November 1, 2022 • 27 mins
Women's soccer began to take off in the U.S. in the 1990s, culminating in the frenzy surrounding the 1999 World Cup and one of the greatest female athletes, Mia Hamm. Matt tells that story and explains how a sports bra created a controversy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place,
world history examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome,
(00:26):
and we're back on the unsold history of sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we return our focus
to the world of women's athletics by examining the Women's
World Cup and the discourse that followed it. We cover
a lot in this episode athletics and sexuality, gender roles,
and of course sports bras. Here's Matt. Last time we
(00:54):
discussed Michael Jordan's and I briefly mentioned his Gatorade commercial
in which Americans were encouraged to quote be like Mike.
A few years later, Gatorade in Jordan, they did another commercial,
and this time Jordan was co starring with the women's
soccer player Mia Hamm. It was Jordan's and ham and
they were trying to outdo each other in a number
(01:16):
of sports of basketball, soccer, fencing, tennis, judo. And meanwhile,
a punk rock version of the song anything you Can Do,
I Can Do Better was playing in the background. So
I'm watching TV in which is when this commercial came out,
and which was also the year of the Women's World
Cup in the United States. I'll tell you that story
(01:38):
in a moment. I'm watching TV with my sister and
her daughter, Eva, my niece, Eva was probably six years
old then, and this commercial comes on and we're watching
it Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm and my niece looks
at me and says, who's that guy with Mia? Well,
I think this was a sign of just how much
(01:58):
the American sports landscape changed in the year. Today, we're
going to explore the story of the Women's World Cup
as a way of gauging the state of American women's
sports at the turn of the twentieth century. And I
want to save some time to discuss the issue of
sport and sexuality as well. And I'll use one of
(02:21):
the players on that women's national team as the focus
of our conversation. But let me begin by saying something
else about Title nine, which we discussed a few lectures ago.
I want to raise an interesting issue here. As you know,
Title nine and the push for women's sports programs. This
was part of the larger second wave feminist movement. But
(02:44):
let me point out how Title nine and the women's
sports revolution, how it's different from most aspects of the
modern feminist movement. The goal of the feminist movement was
to bring equality of opportunity for women, but the goal
was also to integrate women more fully into American society.
Integrate them into society with in Women should have the
(03:07):
same opportunities as men to go to medical school and
law school and to run a business or any other organization.
And men and women should participate in business and politics
and higher education together. They should not be sex segregated
arenas well. Title nine and the larger women's Athletic Revolution
(03:27):
are about equality of opportunity, but they are not about
sexual integration. They are based on the idea that women
deserve and need, to use a well known phrase, a
league of their own. So even as the rest of
society was moving in a more sexually integrated direction, sports
(03:48):
remained that they remain to this day, segregated by sex
when it comes to sports. Title nine is not part
of the larger push for integration in American society. Kind
Of ironically, what Title nine demands to use the language
of that Supreme Court case plus e versus Ferguson which
(04:09):
we talked about a long time ago. Title nine demands
separate but equal, and so some critics of Title nine
suggests that what Title nine and the Women's Sports Revolution
have done kind of a weird way, is actually reinforce
the idea of the difference between the sexes, rather than
(04:30):
subverting that idea. Men and women are fundamentally different, and
we institutionalize that difference and our sex segregated sports. I
suppose this is one of the paradoxes of the feminist
movement with regard to sports. It asks for equality of
opportunity with regard to sports, but it does not ask
(04:52):
for integration in sports, and so some people argue that
we should no longer segregate sports by sex. You may
think that's a ridiculous idea. Of course, sports need to
be segregated bisex, but remember it wasn't that long ago
that American society mandated that sports be segregated by race,
(05:13):
and that seemed completely natural to many people too. I
think it's an interesting idea at the very least. Mia Ham,
the soccer player, certainly raised awareness about women's athletic capabilities
by playing and excelling in women's soccer. But what if
she had not played women's soccer? What if she had
just played soccer, you know. In other words, what if
(05:36):
she had played on a sex integrated national team and
scored goals against men, would her cultural impact have been
even more significant? So I raised that issue is introductory
food for thought, you know, in an intellectual appetizer, But
that's a ridiculous phrase. Anyway. Having said all this, it's
(05:58):
hard to think of Mia Hamm and American female soccer
players having a more significant impact than they did playing
in the Women's World Cup. Maybe the most remarkable moments
in all of American women's sports history came in the
very last year of the twentie century, and I think
(06:18):
that symbolic It took a while. In other words, the
moment was the Women's World Cup, and specifically the final
game at the Rose Bowl between the United States and China.
