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Overview
Beginning with the seemingly innocent ponytail, the subject of the Introduction, scholar Jaime Schultz challenges the reader to look at the historical and sociological significance of now-common items such as sports bras and tampons and ideas such as sex testing and competitive cheerleading. Tennis wear, tampons, and sports bras all facilitated women’s participation in physical culture, while physical educators, the aesthetic fitness movement, and Title IX encouraged women to challenge (or confront) policy, financial, and cultural obstacles.
While some of these points of change increased women's physical freedom and sporting participation, they also posed challenges. Tampons encouraged menstrual shame, sex testing (a tool never used with male athletes) perpetuated narrowly-defined cultural norms of femininity, and the late-twentieth-century aesthetic fitness movement fed into an unrealistic beauty ideal.
Ultimately, Schultz finds that U.S. women's sport has progressed significantly but ambivalently. Although participation in sports is no longer uncommon for girls and women, Schultz argues that these "points of change" have contributed to a complex matrix of gender differentiation that marks the female athletic body as different than—as less than—the male body, despite the advantages it may confer.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252038167 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2014 |
| Series: | Sport and Society |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.90(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Qualifying Times
Points of Change in U.S. Women's Sport
By JAIME SCHULTZ
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03816-7
CHAPTER 1
What Shall We Wear for Tennis?
After "vanquishing a young lady at lawn tennis, though in his judgment she was the better player," Major Wingfield, "the English gentleman who generally has the credit of being the inventor of Lawn Tennis," sought to understand why he emerged the victor. And so, following the 1881 match, he arranged for a comparative assessment of their respective costumes. "He therefore rolled up his flannel suit, lawn-tennis shoes, socks, cap, and belt. Five pounds and a quarter was the result." He requested the woman similarly weigh her ensemble, described as "a tweed tailor's made costume," the equivalent of which was tantamount to a man wearing "a railway rug strapped round his waist, tied in at his knees, and pinned up coquettishly behind." In all, the outfit tipped the scales at ten and three-quarters pounds. In this, Wingfield "saw clearly in this the cause of her losing and he strongly urges a lawn-tennis dress."
Just what that dress might look like was a source of consternation for the moneyed elite. In response to the question "What shall we wear for tennis?" a writer identified only as "A Lady Tennis Player" recommended the following in an 1887 issue of Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine:
1. Flannel or silk combination garment (linen should never be worn).
2. Pair of loose flannel or serge drawers, gathered in at knee with elastic, or ordinary frilled garment.
3. Full petticoat (flannel or serge) to knees.
4. Pair of short riding corsets, either with elastic gussets at sides or laced with elastic. This latter way is a good plan.
5. Loose Norfolk blouse confined at waist by belt.
6. Loose full skirt of some not too heavy material, falling several inches below knees. Too light a fabric ought not to be chosen, as in windy weather great inconvenience will be caused.
7. Stockings to match dress; tennis shoes.
The list envisioned an ensemble of equal parts propriety and comfort. Women must wear corsets, as social codes dictated, but they should be constructed with elastic, as opposed to more incapacitating stays made of metal, bone, ivory, or wood. Skirts must remain long, but the fabric should be of a weight that is neither too cumbersome nor too revealing. Women could thus move about the court while maintaining gentility, refinement, and restraint. Consequently, they could participate in one of the few socially acceptable sports available to them without ruffling the sensibilities of their peers.
From the moment women first picked up their rackets, their attire inspired questions of decorum, social distinction, physicality, and femininity. From the nexus of those considerations emerged several conspicuous and controversial fashion moments. By controversial I mean incidents when women broke from convention to wear costumes that inspired extreme public and media attention—occasions where Americans either revered or decried the players' selections. And while women played tennis recreationally and in physical education classes clad in a variety of clothing options, I am more concerned with what fashion historian Patricia Campbell Warner terms "sport dress—public dress" than I am with "gymnastic dress, or private dress." The cultural conversations about the public dress of American and the top international players tell us something about the tensions between athleticism and femininity.
