Game, Set, Match by Susan Ware

Author:Susan Ware [Ware, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION for Women (NOW) offers one example of how the women's movement approached the issue of women and sports in the 1970s.24 Founded in 1966, NOW did not have a task force on sports in operation until the summer of 1973, when national coordinator Judy Wen-ning reported 130 members and a goal of having a sports committee in every chapter. Title IX enforcement was the task force’s top priority, followed by a long list of goals, including equal access to recreational facilities; elimination of discrimination in all school athletic programs; development of a positive image of women in sports; unbiased media coverage; public support for women's sports development, including encouraging local chapters to help develop programs for girls and women with an emphasis on “health, enjoyment, and physical fitness”; and the encouragement, collection, and dissemination of research on women and sports. That ambitious agenda was matched by a budget of only $705, typical of the way in which NOW task forces were often given broad mandates but little support to carry out their goals.25NOW never developed an official sports policy statement, and by 1977 the task force was no longer in operation. NOW later tried to take credit for being in the lead on Title IX (“Passage of this legislation was one of our proudest moments”), but such a statement vastly overinflates its involvement at the time.26

With the proviso that sports were never a high priority for NOW at the national level, there is intriguing evidence from the 1970s that the organization was ready to leap into the debate about how best to provide athletic equality for girls and women with a stand on sports that was far in advance of conventional wisdom. While admitting that women might need sex-segregated programs in the short term until they were able to come into their own athletically, NOW activists envisioned a sports program that treated women as individuals. NOW'S stance was firm and unequivocal: “NOW is opposed to any regulation which precludes eventual integration. Regulations that ‘protect’ girls and/or women are against NOW goals and are contradictory to our stand on the ERA. Of course one has to be prepared to answer the question, ‘Do you want your daughter to box?’ The answer is of course, ‘MY daughter is the one to decide that, not HEW!’”27

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