And if you were aware of the history of women's
sports in this country, it was hard to watch this
game and not see it as a vindication of the
(06:40):
passage of Title nine past twenty seven years earlier. Title
nine had triggered an explosion of girls soccer programs all
over the country, and the women who made up the
ninety nine World Cup team they had been born into
the sports world that Title nine had helped create. Historians
are not supposed to deal in in counter factuals, but
(07:01):
I'm here to tell you that without Title nine, that
mega moment probably does not happen. The star of the
American team was Mia Hamm. Mia Hamm was the discovery
of the one time US national coach again named Anson Dorrence.
This is a guy who coached at the University of
North Carolina women soccer and Dorance first saw Mia Hamm
(07:23):
play when she was fourteen years old, and he said
it was like watching someone who had been shot out
of a cannon. She outran, out maneuvered, out competed women
who were four or five six years older than she was.
At age fifteen, mia Hamm became the youngest woman ever
a girl really to play for the U S national team,
(07:46):
and then she played collegiately at u n C. Mia
Hamm of the University of North Carolina to four straight
n c A championships between and many still regard her
as the greatest women's collegiate player ever. And mia Hamm
demonstrated that she was probably probably the best women's player
in the world at the Women's World Cup, which was
(08:11):
the first women's World Cup, although in the Women's World
Cup was not technically called the World Cup yet FIFA,
which is the governing body of international soccer, they thought
that the prestigious title World Cup should only apply to
the men's tournament, so instead this one women's tournament was
(08:33):
named after their sponsor. It was called the Eminem's Cup.
The Eminem's Cup was in China, and Chinese fans attended
the matches in huge numbers. The popularity of women's soccer
in China was actually quite shocking to the American players.
I mean, women's sports in China were just much bigger
(08:54):
than they were in the United States. And so in China,
the US players were celebrities. People packed the stands, they
clamored for their autographs. Sixty thousand people were in the
stadium watching the US defeat Norway two to one for
the Eminem title. It was the first world championship in
(09:16):
soccer of any kind for the United States men, women,
youth teams, whatever, the very first. So the team returns
to the United States conquering heroes, and there was nobody
at the airport to greet them. You may have watched
some of the recent Women's World Cups. There has been
(09:38):
a ton of energy and excitement around these tournaments. Don't
think for a minute it's always been like this. It
was the opposite. The victory barely received mention in the
US press. The standard line is that Americans didn't start
to care about women's soccer until the World's Cup. But
(10:01):
actually it was in that women's soccer began to take
off in the United States, and this was at the
Olympic Games in Atlanta. Men had been playing soccer at
the Olympics since nine, now almost a full century later.
In women's soccer made its debut at the Games, and
(10:21):
at these Olympics, the US captured gold by defeating China
two to one in the final. The nine gold medal
game was not televised live in the United States. NBC
did not think that people were interested, but seventy eight
thousand loud, screaming fans were there for this game, which
(10:45):
was played at the University of Georgia's football stadium in Athens.
And included in the crowd were the organizers for the
nine Women's World Cup, which was scheduled for the United
States three years later, and these organizers saw the number
of people in the stands. They that they sensed that
women's soccer was becoming popular, and so they took a chance.
(11:10):
The matches for the ninety nine World Cup were scheduled
to be played in in smaller college soccer stadiums five
thousand to fifteen thousand seats stadiums, the types of stadiums
on college campus where you see soccer often played today.