There are myriad contentious fashion moments in the history of women's (and men's) tennis, but I concentrate primarily on the years between 1884, when the Wimbledon tournament held its first "ladies" event, through 1960, which tennis historian Angela Lumpkin marks as the end of the game's "modern era." During this time, female athletes pushed customary boundaries by purging their wardrobes of restrictive apparel, appropriating masculine styles, and shortening their skirts to the eventual conclusion that their undergarments became more visible and, at times, strategically styled to entice the public. Some of these sartorial points of change liberated female athletes, permitting them to move and to strike the ball in new and increasingly competitive ways. Other points of change demonstrate efforts to keep tennis socially exclusive, bind women to feminine traditions, induce ballyhoo, and titillate spectators.
"Almost universally," writes Warner, "sports historians ignore the significance of clothing as a factor in the development of women's involvement in any athletic endeavor." She overstates her case, but it is true that fashion is an often overlooked and underestimated "social phenomena." In the late 1800s and early 1900s, women adapted their standard apparel in order to play croquet, golf, field hockey and to ice skate, ski, ride horses, pilot planes, and race motorized vehicles, but no two activities were more intertwined with contemporary issues of dress reform than swimming and the "bicycle craze." Bound up with issues of safety and sexuality, women's efforts to release themselves from the trammels of oppressive attire were also about their desires for corporeal emancipation, pleasure, and self-expression.
Tennis, according to scholar Allen Guttmann, "did more than any other sport to revolutionize the clothing worn by upper-class sports women." Perhaps in no other physical activity is fashion more important, not just in terms of athleticism, but especially for one's presentation of self. By 1929 sportswriter John Tunis felt that tennis tournaments had become "more like a display of mannequins at a fashion parade than a group of sportswomen engaging in the most strenuous competition open to the modern girl." Cultural studies scholar Toby Miller made a similar observation regarding today's game, remarking that "a coterie of present players have become icons of the fashion movement." Even the great Billie Jean King once maintained that styles of dress "contributed greatly to the popularity of women's tennis," making it "more interesting" than the men's game.
At the turn of the twentieth century, argues textile historian Barbara Burman, athletic women "achieved a tangible physical freedom and unified bodily experience through their specialist clothing and by so doing they anticipated very significant changes in women's clothing generally, ascribed by some dress historians solely to the later effects of World War I." In other words, sportswomen who challenged the conventions of everyday dress presaged and sometimes precipitated broader sartorial trends. More than this, though, they presaged and sometimes precipitated broader social trends, for as costume historian Anne Hollander posits, "changes in dress are social changes." Significant beyond the boundaries of the tennis court, the public dress of high-profile players speaks to broader cultural and historical issues.
Lawn Tennis Comes to America
In one form or another, people have played games similar to today's tennis since at least the medieval period. It was not until the 1870s that Americans took to the modern sport after socialite Mary Outerbridge, while vacationing in Bermuda, witnessed British officers playing the game. There are counter-narratives regarding the origins of U.S. tennis, but most accounts generally agree that Outerbridge and her brothers introduced it to the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club in New York, and the game quickly spread. Affluent Americans found it attractive as they sought to assert their social distinction by mimicking the pastimes and affectations of the English aristocracy.
Tennis required leisure time, a well-manicured lawn, and imported equipment that kept it sufficiently beyond the grasp of the hoi polloi in those early years. Rallying on the grounds of private estates and within the confines of exclusive athletic clubs insulated the game, as did a strict code of amateurism that followed the initiation of organized competitions. The costumes deemed appropriate for play constituted another locus of class demarcation. As conspicuous leisure, tennis was not necessarily a competitive sport but rather another way to segregate the upper crust from the rest of the American populace, as well as a site at which to perform a particular embodiment of social class.
In the beginning, tennis was not a terribly strenuous pursuit. It was primarily a social activity rather than an athletic one, a characterization that contributed to the acceptability of women's participation. In garden-party finery, those content to pat the ball back and forth across the net with little exertion showed minor concern for the practicality of their clothing—the fashion mattered most, for the tennis court was a place to see and be seen. This was true for men as well, though as historian Foster Rhea Dulles notes, "Women players suffered only the slightest handicap in having to hold up the trains of their long dragging skirts; they were not expected actually to run for the ball."
