02/01/2020
If you can imagine it then you have all the ability to do it. You might succeed or you might fail, but that's not the point. In THIS country you have the right to dream & DO.
"1967: Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston marathon. After realizing a woman was running, organizer Jock Semple went after her to stop her. However, Switzers boyfriend & other runners provided a shield to protect her for the entire marathon." —
Bonnie Morris, Ph.D., is a professor of women's sports history at Georgetown & George Washington University. Here is a piece from one of her lectures, "A Heritage of Mixed Messages" —
"Medical authorities dating back to Aristotle declared that women were basically ruled by their reproductive systems, with a limited amount of ‘energy' flowing through the body that monthly hormonal expenditure used up in dangerous quantities...Too much study or bicycle riding/other unladylike sports would render women infertile; 19th-century America frowned on sports as a threat to females’ fertility...
When the modern Olympics were brought back in 1896, women were not allowed to compete until 1920 (with a special ‘Women's Olympics’ convening in 1922 — well into the 1930s.) Scholar Susan Cahn suggests that country club sports like tennis and swimming, with their ‘leisure-class and feminine-fashion associations’, allowed heroines like Helen Wills and Gertrude Ederle to capitalize on the flapper era’s love affair with sophisticated outdoorswomen: 'They helped fashion a new ideal of womanhood by modeling an athletic, energetic femininity with an undertone of explicit, joyful sexuality.'
The association of sport with ‘rough’ girls continued through the Depression and the 1940s, due to industrial factory softball leagues & the segregated track world of black female athletes. But after the U.S. entry into World War II, gender codes changed to permit and reward muscular competence in war factories’ 'Rosie the Riveter' workers (& WAC recruits.) Wartime America embraced the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
In 1972, buoyed by the successes of the civil rights and feminist movements and political mandates to end segregation, women stepped up to the plate; Title IX became law."
Source —
https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/womens-sports-history