But after seeing almost eighty thousand people come out for
the gold medal final in the World Cup, organizers decided
(11:34):
to play their matches in football stadiums, big stadiums. They
were optimistic that people would come, but there was tremendous
skepticism about this. And as the World Cup got closer
and the organizing committees and now it's the ticket sales
were pretty strong. The organizers were literally accused by members
(11:58):
of the press of lying about the numbers. You are
lined to drum up and drift when we all know
there isn't any. The soccer columnists Jamie Trekker, a man,
he posed a question that indicated what he thought was
going to happen. He wrote, what if they threw a
World Cup and nobody came? But what dubious reporters like
(12:21):
him did not realize was how hard the US women's
team had been working to publicize this moment, as opposed
to the male athletes and most big time team sports.
The members of the women's soccer team, they were actively
working to sell the game of soccer and the World
Cup tournament. In the spring of they traveled the United States.
(12:43):
They put on soccer clinics, They played exhibition matches that
they met with the fans after the game, signing autographs
and selling tickets. The members of the US women's national team,
they were both athletes and promoters. It was grassroots marketing.
(13:05):
After the break Bedlomb at the Rose Bowl, there's a
great story from the opening day of the World Cup.
(13:26):
The members of the U S team. They're in their
bus heading to the Meadowlands in New Jersey, the football
stadium where the NFL's Giants and Jets play, and they
had no idea how many people were actually going to
show up for the game. And as they neared the stadium,
they got stuck in a tremendous traffic jam that the
kind you saw on Sundays in the fall for NFL games.
(13:50):
And they realized that this great crowd was there to
see them, and then the bus pulled into the stadium
parking lot and there were tens of thousands of soccer fans.
They were they were tailgating, they were barbecuing, they were
playing impromptu games of sock and very significantly in this
crowd were thousands, tens of thousands of young girls. Like
(14:14):
we talked about with Jackie Robinson and his meaning for
Black Americans. Think of the power the meaning of this
moment for young American girls. You two can play sports
and people will come and cheer. The US won that
first game in the Meadowlands, and then they continue to win.
There was a rolling momentum to that team in the
(14:37):
summer of and there was a lot of pressure on
the team. They were the draw. If they lost, the
momentum of the whole tournament might sputter. But they kept
winning and they made it all the way to the
final game played in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California,
a college football shrine, one of the temples of American
(15:01):
men's sports, was in People packed the stadium and they
were treated to one of the greatest, one of the
most tense sporting events in American history. The game was
scoreless after regulation, and then scoreless still after sudden death overtime,
so the game went to penalty kicks. The American goalie
(15:23):
Brianna Scurry, she managed to stop one of the five
penalty kicks from the Chinese team, and so the American player,
Randy Chastain, she stepped to the mark and drilled the
ball into the goal for the win. And it was
bedlam at the Rose Bowl. And you know, in the aftermath,
one could not help but think that this was a
(15:45):
sign that women's sports had finally arrived in the United States,
although in the immediate moment you weren't really thinking, wow,
this is a transcendent moment in women's sports in American history.
It really you were thinking, wow, that was one of
the greatest games I've ever seen in any sport. And
(16:05):
those were the immediate national reactions for a couple of
days at least. But then the moment that everyone seemed
to want to talk about was when Brandy Chastain converted
the winning penalty kick and she ripped off her shirt
and joyous celebration, and in doing so, she unveiled the
(16:26):
most famous sports bra in American history. All Right, this
might sound weird, but let's intellectualize the sports bra. The
sports bra is a key character in the women's athletic
revolution that we've been talking about, and like the women's
sports Revolution and Title nine, the sports bra also has
(16:49):
its birth in the nineties seventies. As the rates of
female participation in sports began to go up and up,
there was no accompanying growth in gear and equipment for women,
so female athletes had to improvise. Female athletes wore shoes
made for male feet a small male feet. They wore
(17:11):
uniforms that had been designed for teenage boys. I think
these facts reinforced the idea that men played sports and
women were interlopers. Women would have to adapt. I told
you about Katherine Switzer in the nineteen sixty seven Boston Marathon.
