Welcome to Lecture 7.3 on Gender and Sport. Today we are going to discuss intersections between gender and sport. I'd like you to keep in mind that gender can refer to women and men. In last week's lectures concerning disability, sport, and the film Murderball, we focused specifically on men. Today, we'll focus on women more specifically. I'd also like you to keep in mind the idea of intersectionality. In last week's lectures, that meant thinking about the ways that gender, disability, and even race affected identity formation and socialization. Today, we'll focus less on disability and race and more on gender and class. Today's lecture is based loosely on Ellen Gruber Garvey's essay "Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women."
By the end of today's lecture you should: understand the difference between sex and gender, understand Title IX, think critically about gender and technology, think critically about media/advertising and women.
Let's begin by setting the stage for today's lecture and the short film Playing Unfair, which you may or may not have already viewed. There are a few key terms you should know, including the difference between sex and gender. For our purposes, sex refers to one's anatomy and physiology. Sex generally includes secondary sex characteristics, hormones, and chromosomes. Gender refers to characteristics such as femininity and masculinity: how one acts, dresses, talks, and presents oneself. Sex and gender are linked in many complex ways, but the distinction between terms helps us remember that one's sex does not automatically determine one's gender. A female can be masculine, or have masculine traits; a man can be feminine or have feminine traits. Gender is socially constructed. Sex is biological.
As you think about and/or watch the film Playing Unfair, think about these issues of gender and sex and their relation to larger social structures. Is the sports world equal with regards to gender (race and disability and class)? How do images of female athletes reinforce or challenge our cultural understandings of gender?
If we think historically, the answer is no: social systems have long privileged males and masculinity. We discussed this point briefly when we were defining modernity and looking at the rise of modern society. Women have been struggling for equal rights for many centuries. What you see on this slide is a very brief overview of some key moments in the history of feminism. In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention is one of the first organized meetings in the country concerning women's rights. The women and men who attend publish the Declaration of Sentiments - a play on the Declaration of Independence - that urges the country to recognize women as equal partners with full rights. It is not until 70 years later that women finally earn the right to vote. In 1920, the 19th amendment is finally passed. Women have the right to vote. Can you believe that was only 90 years ago?? During WWII, women make some strides for equality as they rally behind the war effort in factories and in the military as nurses. In addition, many women played baseball back home to adoring fans. Of course, this liberation was short lived; once the war was over women resumed their positions in the home during the 1950s - a decade of hyper-femininity. By the 1960s and 1970s radical feminists came on the scene. Instead of demanding equal access and equal rights (right to vote, right to an education) they began to question the larger systems of oppression. Radical feminists wanted to change ideology, power systems, and patriarchy. They succeeded in some respects, but not in others. Women are still paid less than their male counterparts, we have yet to have a female president, and women are still sexualized by American culture. The final date on our brief history of feminist activism is 1972, when Title IX was passed.
Many of you may know about Title IX; many more of you may have benefited from Title IX without even knowing it! I would urge you to check out the original document either via the U.S. Dept of Labor (which you see on this slide) or via the Title IX website. I'll give you the short version here: Title IX requires that federally funded educational programs provide the same opportunities for boys and girls, men, and women. Title IX affects education in the classroom and on the field. Sometimes Title IX is associated only with equality in sport, but it actually concerns a range of educational programming. You will have a chance to hear more about Title IX and the current state of women in sports when you watch Playing Unfair this week. In case you think that we don't need feminism or Title IX anymore, let me rattle off a few statistics from the Title IX Info website (http://www.titleix.info/History/History-Overview.aspx ): "Before Title IX, the primary physical activities for girls were cheerleading and square-dancing. Only 1 in 27 girls played high school sports. There were virtually no college scholarships for female athletes. And female college athletes received only two percent of overall athletic budgets." Even now, girls and women are proportionally under-represented in high school and college athletics. AND more importantly, we have not finished making all of the larger systemic changes to ideology that would ensure the continuance of women's participation in sports should Title IX cease to exist.
For now—and for the rest of this lecture—I would like to focus on a more historical side to this question of women in sport. So let's take a closer look at Garvey's essay about "Reframing the Bicycle." This essay gives you a good perspective on gender, sporting activities, and modern society. Garvey does a terrific job of setting the scene: she places the bicycle and bicycle riding in several larger contexts of modern society, including medical theories, social conventions, and technological development. As we talk through several of Garvey's main points, I want to be sure you have a chance to see some images and advertisements that are similar to the ones she discusses. Here, you see the high wheel bicycle that was almost exclusively used by men. It was considered dangerous and difficult. Women rarely rode these high wheelers. The safety bicycle represented one way to tap into an untapped market: female riders. In the image on the right you can see a safety bicycle. These are pretty much the same bikes we have today. In the 1890s they were a revolution for bike manufacturers, and for female riders.
