Why Women's Sports Were Separated in the First Place, From 1900 to Title IX

Picture an old sports-page photograph of a woman in a wool skirt that reaches her ankles, swinging a golf club or a tennis racket as though the whole thing were a perfectly sensible way to spend an afternoon, while a roomful of gentlemen in the background wonder whether she ought to be lying down. That picture is the beginning of our story. It was not a story about women being kept out of the men's game. It was a story about women being kept out of everything, and building their own game when the front door stayed shut.

I think this history gets told badly from every direction. One version says women's sports were set apart as a polite way to keep women down. The other version says the separation was always obvious and nobody ever fought for it. Both are wrong. The truth is more interesting, and more American: women organised, argued, built leagues out of nothing and won a legal guarantee, and the separate category was the thing they won. Let me tell it in order, because dates do more work than adjectives.

1900: the first women in the Olympic Games

At the Paris Games of 1900, women took part in the Olympics for the first time. A small number of women, 22 by one count, competed in 1900 in events including tennis, golf, sailing, croquet and equestrian sport. Charlotte Cooper of Britain won the tennis singles and is generally regarded as the first individual female Olympic champion. An American golfer, Margaret Abbott, won the golf event, and the story goes that she did not know she had entered an Olympics at all, a claim that is repeated often enough in the histories that I would call it a tradition and not a documented fact.

Look at the list of events. Tennis and golf were what a respectable woman of the period was permitted to play. The sports the era considered unladylike, such as running and jumping, stayed closed. Women were allowed in the rooms that were considered safe, and they were kept out of the ones that mattered.

The track-and-field programme tells the rest of the story. Women's athletics events were added to the Olympic programme in 1928 in Amsterdam, and the 800 metres in that first year was controversial because many competitors were reportedly exhausted or unable to finish, and the Olympic authorities dropped the event. It was not reinstated until 1960. Whatever the truth about that race, the long absence of the event is the sort of restriction that rested on assumption. This is worth remembering whenever someone tells you that a restriction on women is simply a matter of what is natural.

Early college athletics: the women who built it from scratch

Meanwhile, on American campuses, women did something quietly radical: they invented their own sporting culture. At Smith College, Senda Berenson, the director of physical training, introduced an adapted version of the new game of basketball for women in the fall of 1892, and her rules were published in 1899 and used widely for decades. The adaptations were cautious by modern standards. Whatever we think of the caution, the achievement was real. A game that had been invented for men was taken up by women, on their own terms, in their own gymnasiums, with their own coaches.

Notice the pattern that is repeated again and again. Women did not wait for men to grant them admission to the men's contest. They built a parallel structure where they could compete, win and develop talent. That is what separate categories gave them in the first place: a space of their own in which the question "who is the best?" could be asked of women.

The leagues women built for themselves

Women's professional sport in America is a patchwork of ventures that were mostly started by women and mostly started late. In 1943, during the Second World War, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League began, founded in part to keep professional baseball in the public eye while the men were overseas. It ran through 1954 and at its peak in 1948 drew about 910,000 paid fans, and its history is the kind of story that Hollywood later turned into a film. Notice what the league was: a league for women, run on women's terms, in which women could play as professionals for pay. It was not a men's league that had been opened to women. It was a women's league that existed because the men's one was closed.

Basketball tells a similar story. A professional league for women in the United States started in 1978, the Women's Professional Basketball League, and folded within a few years. The WNBA began play in 1997, and it has outlasted every earlier attempt, a point that deserves a plain statement of respect for the athletes who carried it. And in tennis, the story of the early 1970s is the story of women setting up their own tour, the Virginia Slims Series, which grew into the Women's Tennis Association, over pay and respect. Again, the separate structure was not a concession. It was a weapon.

Title IX in 1972

Then, in 1972, Congress passed the Education Amendments, of which Title IX is part, and President Nixon signed the act on June 23, 1972. Title IX forbids sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal money, and it did not say a word about sports. Yet its effect on sport was seismic.

Consider the starting point. In the 1971-72 school year, the first survey of the National Federation of State High School Associations counted 294,015 girls in high school sports in the United States. By 2010-11 the figure was more than three million. Whatever one thinks of the law's various interpretations and enforcement controversies, the growth in participation is one of the great American success stories of the twentieth century.

How did a law that never mentions sports have such an effect? Through regulations. As described in the companion piece, Fairness for Female Athletes Is a Civil Rights Argument, Made With Respect, the regulations permit sex-separate teams where selection is based on competitive skill or the sport is a contact sport, and the 1979 policy interpretation told schools how to show that they were offering equal opportunity. The schools now had to count what they offered women and to explain the gap. Where there had been nothing, there was suddenly an obligation to provide something.

At the college level the rules of the game changed in a different way. A body called the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women had been organised in 1971 to run national championships for women. In the early 1980s the NCAA moved into women's championships, and the older organisation closed in 1982. People disagree about whether that transition helped or hurt the women's own leadership of their sport, and it is a subject on which honest historians differ. What is not in doubt is that by the 1980s women's sports had a national structure of their own.

September 20, 1973: the Battle of the Sexes

The Astrodome in Houston, September 20, 1973. Billie Jean King, who had been the leader of the women's tennis movement, played a match against Bobby Riggs, a former Wimbledon champion who had made a career of loudly proclaiming that women's tennis was inferior. King won in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, in front of a crowd of more than thirty thousand and a television audience estimated in the tens of millions.

