Ranging from Cold War tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify—and eliminate—athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing—ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous—degraded the very idea of female athleticism.
Ranging from Cold War tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify—and eliminate—athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing—ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous—degraded the very idea of female athleticism.
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Overview
Ranging from Cold War tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify—and eliminate—athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing—ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous—degraded the very idea of female athleticism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252081682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2016 |
| Series: | Sport and Society |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sex Testing
Gender Policing in Women's Sports
By Lindsay Parks Pieper
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-08168-2
CHAPTER 1
"A Careful Inquiry to Establish Her Sex beyond a Doubt"
Sex/Gender Anxieties in Track and Field
IN THE 1936 BERLIN SUMMER OLYMPICS, nineteen-year-old Missouri runner Helen Stephens finished first in the 100-meter finals. Her speed proved both unprecedented and unbelievable. As reporter Bill Henry recounted, she "literally [ran] away from the fastest field of girl flyers ever assembled on an athletic field." With an unparalleled time of 11.5 seconds — actually a tenth of a second slower than her first qualifying time — the "Fulton Flash" earned the gold. The "Missouri farm girl" also eclipsed the world record held by runner-up Stanislawa Walasiewicz, who was known in the West by her anglicized name, Stella Walsh. Although the IAAF refused to ratify Stephens's result due to the presence of an advantageous tailwind, no woman officially surpassed her time for nineteen years.
While Stephens's hometown, Fulton, Missouri, burst into celebration upon receiving news of her victory, others remained unmoved. Few people believed a woman could run at such a fast pace; therefore, many questioned Stephens's sex. Notably, a special correspondent to the Polish newspaper Kurier Poranny alleged that the United States had allowed a man to compete in the women's event. The reporter reasoned that silver medalist "Miss Walasiewicz would have gained first place if she had competed only against women." He further suggested that Stephens "should have been running with [Jesse] Owens and the other American male stars." Public condemnations of the US victor ensued.
Stephens's mother, Bertie May Stephens, attempted to dispel the attacks by citing her daughter's courtship practices. "Helen is absolutely a girl," she explained. "Helen leads a normal girl's social life. She enjoys dating and attends dances regularly at college." Bertie May's underlying assumption — one she shared with the larger public — was that participation in heterosexual rituals ensured femininity, which proved womanhood. Nevertheless, the innuendos surrounding the Olympic victor failed to dissipate. To quiet the suspicions, sport authorities quickly disclosed that Stephens had undergone a physical exam prior to competition. According to the Los Angeles Times, German officials, suspicious of Stephens's tremendous athletic talent, conducted "a careful inquiry to establish her sex beyond a doubt" when she arrived in Berlin. This inquiry marked the first widely publicized sex test of the modern Olympic movement.
Strong, successful women in track and field, like Stephens, challenged the deeply rooted Olympic sex/gender divide. Throughout the history of the Olympic Games, sport officials mandated sex categorization and attempted to uphold a dichotomous gender divide. In ancient Greece men and women competed separately and in different events. Men participated in a variety of activities, including boxing, discus, equestrian, javelin, running, and wrestling. Women participated in only a short footrace. This setup helped establish sex segregation in sport and fostered hierarchal gender assumptions. When Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern games centuries later, he maintained this sex/gender paradigm. He required sex classification and entrenched conventional gender beliefs in the Olympic movement. Coubertin notably barred women from the 1896 Athens Games and later limited their participation to events deemed socially acceptable. Although women's involvement in archery, golf, and tennis received tempered support, track and field remained strictly proscribed.
Track and field was the most popular and prestigious Olympic pastime in the early twentieth century. The United States, for example, celebrated athletics as the epitome of international sporting excellence. It was also an activity explicitly reserved for men. Thus when female activists successfully fought for women's inclusion in international competition, many people balked. The IAAF and IOC, in particular, begrudged the presence of female track and field athletes and painted the victors as mannish oddities. It was in track and field, then, where questions of sex/gender first surfaced and continued throughout the twentieth century.
The Origin of Olympic Sex Segregation and Gendered Ideals
Although the IOC eventually introduced sex/gender testing, sex segregation in sport has much deeper historical roots. Contests in ancient Greece tellingly excluded women. To celebrate the masculine body and pay tribute to the gods, male athletes competed naked, a practice that helped deter female infiltration. This requisite of nudity therefore served as the first method to ensure separation in sport; paradoxically, a similar type of test later would be required of female participants to bar men from women's competitions. In addition, not only did the ancient games forbid female involvement, but women were also disallowed from spectating. The penalty for female intrusion was death by being thrown from the top of Mount Typaion, a peak near Olympia. With such severe punishments, only one such incident is known to have occurred. Greek traveler Pausanias testified that the widow Kallipateira, or Pherenike, from the famed athletic family of Diagoras of Rhodes, disguised herself as a male trainer in order to bring her son, Peisirodos, to compete. Unable to contain her excitement when he triumphed, Kallipateira exposed herself. Pausanias relayed that she was released unpunished out of respect for her family.