When Katherine Switzer ran the New York Marathon a few
(17:32):
years later nineteen seventy four as an accepted official entrant,
she ran the twenty six miles in a tennis dress
that was the most comfortable women's athletic gear that she
could find. And one of the biggest problems for female
athletes was the absence of a functional bra that women
could wear while being athletic nineteen seventy seven a female
(17:56):
marathon or named Lisa Lindall. She grew tired of bouncing
breasts while she ran, and so she asked a question,
why isn't there a jock strap for women? Men can
find they're bouncing testicles in a jock strap, why can't
women do the same for their breasts? And in that
year seven, her ingenious solution was to literally take two
(18:21):
men's jock straps, cut them and sew them together. She
called it the jock bra, and it worked for her,
so she began to market it. Sporting goods stores objected
to the name jock bra, so she changed it to
the jog bra. Now it's usually just called a sports bra.
(18:44):
And now here in we have Brandy Chastain tearing off
her US jersey and revealing her sports bra, and there
was controversy. People were scandalized. Some American newspapers actually refused
to print photographs of that iconic moment because it was
(19:05):
a picture of a woman and a bra. What was
so strange was that these were newspapers that often ran
ads with photographs of women in bras on their pages,
ads for bras, But somehow that woman in that bra
was unacceptable. Some male newspaper columnists. They wrote about this moment.
(19:27):
They insisted on seeing it not as an athletic moment,
but as a sexual moment. I vividly remember a sportswriter
for a newspaper around me. He wrote an article saying
that he was half intimidated by Brandy Chastain's muscles and
half turned on by her breasts. People are entitled to
(19:48):
their opinion, but come on, man. The inability to see
that moment as anything other than an expression of athletic exhilaration.
It It baffles and and disappoints me. To somehow set
shalize this moment as if it were a sort of
strip tease was ridiculous. But having just said that, let's
(20:15):
switch gears at the end here, let me complicate this.
I want to use this moment to briefly explore a
trend or a phenomenon in American sport history. The trend
of what I think is fair to call the the
sexualization of the female athletes. I believe it's a fair
word to use, other than the fact that I don't
(20:36):
think sexualization is a real word. But you get my
drift here. And to discuss this, let's go back to
Brandy Chastain, she of the game winning penalty kick and
the famous sports bra. But let me tell you about
some other photos of Brandy Chastain. Brandy Chastain appeared in
some other photographs that summer photos taken over just weeks
(20:57):
before the World Cup kicked off, and these photos appeared
in something called Gear magazine. I had never heard of it.
In these photographs, Brandy Chastain was naked when she was
wearing soccer cleats but nothing else. In one photo, her
oiled up body was curved around a soccer ball. In another,
(21:18):
she was bent over with a big smile on her face,
and she held two soccer balls that covered her bare breasts.
And Brandy Chastain defended these photographs by saying that she
was proud of her athletic body. She had worked her
butt off to get in shape, and she saw nothing
wrong with showing it off. Some other people argued that
(21:38):
photographs like those they undid much of the good from
events like the World Cup. They said, those are not
photographs of an athletic woman. Those are photographs of a
woman displaying her body for the male gaze and Gear
magazine was marketed towards men, and these photos they kick
(21:59):
started a pretty intense conversation about a trend, a trend
in which more and more female athletes were were posing
naked or opposing scantily dressed, presenting themselves as both fit
and sexual. And sometimes these images were in sports magazines,
sometimes they were in men's magazines like Gear or Details
(22:22):
or Esquire, and sometimes they were in magazines like Playboy.
The phenomenon of female athletes posing nude or or presenting
themselves as beauty objects this is part of what the
feminist scholar Jan felsh And called, way back in nineteen
seventy four, the feminine apologetic. She argued that because sports
(22:46):
have historically been so closely linked with men, female athletes
who do not want to be thought mannish, or or
or or masculine, they have felt compelled to play up
and emphasize their their femininity, their their female heterosexuality, and
female athletes do this in a number of ways. Felshin
(23:08):
said it might be through dress or grooming, that the
wearing a makeup while playing sports, or the feminine apologetic
might come in the form of stripping off one's clothes,
having your photograph taken, allowing oneself to become an object
of of of of the male gays male sexual fantasy.
(23:31):
Maybe the best example of this feminine apologetic at work,
and slightly different from what Brandy Chestain did. Maybe the
best example comes from the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.
