League of their Own (1992), was made possible by the exigencies of the World War. Nonetheless, it spurred many women to continue to demand opportunities for themselves and their daughters in the years following the war.

The accentuation of difference is especially noticeable in the commercial world of advertising. Sporting-goods producers, like other capitalists in the marketplace, have realized that catering to different consumers is the key to selling more goods. While automobile manufacturers before them built cars to appeal to particular segments of the market, thereby expanding the number of consumers overall, sporting-goods producers like Nike and Reebok have realized that they should be marketing their products to different groups based upon gender difference. Whether or not actual differences do exist (and the high level of demand for such women’s products suggest that many women feel they do), completely different product lines exist in all goods from clothing to equipment not just in terms of color but also in terms of design. The effect of stressing that women have different feet and need different kinds of shoes, for example, serves both to bring about product diversification and the suggestion to women who haven’t run before that they perhaps might have done so had they not been discouraged by the male bias inherent throughout sport. This gendering of sports products also means that women role models like Chris Evert (tennis), Mia Hamm (soccer) and Linda Swoopes (basketball) can be used to promote the goods to impressionable youngsters less impressed by Andre Agassi, Alexi Lalas and Michael Jordan, respectively.

Sex appeal has also been an important element of sports promotion. While women athletes’ body types have transformed significantly in the years since the passage of Title IX, with the increased level of training, so has the growing divergence in notions of attractive female forms (identified by men and, perhaps more significantly, women themselves). Women’s sports have made women’s bodies the objects of the spectator’s gaze, and some women have used this to their advantage. The soccer team for the Women’s World Cup of 1999 posed in T-shirts for a photo given to the David Letterman Show. The establishment of the Women’s National Basketball Association was also accompanied by hype that the players had more sex appeal than their counterparts in the NBA. Such appeal, though, is no longer always accompanied by gestures to heterosexuality in the face of media and public scrutiny. While the old assumption that the woman athlete may be gay (something that haunted both Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, who later confirmed on the Phil Donahue Show that she was) is not dead, it is muted nonetheless. Concern with female sexuality has also deflected discussion of homophilic and homophobic behaviors in male sports, as well as rare cases of “out” athletes like Greg Louganis (though the growing support for the Gay Games suggests gay athletes may be more common in future). Many of these issues relating to women athletes were raised in the movie Personal Best (1982).

Sexual difference has also been used in other ways. Women figure skaters and gymnasts, for example, although many of them are capable of outperforming men in terms of their ability to execute jumps and spins, will not do away with their different styles of costume and performing and methods of adjudication since the present system has demonstrated its audience appeal.

Two events in recent years have served well to highlight the transformation that has occurred in sports. First the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, which for the first time saw an equal number of women athletes as men performing. At the event, more interest was shown in the women’s teams than the men’s in sports like softball (as compared to baseball), basketball (in which the winner of the men’s event was a foregone conclusion) and soccer. The success of these games led to the emergence of two professional women’s basketball leagues (one of which was dismantled within three years). Similarly great attention was given to the American women’s soccer team, which also captured the gold medal, leading to considerable anticipation for the second event of note, the Women’s World Cup held in the United States in 1999. The largest crowds ever to witness women’s team events in the United States greeted every game in which the American team played (the US eventually defeating China in the final). This can only increase the interest among girls and women in this sport, perhaps reaching new, untapped groups like African Americans who will have seen the numerous feature stories on Briana Scurry.

The combination of these two events symbolizes the success of the equal-rights approach thus far. Whether women are able to avoid some of the pitfalls of commercial sports more generally and whether they should try to do so, are questions that remain unanswered. The final verbal exchange of Pat and Mike, a 1952 movie about a male promoter and a female athlete, suggests that the athlete will “own” the promoter. This remains to be seen.