As Susan B. Anthony is quoted as saying in 1896: "the bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world." Why? Well, at least for the middle classes - and here we have an example of intersectionality: bicycle riders were largely white, male, and middle class. Women riders too were largely white and middle class. So, for these middle class riders, the bicycle represented mobility - the kind of mobility that used to be reserved for the upper classes who could afford horses and carriages. For women, mobility meant even more: it meant the ability to leave the private sphere of the home, to travel, to engage in social events outside of the home.
I mentioned at the beginning of this week, that a couple of the readings would be a bit dense. I had Giulianoti's and Garvey's essays in mind when I said this. So let me break down a couple of the main points here. First, Garvey argues that "the discourse of consumption constituted by the advertising, articles, and fiction within the developing mass-market magazine of the 1890s subsumed both feminist and conservative views in the interest of sales" (66-67). What does this mean in plain English? Well, she's basically arguing that bicycle manufacturers were stuck between two ideologies: a feminist idea that bicycles could liberate women and a conservative idea that bicycles were dangerous for women. Instead of choosing sides, advertisers chose to "reframe" problems as potential, social benefits.
In both print ads and in several fictional stories from the 1890s, the bicycle is presented as not only safe for women, but as a means to reinforce many of the gender ideologies already in place. These ideologies ranged from women's place is in the home, to the need to protect femininity and heterosexuality.
Advertisements dealt with fears about masturbation, by figuring women next to their bikes (rather than riding them); when women did ride, they were pictured sitting upright. These images reinforced the bicycle as part and parcel of larger social ideologies that posture implied morality. Likewise, advertisements tapped into ideas of women as natural by figuring them in natural rather than urban spaces. So, while the bicycle could be read as transgressive, progressive or simply glamorous, advertisers found a way to avoid major debates so that they could sell more bicycles.
In fiction, similar stories developed: often men had to fall off their bicycles and be nursed back to health by a women in the home. The fiction of the period lauded bicycles without challenging notions of heterosexuality. A bicycle ride did not mean that women ultimately left the home. Indeed, the fiction of the era helped promote bicycles by arguing that women might be better mothers if they were more physically fit.
A quick cliff notes version of Garvey's section on fiction would include the following points: fiction, like the advertisements of the period, helped to blur the distinction between information and propaganda. Fiction and adverts were selling something: a new product that fit in with older ideologies. In this respect, fiction served as a kind of instruction manual for women who wanted to take up bicycling. Finally, and as we have already seen, the fiction of the period was premised on the reinforcement of traditional heterosexual relationships and marriages.
One thing the bicycle did help to change was fashion. Here you can see two advertisements for bicycling clothes for women.
In this last section of today's lecture, I want to focus on one more aspect of the bicycle: it's role as a modern technology. Technologies can be defined as the application of knowledge to a task or problem. I bet you didn't guess that definition! That's because technologies are not always physical things . . . They can be ideas or structural changes, or stories so long as they are performing some work for us. We can also ask many questions about a technology: is it a boon or bane (good for society or bad for society); does it represent progress? For whom? How are technologies cultural products? In other words, why do they emerge when they do? How are they linked to ideology? Finally, what is the history of a given artifact or technology?
If we take the bicycle as our example, this is how we might fill in the chart. Bicycles were a boon to white, middle class men and women because they offered mobility, enhanced bodily strength and fitness (in women's case: for motherhood); these were all linked to ideologies that 1890s society could endorse. On the other hand, the bicycle was seen as a bane (or problem) for society because it could potentially ruin women's sexuality and compromise gender distinctions. In both cases, I hope you notice the ways that the same technology can be endorsed or discredited by varying social ideologies. As an artifact, we might note that ways that the bicycles has changed over time from a high wheeler to a safety bicycle. This kind of change can be aligned with larger social changes, such as the rise of the middle class and the rise of feminism. Finally, as a cultural product, the bicycle provides a great example of the ways that different groups can present and represent a technology very differently. For many medical doctors, the bicycle was seen as dangerous for women's health and sexuality. For advertisers, the bicycle was engulfed in a marketing campaign that attempted to "reframe" social arguments.
Like sport, technologies change over time and vary by place. Just as "Vanilla Dunk" gave us a glimpse of an alternate basketball game, you can imagine a world full of different technologies. The bicycle did not need to develop in the ways that it did. It could have remained a high wheeler and never taken off to become popular. Alternatively, the bicycle could have become more popular than the automobile is in the U.S. So, whenever you think of technology, also try to think of the many things that went into its construction and its marketing.
Today, we looked at a historical narrative about bicycles to help us better understand the complex relationship between gendered bodies and modern society. When you watch Playing Unfair, see if you can uncover some of the ideologies at play in women's contemporary sports. I'll leave you with a link to a Nike advertisement for spinning gear. The link is also available on the Readings and Lectures page for the week. What kinds of ideologies are behind this ad? How are technologies being used? What's going on with gender? You should be better equipped to answer each of these questions now.