During World War Two, some baseball men were looking for
extra revenue and they created a professional baseball league for women.
(23:52):
And one of the demands of the All American Girls
Professional Baseball League was that the female players had to
emphasize widely accepted feminine beauty standards. So the players didn't
wear traditional baseball attire. They wore pastel colored short skirts
while they played the game. Every member of the league
(24:13):
had to attend charm school classes where they learned so
called feminine manners. They were taught how to apply makeup,
how to do their hair so they might be more
visually appealing to the spectators. In this league, if a
batter came to the plate and was not wearing lipstick,
the umpire sent her back to the dugout. The league
(24:34):
was fairly successful. It lasted from the beginning of the
war until nineteen four, though it ended up folding because
of lack of interest. TV had something to do with it,
but I think so did the fact that the dominant
feeling in nineteen fifties America was that real women don't
play baseball. But those rules about makeup and charm school,
(24:56):
I want to emphasize that they were exactly that they
were the rules. If those female athletes wanted to play baseball,
they were re fire to dress and ornament themselves in
those ways. What people were critiquing here in and in
this era was an American culture that seemed to be
more interested in female athletes in various states of undress
(25:20):
rather than female athletes performing strenuously in various sports. Now,
the argument that is often given in defense of images
like those is that, look, this is publicity. Women's sports
are so undervalued that female athletes need to do whatever
it takes to drum up interests, and sex sells sports.
(25:42):
And there is definitely something to the idea that women's
sports need all the publicity they can get because they
are under appreciated in the United States. But the critics say,
here's the problem with saying that sex sells sports. Studies
suggest that's not really true. What is true is that
(26:04):
sex sell sex. Do young men who look at female
athletes in Playboy magazine? Do they find these female athletes hot?
I suppose they do, But do they find them more
interesting as athletes? And are they more likely to watch
them compete? The data says no. I'm not sure there
(26:24):
is any discussion that I have in my sport history
courses that prompts more disagreement from my students than this
critique that I'm just offering up the feminine apologetic. A
lot of my female students, in particular, they object to
me even raising this issue and suggesting that these images
might be in any way problematic. Maybe I possess an
(26:48):
outdated mindset. Could it be, of course, it could be
that I wonder what you think about this issue. That's
all for now. Next time on the Untold History of
Sports in America, presented by One Day University Athletes who
(27:09):
Cheat School of Humans
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place,
world history examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome,
(00:26):
and we're back on the unsold history of sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Today we return our focus
to the world of women's athletics by examining the Women's
World Cup and the discourse that followed it. We cover
a lot in this episode athletics and sexuality, gender roles,
and of course sports bras. Here's Matt. Last time we
(00:54):
discussed Michael Jordan's and I briefly mentioned his Gatorade commercial
in which Americans were encouraged to quote be like Mike.
A few years later, Gatorade in Jordan, they did another commercial,
and this time Jordan was co starring with the women's
soccer player Mia Hamm. It was Jordan's and ham and
they were trying to outdo each other in a number
(01:16):
of sports of basketball, soccer, fencing, tennis, judo. And meanwhile,
a punk rock version of the song anything you Can Do,
I Can Do Better was playing in the background. So
I'm watching TV in which is when this commercial came out,
and which was also the year of the Women's World
Cup in the United States. I'll tell you that story
(01:38):
in a moment. I'm watching TV with my sister and
her daughter, Eva, my niece, Eva was probably six years
old then, and this commercial comes on and we're watching
it Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm and my niece looks
at me and says, who's that guy with Mia? Well,
I think this was a sign of just how much
(01:58):
the American sports landscape changed in the year. Today, we're
going to explore the story of the Women's World Cup
as a way of gauging the state of American women's
sports at the turn of the twentieth century. And I
want to save some time to discuss the issue of
sport and sexuality as well. And I'll use one of
(02:21):
the players on that women's national team as the focus
of our conversation. But let me begin by saying something
else about Title nine, which we discussed a few lectures ago.
