FOREWARD
I remember, as a child, two women buying a run-down farmhouse on the outskirts of the conservative Pennsylvania town where I grew up. They were related to me through my oldest sister’s marriage, and so, in the way that one often is held accountable in small towns, by way of vague attachments, the ambition of these women became my burden in the recess yard at school.
I’ll never forget the shame I felt when a male classmate chided me: Two women,” he said, “are never going to be able to fix up that dump. Women just have no business getting involved in something like that.”
Why, I asked myself at the time, had they set themselves up for such a public failure? At eight or nine years old, my schoolyard lesson hit home loudly and clearly: Women can’t succeed at physically demanding tasks. They’ve got some nerve, actually, even to try.
Well, those women did fix up that house, and then they rented it out for a while, and later they sold it for a profit. The town wags had lost a round. But public opinion had not really changed. It wasn’t until many years later, in fact, that I reconsidered my own perceptions of what women could do … and what I could do, for that matter. Only then did 1 see the possibilities could be endless.
In researching the sports world, one finds similar prejudices running rampant with regard to women’s sports accomplishments. This book is not intended to be a comprehensive sports history book, nor will it give enough women athletes their due.
It will, however, tackle attitudes. Ten years after winning a federal mandate for parity of athletic resources in the schools, for instance, girls and women have yet to see any real parity. Things have gotten better, it’s true. But women coaches, mentors, and athletes well know that changes have not been comprehensive. Now we hear talk of bringing men’s and women’s institutional sports allocations to a 60-40 split, percentage-wise. Should women be grateful? It is, after all, better than the estimated 70-30% allotment we’re getting now.
“If the current population of male and female students is 50/50,” says Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports
Foundation, “common sense says that the athlete population should be 50/50. You can’t pull any number, like 60/40, out of the air.”‘
But that, it appears, is precisely what the Big Ten universities have in mind. Will the 50/50 ratio be met in five years, then, as the stated long-term goal requires? Women can only hope past track records of equity are not accurate indicators of what is to come.
When even laws do not evoke significant change after two decades of “enforcement,” clearly the roots of a problem run deep in society. So deep, in fact, as to have become a part of that society’s way of life, giving way to the kind of popular “truths” that even school children take for granted . . . .