International Women’s Day- Sports & Equality

Just yesterday, on this site, Denise Harvey took on the “Tradition of Classism & Racism in ‘Elite’ Sports“.

It is true that sports have historically been one of the areas of society where barriers to full participation have been erected to keep others out.

Whether those others being kept out were of different classes, ethnicities, races, religions, or genders or simply going to beat us, the history of sports is pockmarked with a history of painful exclusions. But unlike other areas where performance isn’t as measurable or excellence isn’t as demonstrable, these erected barriers tend to fall because they make such little sense. Amateurism, despite having lofty ideals associated with it, can often be just such a barrier, that for a long time kept elite sports out of the reach of the lower or even middle classes.

The Henley Regatta’s barring the best rower in the world, American Jack Kelly in 1920, because he had worked with his hands (manual labor as described in the Henley rules) in his father’s Philadelphia brick masonry business may have been helped along by his Irish and Catholic immigrant roots, but the fact he was on what became a 126 race undefeated streak and likely to defeat the best rowers aristocratic Europe could send out against him more likely sealed the deal. Kelly, who would later be better known as the father of actress Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco, repaid the exclusion with two Gold medals in the Antwerp Olympics later that summer, beating the Henley champion along the way, and another Gold in Paris in 1924. So sports are collectively a venue where barriers to inclusion are put up but are also broken, overcome, or simply shattered.

In reflecting on March 8, 2021 being #InternationalWomen’sDay, with a theme this year of #ChooseToChallenge, I get to focus on the better aspect of sports’ history as a cultural leveler. It is an imperfect history, but it is one where the arc bending toward greater inclusion is noticeable.

While Kelly was capturing Gold in Antwerp and Paris, women were still four years, a full Olympiad, away from competing in track and field events and then prohibited from any race longer than 800 meters until the 1970s, because no one wanted to see a woman exhausted or winded. But keeping with the #ChooseToChallenge theme the last 50 years have witnessed a revolution in women’s sports and in turn, equality. In fact, if you want to support equality, submit it to open competition, it will win every time.

I can list some of the names of the women who helped smash these barriers, Billie Jean King who lives in my Manhattan neighborhood and with whom I occasionally cross paths and always feel as if I am in the presence of royalty, is perhaps the best and most obvious example. But for every woman who has picked up a shot put, laced a cleat, grabbed a club, or run a marathon has helped bend that arc. There are now more women in American colleges and professional schools than men today. But the playing field is still far from level, especially when one considers that women have earned 13 million more undergraduate and graduate degrees than men in the U.S. since 1982. Yet in 2021, courts have been called on to protect gender equity on multiple occasions as colleges have dropped sports opportunities for women in budget cuts and been forced to restore those opportunities.

So there remains work to be done. But if history teaches us anything, it teaches these two truths: first, cultures that erect the fewest barriers to full participation and belonging prosper the most, and those that try to keep any group down or out needlessly waste critical energy and opportunity trying to delay something as inexorable as the next sunrise. On their best day, sports help show us the way, because competitors choose to challenge- themselves, the status quo, and the barriers, that stupidly get put up to keep them down.