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Nina and the Man
She Got Game, the lonely voice on the radio for women’s athletics, commissioned this one about a group of women who protested a small rule change in the 1972 NYC Marathon. Kusick, the lead protestor, believed that her efforts chipped away at an establishment unresponsive to women athletes, though it’s likely she only caused the establishment to shift its feet a little.
Undoubtedly, women in the US have elevated their profile since the 70s, but they did so at the expense of the equality they originally sought. Googling “men’s sports” reveals half as many results compared to “women’s sports” (53 million to 88). A term paper search for men’s sports turns up titles like “Sports Journalists’ Influence on Sports” and “Sports Agency Law” whereas a term paper search for women’s sports has titles like “Differences in Gender Roles” and the ubiquitous “Women in Sports” which is peppered with lines like “the realities that face athletic women today.”
The operative word in “women’s sports” is women. For most, the term “men’s sports” is redundant.
In the 70s, the plunge for gender plurality in athletics seemed to have forced the establishment to shift uncomfortably in its shoes and to politely leave a little space for women. African-Americans as a minority group, however, participate with apparently far more ease in most sports compared to women (“African-American sports” receives only 30 million Google results; a term paper search shows more general titles like “African American Families: Demographic, Socio-Economic and Cultural Characteristics”)
One wonders, though, whether all this is changing. Younger women seem more ambivalent about their gender than Kusick. The boxer Alicia Ashley, for example:
Did Kusick’s approach, minutely protesting every inequality in sports, produce more meager results than Ashley’s care-little attitude? Or, as some suggest, did Kusick blaze the trail for Ashley to even consider fighting?
Posted by 1000monkeys on November 1, 2004 06:19 PM