I want to raise an interesting issue here. As you know,
Title nine and the push for women's sports programs. This
was part of the larger second wave feminist movement. But
(02:44):
let me point out how Title nine and the women's
sports revolution, how it's different from most aspects of the
modern feminist movement. The goal of the feminist movement was
to bring equality of opportunity for women, but the goal
was also to integrate women more fully into American society.
Integrate them into society with in Women should have the
(03:07):
same opportunities as men to go to medical school and
law school and to run a business or any other organization.
And men and women should participate in business and politics
and higher education together. They should not be sex segregated
arenas well. Title nine and the larger women's Athletic Revolution
(03:27):
are about equality of opportunity, but they are not about
sexual integration. They are based on the idea that women
deserve and need, to use a well known phrase, a
league of their own. So even as the rest of
society was moving in a more sexually integrated direction, sports
(03:48):
remained that they remain to this day, segregated by sex
when it comes to sports. Title nine is not part
of the larger push for integration in American society. Kind
Of ironically, what Title nine demands to use the language
of that Supreme Court case plus e versus Ferguson which
(04:09):
we talked about a long time ago. Title nine demands
separate but equal, and so some critics of Title nine
suggests that what Title nine and the Women's Sports Revolution
have done kind of a weird way, is actually reinforce
the idea of the difference between the sexes, rather than
(04:30):
subverting that idea. Men and women are fundamentally different, and
we institutionalize that difference and our sex segregated sports. I
suppose this is one of the paradoxes of the feminist
movement with regard to sports. It asks for equality of
opportunity with regard to sports, but it does not ask
(04:52):
for integration in sports, and so some people argue that
we should no longer segregate sports by sex. You may
think that's a ridiculous idea. Of course, sports need to
be segregated bisex, but remember it wasn't that long ago
that American society mandated that sports be segregated by race,
(05:13):
and that seemed completely natural to many people too. I
think it's an interesting idea at the very least. Mia Ham,
the soccer player, certainly raised awareness about women's athletic capabilities
by playing and excelling in women's soccer. But what if
she had not played women's soccer? What if she had
just played soccer, you know. In other words, what if
(05:36):
she had played on a sex integrated national team and
scored goals against men, would her cultural impact have been
even more significant? So I raised that issue is introductory
food for thought, you know, in an intellectual appetizer, But
that's a ridiculous phrase. Anyway. Having said all this, it's
(05:58):
hard to think of Mia Hamm and American female soccer
players having a more significant impact than they did playing
in the Women's World Cup. Maybe the most remarkable moments
in all of American women's sports history came in the
very last year of the twentie century, and I think
(06:18):
that symbolic It took a while. In other words, the
moment was the Women's World Cup, and specifically the final
game at the Rose Bowl between the United States and China.
And if you were aware of the history of women's
sports in this country, it was hard to watch this
game and not see it as a vindication of the
(06:40):
passage of Title nine past twenty seven years earlier. Title
nine had triggered an explosion of girls soccer programs all
over the country, and the women who made up the
ninety nine World Cup team they had been born into
the sports world that Title nine had helped create. Historians
are not supposed to deal in in counter factuals, but
(07:01):
I'm here to tell you that without Title nine, that
mega moment probably does not happen. The star of the
American team was Mia Hamm. Mia Hamm was the discovery
of the one time US national coach again named Anson Dorrence.
This is a guy who coached at the University of
North Carolina women soccer and Dorance first saw Mia Hamm
(07:23):
play when she was fourteen years old, and he said
it was like watching someone who had been shot out
of a cannon. She outran, out maneuvered, out competed women
who were four or five six years older than she was.
At age fifteen, mia Hamm became the youngest woman ever
a girl really to play for the U S national team,
(07:46):
and then she played collegiately at u n C. Mia
Hamm of the University of North Carolina to four straight
n c A championships between and many still regard her
as the greatest women's collegiate player ever. And mia Hamm
demonstrated that she was probably probably the best women's player
in the world at the Women's World Cup, which was
(08:11):
the first women's World Cup, although in the Women's World
Cup was not technically called the World Cup yet FIFA,
which is the governing body of international soccer, they thought
that the prestigious title World Cup should only apply to
the men's tournament, so instead this one women's tournament was
(08:33):
named after their sponsor. It was called the Eminem's Cup.