While Kallipateira's artifice provided a singular (recorded) example of female infiltration in the ancient Olympic Games, some scholars speculate that women, specifically unmarried virgins, participated in a separate forum. In advance of the male festival, women held female-only competitions to honor the Greek goddess Hera. Known as the Heraean Games, the contests occurred in Olympia's stadium and consisted of "stade" races, footraces that were five-sixths of the length males were required to run. The shorter distance — coupled with the privileging of men's achievements and the prioritization of the male festival — indicates a belief in women's lesser status. A similar attitude was later exhibited by Coubertin, the "father" of the modern Olympic movement.
Coubertin reformulated the ancient competitions and birthed the modern games at the end of the nineteenth century. Born into an aristocratic French family, and a child during the Franco-Prussian War, he wanted to avenge the humiliating military defeat that included France's loss of the Alsace and Lorraine provinces. As a nationalist the baron initially considered a military career but instead followed an educational track that gradually prompted his enamor of sports. Coubertin's intentions for Olympic revival therefore aimed primarily at revitalizing French masculinity; however, he also desired European camaraderie to eliminate the possibility of further warfare — and French defeat. For example, in 1894 he proclaimed that an international sports forum held every four years would "give the youth of all the world a chance of a happy and brotherly encounter which will gradually efface the peoples' ignorance." Coubertin further explained that left unaddressed, such ignorance "feeds hatred, accumulates misunderstandings, and hurdles events along a barbarous path toward a merciless conflict." Although he revived the Olympic Games to promote athletic reform and encourage international goodwill, Coubertin nevertheless established several incongruities. As sport scholar Alan Tomlinson notes, his "declared egalitarianism concerning the politics of the body was bounded by principles of privilege, patronage, and misogyny." In alignment with the beliefs of the time, the French baron opposed female inclusion.
Coubertin's sex/gender beliefs both paralleled contemporary society and dominated the Olympic policies of his tenure. Shaped by the nineteenth century's social acceptance of "separate spheres," which encouraged strength, physicality, and sociability for men while mandating passivity, fragility, and domesticity for white, middle-class women, he repeatedly espoused such gendered ideals in his formulation of the Olympic movement. Coubertin suggested that "the Olympic Games must be reserved for men" and justified this assertion by infamously declaring female competition "impractical, uninteresting, ungainly, and ... improper." The founder of the modern games further rationalized the denial of women by pointing out complications with female inclusion; he noted that permitting women Olympians would require the construction of separate facilities and argued that social norms eschewed viewing females in athletic costumes.
Although he succeeded in barring women from officially partaking in the first modern Olympics, Coubertin's prohibitions eventually dwindled and female athletes competed from the Paris Games onward. Significantly, the addition of 22 women in the 1900 Olympics occurred against the behest of Coubertin and the IOC. With the success of the 1896 Games, the IOC was forced to delegate organizational responsibilities to various committees. Women first entered Olympic competition under these more localized authorities. However, Coubertin did not completely acquiesce, as female Olympians remained limited to separate, often modified competitions and participated only in those deemed appropriately feminine — such as archery, golf, swimming, tennis, and yachting — throughout his reign. As a result, the 22 women who competed in 1900 (compared to the 975 men) overtly adhered to Western notions of appropriate femininity.
Furthermore, Coubertin established the consummate Olympic authority as an elite male domain. His classed and gendered beliefs led to the naming of fifteen affluent men in the creation of the IOC in 1894. Because Coubertin desired an independent, nonpolitical organization, he selected individuals who could both afford the necessary travel and contribute to the burgeoning IOC. In the words of historian Allen Guttmann, "The members, who were much more likely to be enthusiasts for turf than track, were selected for their wealth and for their social status" Of the original members, IOC president Demetrios Vikelas (Greece), officer Viktor Balck (Sweden), Alexei General de Boutowsky (Russia), Coubertin, Jiff Guth-Jarkovsky (Bohemia), Ferenc Kemény (Hungary), and classics professor William Milligan Sloane (United States) were the most active. Other members included Lord Ampthill (Britain), Count Maxime de Bousies (Belgium), Ernest F. Callot (France), Duke of Andria Carafa (Italy), Leonard A. Cuff (New Zealand), Charles Herbert (Britain), Count Mario Lucchesi Palli (Italy), and Dr. José Benjamin Zubiaur (Argentina). Coubertin assumed the presidency in 1896 and held the office for almost three decades. Although he retired in 1925, his principles remained rooted in the IOC's policies. As historians Kay Schiller and Christopher Young explain, throughout the twentieth century the IOC "behaved on occasion with the random unaccountability of a self-electing gentleman's club." With regard to sex and gender, perhaps the greatest influence of this "gentlemen's club" was its decision to implement sex testing.