Be careful about what that match proved and did not prove. It is sometimes quoted as evidence that women can beat men at their own game, but that is the wrong lesson. Riggs was fifty-five years old. The match was a piece of theatre, a promotional spectacle in which the stakes were the credibility of women's sport and the argument was about respect. King understood that women's tennis needed a stage, and she took it. Here is the thing that I find a little funny and also instructive: the match was played because the case for women's tennis was strong enough that it needed a showman to attack it. A weak case does not draw thirty thousand people into an arena.

For the argument of this essay the relevance of the match is exactly this: the cause of women's sport in the early 1970s was a cause of getting a fair stage, a fair purse and a fair respect, and it was won through the women's own category, not by abolishing it. If King had been told that the way to equality was to enter all tournaments in a single open draw, she would have lost the tour she had just built. The tour was the equality.

The growth that followed, and the 1999 Women's World Cup

By the 1990s the results were visible. American women won gold in soccer, basketball and softball at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Collegiate women's programmes had expanded to include sports that had barely existed a generation earlier. And then came the summer of 1999.

On July 10, 1999, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, the United States and China met in the final of the Women's World Cup. After a scoreless match and extra time, the United States won on penalty kicks, 5-4, in front of a crowd of more than ninety thousand, still one of the largest ever to attend a women's sporting event. The image of the final kicker celebrating is one of the most reproduced in American sport.

Look at what that day represented. A team of women, grown out of the programmes that Title IX had made possible, filled one of the largest stadiums in the country, and did it in a tournament that had been created for women by women's insistence on having one. The first Women's World Cup had been played in 1991, and the 1999 edition was hosted in the United States. You cannot tell the story of that final without the infrastructure of the girls' leagues, the college programmes and the sport's own category.

What the history asks of policy

Here is the argument that I think the history supports, laid out in numbered form.

1. Separate categories were a victory, not a concession. Women demanded their own competitions because the open ones were closed to them, and then they built those competitions into institutions. To describe the women's category as a form of exclusion reverses the historical record.
2. The category is what made the other gains possible. Participation, scholarships, professional leagues and national audiences followed the creation of a protected space. It would have been impossible for the numbers to grow as they did if girls had had to compete in an open draw from the beginning.
3. Every gain was contested, and each had to be defended. The 800 metres was dropped for decades, the women's college association was absorbed, and compliance with Title IX has been argued about in courts and athletics departments for half a century. Institutions have a habit of letting go of women's sport when nobody is watching.
4. Therefore any policy that changes who the women's category is for should be judged against the purpose for which the category was won. That is not a verdict on any single policy question, and honest people disagree about them. It is a standard, and it is the standard that the athletes who built the category would recognise.

The current argument over who may compete in the women's category is, in my view, best entered with this history in mind. I make the case for keeping the category sex-based in Fairness for Female Athletes Is a Civil Rights Argument, Made With Respect, and I try to answer the strongest inclusion argument there. What I want to add here is the reminder that the women who built this structure did it with their own money and their own time, and that their claim on its integrity is not a technicality.

The honest objection

Some readers will say that history is no guide to the present, and that the women of 1900 or 1973 were not thinking about the questions we face now. That is true. Nobody in 1973 was drafting policy for the cases we argue about today, and it would be dishonest to put words in their mouths.

But a history can tell us what a thing was built for, and that is a legitimate question to ask of any institution. The women's category was built for women who had been denied a fair contest, and we can ask what changes would honour that purpose. We can ask that question without contempt for anyone, and with gratitude to the people who built it. The principle that a fair contest requires a fair measure runs from the track of Jesse Owens, whose story I tell in Jesse Owens in Berlin and the Honours His Own Country Was Slow to Give, to the Rose Bowl in 1999. And the principle that what is measured must be measured honestly is the reason What If Every League Abolished the Scoreboard in the Name of Equity reads as a warning and not just a joke.

A note on being cheerful about it

I will end with something that the debate rarely allows. This is a happy story. The history of women's sport in America, from the woman in the wool skirt to the Rose Bowl, is one of the finest examples we have of what free people can do when they organise, when they are given a fair legal footing, and when they refuse to take no for an answer. Conservatives, who believe in voluntary association, in building institutions from the ground up and in the dignity of effort, should find it a natural subject for pride. It is entirely ours. Nobody handed it down from a federal agency; the agency came afterward and wrote the rules the women had already earned.

The case in brief

1. Women first competed in the Olympics in 1900, and the era's sports for them were the ones that seemed safe, while track events came in 1928 and the 800 metres vanished until 1960 on the basis of assumption, not evidence.
2. Women built their own structures, from Smith College basketball in the 1890s to the 1943 baseball league, the 1973 tennis tour and the WNBA, because the open competitions were closed to them.
3. Title IX of 1972 and its regulations turned those efforts into a legal guarantee, and participation grew from under three hundred thousand high school girls to more than three million.
4. The 1973 Battle of the Sexes and the 1999 Women's World Cup showed what a protected category and a fair stage can produce, and any policy should be judged against the purpose for which the category was won.

What you can do: look up how many girls' and boys' teams your local high school fields and ask the athletic director, in writing, how that compares with enrolment.