The Eminem's Cup was in China, and Chinese fans attended
the matches in huge numbers. The popularity of women's soccer
in China was actually quite shocking to the American players.
I mean, women's sports in China were just much bigger
(08:54):
than they were in the United States. And so in China,
the US players were celebrities. People packed the stands, they
clamored for their autographs. Sixty thousand people were in the
stadium watching the US defeat Norway two to one for
the Eminem title. It was the first world championship in
(09:16):
soccer of any kind for the United States men, women,
youth teams, whatever, the very first. So the team returns
to the United States conquering heroes, and there was nobody
at the airport to greet them. You may have watched
some of the recent Women's World Cups. There has been
(09:38):
a ton of energy and excitement around these tournaments. Don't
think for a minute it's always been like this. It
was the opposite. The victory barely received mention in the
US press. The standard line is that Americans didn't start
to care about women's soccer until the World's Cup. But
(10:01):
actually it was in that women's soccer began to take
off in the United States, and this was at the
Olympic Games in Atlanta. Men had been playing soccer at
the Olympics since nine, now almost a full century later.
In women's soccer made its debut at the Games, and
(10:21):
at these Olympics, the US captured gold by defeating China
two to one in the final. The nine gold medal
game was not televised live in the United States. NBC
did not think that people were interested, but seventy eight
thousand loud, screaming fans were there for this game, which
(10:45):
was played at the University of Georgia's football stadium in Athens.
And included in the crowd were the organizers for the
nine Women's World Cup, which was scheduled for the United
States three years later, and these organizers saw the number
of people in the stands. They that they sensed that
women's soccer was becoming popular, and so they took a chance.
(11:10):
The matches for the ninety nine World Cup were scheduled
to be played in in smaller college soccer stadiums five
thousand to fifteen thousand seats stadiums, the types of stadiums
on college campus where you see soccer often played today.
But after seeing almost eighty thousand people come out for
the gold medal final in the World Cup, organizers decided
(11:34):
to play their matches in football stadiums, big stadiums. They
were optimistic that people would come, but there was tremendous
skepticism about this. And as the World Cup got closer
and the organizing committees and now it's the ticket sales
were pretty strong. The organizers were literally accused by members
(11:58):
of the press of lying about the numbers. You are
lined to drum up and drift when we all know
there isn't any. The soccer columnists Jamie Trekker, a man,
he posed a question that indicated what he thought was
going to happen. He wrote, what if they threw a
World Cup and nobody came? But what dubious reporters like
(12:21):
him did not realize was how hard the US women's
team had been working to publicize this moment, as opposed
to the male athletes and most big time team sports.
The members of the women's soccer team, they were actively
working to sell the game of soccer and the World
Cup tournament. In the spring of they traveled the United States.
(12:43):
They put on soccer clinics, They played exhibition matches that
they met with the fans after the game, signing autographs
and selling tickets. The members of the US women's national team,
they were both athletes and promoters. It was grassroots marketing.
(13:05):
After the break Bedlomb at the Rose Bowl, there's a
great story from the opening day of the World Cup.
(13:26):
The members of the U S team. They're in their
bus heading to the Meadowlands in New Jersey, the football
stadium where the NFL's Giants and Jets play, and they
had no idea how many people were actually going to
show up for the game. And as they neared the stadium,
they got stuck in a tremendous traffic jam that the
kind you saw on Sundays in the fall for NFL games.
(13:50):
And they realized that this great crowd was there to
see them, and then the bus pulled into the stadium
parking lot and there were tens of thousands of soccer fans.
They were they were tailgating, they were barbecuing, they were
playing impromptu games of sock and very significantly in this
crowd were thousands, tens of thousands of young girls. Like
(14:14):
we talked about with Jackie Robinson and his meaning for
Black Americans. Think of the power the meaning of this
moment for young American girls. You two can play sports
and people will come and cheer. The US won that
first game in the Meadowlands, and then they continue to win.
