Donna Lopiano Discusses "Sporting Women"
In the following interview, Marianne Doezema and Donna Lopiano, director of The Women's Sports Foundation, discuss the progress women have made and the challenges they continue to face as they have gained increasingly better access to athletic activities. For more information about the museum's special exhibition on the subject, see Current Exhibitions. MD: What are some of the primary initiatives that The Women's Sports Foundation is undertaking currently? DL: In the context of our 30th anniversary, the foundation has developed a program called "GoGirlGo!" that will get one million girls active in sports over the next three years and deliver educational materials about the danger of inactivity to another million girls who are already participating in physical activities. In the last three years we've given more than $1 million in grants to provide new opportunities for girls to become involved with sports. During the next three years we will expand our grant program to $2.6 million. In addition, we'll have a national activism campaign through a friend-to-friend internet software program. On the fund-raising side, we will be engaged in a $10-million major giving campaign to attract corporate, foundation, and individual donations. MD: That's a very ambitious series of programs. Congratulations! DL: Yes, it's huge, but it's fun too-and important. The foundation has always occupied a unique position as a change agent. I think we've been especially effective in developing creative strategies for bringing about change. MD: The museum's spring exhibition is all about change. The Sporting Woman: The Female Athlete in American Culture documents and celebrates the emergence of women in sports. Visitors to the exhibition will realize early on that sporting activities are not merely frivolous fun. Deep cultural meanings are attendant to them. So, when women walk into the gymnasium or convene on the playing field, they are subjected to a range of cultural assumptions. The images we've assembled for this exhibition, depicting women who exercise and play sports, resonate with closely held beliefs about women's proper role in society and definitions of femininity. DL: Indeed, many of the images, especially in those from the early days, relate directly to the way women have been controlled by expectations about how they should comport themselves and what was considered acceptable in terms of dress. There is a long history of restricting movement and physical expression as part of a broad social structure aimed to keep women in a certain place, within a power structure dominated by men. And fears about sex and sexuality, which were so much stronger in this country than in Europe, are played out in some of these pictures as well. MD: We see that as a subtheme in the very first painting the viewer encounters when entering the gallery. Winslow Homer's beautiful canvas depicts women playing croquet, one of the first sport activities in which proper women could participate, out of doors and in the company of men. But almost as soon as women began to play the game, they were criticized for taking advantage of opportunities for flirtation. On the left side of Croquet Players, a couple has taken a few steps away from the center of action, and they appear to be whispering to each other. DL: Not only was flirtation viewed with horror by the custodians of morality, but the medical community also participated in holding women back. Medical journals printed countless articles about the dangers of riding a bicycle. According to a famous article, a permanent wrinkling of the face could result from the imagined pain of sitting astride a bicycle seat. MD: One of the posters in the exhibition advertises Stearns bicycles with the boast: "Ride a Stearns and be content." The implicit message was clear to audiences in the 1890s: Stearns used a bicycle seat that was designed to avoid potential damage to a woman's sexual organs. DL: Isn't it ironic that men are more at risk on a bicycle seat than women, mainly because their genitals are housed externally, while women's are very well protected. Today one cannot help but think about the absurdity of fears that surrounded the bicycle craze, especially in light of how long women were repressed as a result of such ideas. Women were not allowed to run an Olympic race longer than 200 meters until the 1950s. They were not allowed to run an Olympic marathon until the 1980s. This is not just "way back when." These prohibitions and barriers persisted for many decades, and some are still with us. MD: Doesn't this bring us back to the deep cultural meanings associated with sport, including the definition of masculinity and femininity? DL: If you list the characteristics of an athlete, they all conform to the stereotypical definition of what is masculine. So, sport involves the propelling of a mass through space (throwing balls or propelling oneself over hurdles) or overcoming the resistance of a mass. With the exception of some of the target sports (shooting, archery, etc.) or sports in which the athlete is a horse or machine, most sports are strength, speed, and reaction time activities-skills associated with the physical strength of men. MD: And American society
is still not comfortable with the concept of a powerful woman,
though in this generation, as we can see from images in the exhibition,
a number of strong women are cultural icons-Venus and Serena Williams
and Annika Sorenstam, to name just a few. The exhibition will
also include clips from a documentary-style film, Pumping Iron
II: The Women (1985), directed by George Butler, which tells
the story of a landmark women's body building contest.
DL: In that regard, it's important to make the point that we are just beginning to see the potential of the female body. As recently as the last decade we've begun to see a new level of muscle definition and training effect. We're only beginning to see this in women because they've had access to coaches and weight rooms for less than three decades. I don't just refer to access available when the men aren't using the equipment. An Olympic athlete is twenty years in the making-twenty years of weight lifting and training. The Williams sisters did it on their own, outside the traditional athletic bureaucracy. Annika Sorenstam is probably the first golfer ever to take weight training seriously and explore her body's potential. When you see her in sports bra and brief, being proud of her sculpted body-what an expression of power. So, this is the first generation of a new kind of female athlete. If muscular women and scanty attire scare people, then the world hasn't seen anything yet!
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