The game grew increasingly competitive in certain circles of the tennis world. For that reason, a group of men banded together in 1881 to establish the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), now the United States Tennis Association (USTA), which hosted the first official American men's championships in Newport, Rhode Island, summer home to the superrich. The advent of prestigious tournaments intensified the visual display of athletes and spectators. On the grass courts of exclusive resorts, tennis matches became "a festival of the fashionable world," providing occasions for ostentatious displays of wealth, including the style of dress of participants and spectators alike.
By 1883 there were approximately forty organized lawn tennis clubs in the United States, one-third of which admitted women as full or limited members. Yet as Outing magazine summarized: "None of the clubs that hold open tournaments admit ladies to membership, and perhaps it is owing to this fact that, with one exception, ladies have hitherto found no place in open competitions. That this should be the case, there is no adequate reason. Not alone the nature of the game, but also its popularity among ladies, has proved that it is a ladies' game, and in every locality where tennis is in vogue there are ladies who play as well as the gentlemen." Far from equal, women nevertheless enjoyed access to tennis more than any other sport at that time.
In 1884 the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club added a "ladies" singles event to its Wimbledon tournament (established for men in 1877), though not without fierce resistance. Four years later, the USLTA invited women to compete in its prestigious national contest. By that time, most American athletic clubs sponsored women's competitions. These events, as reported in 1894, were "social functions of the highest class, and none enter their names but those of assured social position. As a matter of fact, all our first lady tennis players belong to the best families." Tennis aficionados openly segregated their sport on the bases of social class, race, ethnicity, and religion, but less so on the grounds of sex.
England's Maud Watson triumphed over her younger sister Lilian in the finals of the first Wimbledon women's event, where the two evidently "revolutionized tennis dress by wearing separates, silk jersey blouses with long sleeves and low necks, and white wool skirts with a bustle." In the process, they set in motion "the basic principle of proper tennis dress is that white is right." There are a number of explanations for the tradition of all-white tennis wear. First, it plays into the game's elitist character: "White clothes, hard to launder and keep pristine, were the prerogative of the rich," writes Warner. To display immaculate clothing in the context of athletics was a way of asserting one's social rank.
White clothing also helped players stay cool in the heat and masked the rivets of perspiration that invariably bedewed even the daintiest contenders. "Victorian etiquette," explained acclaimed fashion designer Ted Tinling, decreed that women "must give an outward proof of cleanliness if they were likely to get warm." Visible signs of sweat and strain had significant class connotations. At the 1897 Ladies' Championship in Dublin, Ireland, the summer heat "brought to a head the problem of the coloured silk, or elaborate serge costumes, developing visible damp stains before spectators who might have in their midst some of the 'lower classes.'" As a solution, "All-white copies of their contemporarily high-fashion costumes were the miraculous Irish solution for those players who moved about enough to be called 'good' and who deliberately wished to demonstrate this fact in championship competition." Whatever the rationale, the unwritten code of white clothing in tennis persisted with remarkable tenacity through the mid–twentieth century, to such a degree that flashes of color seemed garish and out of place.
In the late 1880s and 1890s, women began to navigate the court with a bit more latitude and adjusted their clothing accordingly. England's Charlotte (Lottie) Dod, who took the 1887 Wimbledon title at age fifteen, "broke with tradition advocating that ladies should run, and run hard, and not merely stride after tennis balls." In so doing, she "made women's tennis into a real sport." Her skirt, cut four inches above the ankle (possibly part of her school uniform), allowed for her more vigorous style of play. Perhaps because of her youth, fans and journalists forgave her indiscretion. Still, most of her peers "remained safely and demurely at the baseline," where their hemlines safely and demurely brushed the ground.
Dod chastened those who clad themselves in ponderous clothing, wondering, "How can they ever hope to play a sound game when their dresses impeded the free movement of every limb? In many cases their very breathing is rendered difficult." The women's game and its players remained repressed as long as they adhered to the dictates of everyday fashion. Dod concluded that a "suitable dress is sorely needed and hearty indeed would be the thanks of puzzled lady-players to the individual who invented the easy and pretty costume."