Sex/Gender Anxieties in Track and Field
Due to the historical association of physicality and maleness, whispers of ambiguously sexed female athletes and men posing as women for athletic achievement surfaced almost from the onset of women's inclusion in sport. The interwar period proved notably rife with such accusations as female competitors advanced in track and field, the era's most popular international pastime for men. Athletics had masculine connotations — thereby deterring women's participation — for a variety of reasons. Foremost, female track and field competitors experienced resistance from the medical community. According to sport historian Jennifer Hargreaves, "Because of the intrinsically vigorous nature of running, jumping and throwing events, female athletes were particularly vulnerable to reactionary medical arguments." Doctors not only suggested that the sport harmed women's health and damaged the female physique but also specifically described its detrimental effects on reproduction.
Heeding these precautionary warnings, female physical educators sought to limit women's involvement in the sport, a restraint appreciated by many in the West. The larger public found the muscularity required for track and field unsettling, and the power and speed necessary for success, unmediated by an apparatus or teamwork, only exacerbated such concerns. Finally, race and class dynamics underlined all of these anxieties. That women of color and working-class women more frequently competed in athletics kept middle- and upper-class white women off the track. As a result, argues Susan Cahn, "Where sports in general connoted masculinity, track and field had a particularly masculine image." Consequently, as women organized and participated in events deemed socially unacceptable — such as discus, distance running, and javelin — they stepped into an arena previously reserved for men and subsequently faced hostility, resentment, and suspicion.
The Amsterdam Olympics and Women's World Games
In the wake of World War I, Coubertin attempted to reclaim the authority he had previously delegated to national committees. The IOC proved unable to eliminate the already-added female events, which included diving, figure skating, swimming, and tennis, and therefore opted to reject any proposal that suggested expanding the women's program. Because the IOC repeatedly denied the addition of women's track and field in the Summer Games, female sports organizations created new, alternative forums for athletics.
As the most notable example, French feminist Alice Milliat formed the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI). She founded the FSFI in 1921 after several failed lobbying attempts to secure women's track and field in the 1920 Games. Denied by the IOC, the FSFI hosted the Jeux Olympiques Féminins (Women's Olympic Games) in 1922, during which sixty-five competitors from five countries participated in eleven events — the 60-meter race, 100-yard race, 100-yard hurdles, 300-meter race, 1,000-meter race, 4 x 110-yard relay, high jump, javelin, long jump, standing long jump, and shot put. The Women's Olympics continued to grow and were repeated in 1926, 1930, and 1934. Despite its short tenure, this initiative accomplished three significant goals: it maintained affiliation with the same number of countries as other male international federations; it expanded the role of women in sport; and it simultaneously challenged the gender order.
Not everyone viewed women's inclusion in track and field quite so positively. In the United States, for example, white female physical educators disdained the competitive and masculine nature of athletics. In the early twentieth century, female instructors had gained control over women's sport by highlighting biological dissimilarities between the sexes. They reasoned that the peculiarities of women's bodies and the shortfalls in their physical capabilities required female leadership over separate activities. In other words, the women "staked their programs and authority on female-appropriate exercise." By focusing on their differences, the physical educators cast female athletes as ill-equipped to handle the most commonly practiced (male) versions of sport and instead offered moderated approaches that upheld white, middle-class feminine norms. Thus when the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) opened track and field to women in 1924, the physical educators quickly protested. On the surface, many of them questioned the motives of the men in promoting women's athletics. The sudden interest "struck women instructors as opportunistic and simply wrong." Yet underlying such concerns were the gendered, raced, and classed realities of the sport. Because African American and working-class women largely populated track and field, several instructors denounced the sport as inappropriate and the participants as mannish. Such indictments led to increased associations of track and field as both masculine and masculinizing and encouraged white, middle-class women to further abandon the sport.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sex Testing by Lindsay Parks Pieper. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 "A Careful Inquiry to Establish Her Sex beyond a Doubt": Sex/Gender Anxieties in Track and Field 11
2 "Because They Have Muscles, Big Ones": Cold War Gender Norms and International Sport, 1952-1967 35
3 Is the Athlete "Right" or "Wrong"? The IOC's Chromosomal Construction of Womanhood, 1968-1972 61
4 "East Germany's Mighty Sports Machine": Steroids, Nationalism, and Femininity Testing 89
5 The US vs. USSR: Gender Testing, Doping Checks, and Olympic Boycotts 109
6 "One of the Most Horrid Misuses of a Scientific Method": The Development of a Protest 133
7 "Gender Testing Per Se Is No Longer Necessary": The IAAF's and the IOC's Continued Control 159
Epilogue: The Reintroduction of Gender Verification 179
Notes 187
Bibliography 227
Index 243