Gradually, pundits and athletes alike began to heed Dod's plaint and question the conventions of tennis. At the end of the decade, Outing magazine marveled at the female player who "bravely struggles against the awful handicap imposed upon her, viz., much dress and little strength.... It is obvious that the wearing of a long and flowing skirt not only seriously interferes with quick movements from one part of the court to another, but, what is of still more importance, it prevents a woman from using her racquet and making a stroke in a correct manner, or, as it is more commonly called, in 'good form.'" On the whole, clothes hindered women's ability to roam about the court, to breathe, and to strike the ball effectively.
The rules of the game further relegated women to second-class status. Until 1902 women, like men, competed in a best-of-five-sets series. That year the USLTA decreed that women would play the best of three sets, reflecting prevailing beliefs about their physical capabilities. The rules became the international standard and, in conjunction with women's fashions, kept the distaff game an inferior, feminized version of the male norm.
Of Wrists and Ankles
Like Lottie Dod, other female tennis players began to forge their own sartorial paths. Socialite Ava Willing Astor, for example, took the court in bloomers at a Newport match in 1893, much to the alarm of spectators. First associated with the women's movement in the 1850s, the bloomer costume initially incited hostility and ridicule, but it held great value for working-class, agricultural, and frontier women (before they adopted trousers), as well as to swimmers and those who wore bloomer-style exercise uniforms in sanitariums, schools, and colleges. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the bicycle craze inspired middle-class women to return to those "Turkish trousers" for matters of safety and comfort, and "Bloomer Girls" baseball teams barnstormed the country. The garment thus became associated with dress reform, practicality, emancipation, personal preference, and derision, for those who donned the bloomers, like Astor, publicly challenged gender norms, demonstrating clothing's powerful political symbolism.
Astor's bloomers did not inspire a fashion trend in tennis, though some women clearly began to rethink their costumes on the court in ways that suggest increased athleticism. In 1896 Harper's Bazaar bemoaned, "Girls who play for championship make everything subservient to the game, and apparently do not care how they look." Still, most women athletes endured the persistent encumbrance of their clothing during this time. One tennis player noted of the era, "No girl would appear unless upholstered with a corset, a starched petticoat, a starched skirt, heavily button-trimmed blouse, a starched shirtwaist with long sleeves and cuff links, a high collar and a four-in-hand necktie, a vest with silver buckle, and sneakers with large silk bows." Another added that they were also required, by social if not official dictate, to wear a "long undershirt, pair of drawers ... long white silk stockings, and a floppy hat. We were soaking wet when we finished a match." Clad in the vestments of upper-class life, the "one concession their costume might make to sport was an apron with a wide pocket to hold their tennis balls."
As historian Nancy Rosoff argues, "Dressing in conventional clothing kept women from appearing too threatening while they engaged in their athletic activities." Their bodies cloaked, their mobility restricted, and their game inhibited, women posed little challenge to the masculinist center of sport. At a time when critics worried about the "mannifying" effects of strenuous activity, proponents assured the American public that tennis was among the few acceptable athletic pursuits, provided women only "moderately indulged."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Qualifying Times by JAIME SCHULTZ. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Abbreviations, xiii,
Introduction: The Politics of the Ponytail, 1,
1 What Shall We Wear for Tennis?, 15,
2 Commercial Tampons and the Sportswoman, 1936–52, 47,
3 Rules, Rulers, and the "Right Kind" of Competition, 73,
4 Women's Sport and Questionable Sex, 103,
5 From "Women in Sports" to the "New Ideal of Beauty", 123,
6 A Cultural History of the Sports Bra, 149,
7 Something to Cheer About?, 167,
Epilogue: Cheering with Reserve, 187,
Notes, 201,
Bibliography, 239,
Index, 271,
What People are Saying About This
Honorable Mention in U.S. History, PROSE Awards, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers, 2015.