There was a rolling momentum to that team in the
(14:37):
summer of and there was a lot of pressure on
the team. They were the draw. If they lost, the
momentum of the whole tournament might sputter. But they kept
winning and they made it all the way to the
final game played in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California,
a college football shrine, one of the temples of American
(15:01):
men's sports, was in People packed the stadium and they
were treated to one of the greatest, one of the
most tense sporting events in American history. The game was
scoreless after regulation, and then scoreless still after sudden death overtime,
so the game went to penalty kicks. The American goalie
(15:23):
Brianna Scurry, she managed to stop one of the five
penalty kicks from the Chinese team, and so the American player,
Randy Chastain, she stepped to the mark and drilled the
ball into the goal for the win. And it was
bedlam at the Rose Bowl. And you know, in the aftermath,
one could not help but think that this was a
(15:45):
sign that women's sports had finally arrived in the United States,
although in the immediate moment you weren't really thinking, wow,
this is a transcendent moment in women's sports in American history.
It really you were thinking, wow, that was one of
the greatest games I've ever seen in any sport. And
(16:05):
those were the immediate national reactions for a couple of
days at least. But then the moment that everyone seemed
to want to talk about was when Brandy Chastain converted
the winning penalty kick and she ripped off her shirt
and joyous celebration, and in doing so, she unveiled the
(16:26):
most famous sports bra in American history. All Right, this
might sound weird, but let's intellectualize the sports bra. The
sports bra is a key character in the women's athletic
revolution that we've been talking about, and like the women's
sports Revolution and Title nine, the sports bra also has
(16:49):
its birth in the nineties seventies. As the rates of
female participation in sports began to go up and up,
there was no accompanying growth in gear and equipment for women,
so female athletes had to improvise. Female athletes wore shoes
made for male feet a small male feet. They wore
(17:11):
uniforms that had been designed for teenage boys. I think
these facts reinforced the idea that men played sports and
women were interlopers. Women would have to adapt. I told
you about Katherine Switzer in the nineteen sixty seven Boston Marathon.
When Katherine Switzer ran the New York Marathon a few
(17:32):
years later nineteen seventy four as an accepted official entrant,
she ran the twenty six miles in a tennis dress
that was the most comfortable women's athletic gear that she
could find. And one of the biggest problems for female
athletes was the absence of a functional bra that women
could wear while being athletic nineteen seventy seven a female
(17:56):
marathon or named Lisa Lindall. She grew tired of bouncing
breasts while she ran, and so she asked a question,
why isn't there a jock strap for women? Men can
find they're bouncing testicles in a jock strap, why can't
women do the same for their breasts? And in that
year seven, her ingenious solution was to literally take two
(18:21):
men's jock straps, cut them and sew them together. She
called it the jock bra, and it worked for her,
so she began to market it. Sporting goods stores objected
to the name jock bra, so she changed it to
the jog bra. Now it's usually just called a sports bra.
(18:44):
And now here in we have Brandy Chastain tearing off
her US jersey and revealing her sports bra, and there
was controversy. People were scandalized. Some American newspapers actually refused
to print photographs of that iconic moment because it was
(19:05):
a picture of a woman and a bra. What was
so strange was that these were newspapers that often ran
ads with photographs of women in bras on their pages,
ads for bras, But somehow that woman in that bra
was unacceptable. Some male newspaper columnists. They wrote about this moment.
(19:27):
They insisted on seeing it not as an athletic moment,
but as a sexual moment. I vividly remember a sportswriter
for a newspaper around me. He wrote an article saying
that he was half intimidated by Brandy Chastain's muscles and
half turned on by her breasts. People are entitled to
(19:48):
their opinion, but come on, man. The inability to see
that moment as anything other than an expression of athletic exhilaration.
It It baffles and and disappoints me. To somehow set
shalize this moment as if it were a sort of
strip tease was ridiculous. But having just said that, let's
(20:15):
switch gears at the end here, let me complicate this.
I want to use this moment to briefly explore a
trend or a phenomenon in American sport history. The trend
of what I think is fair to call the the
sexualization of the female athletes. I believe it's a fair
word to use, other than the fact that I don't
(20:36):
think sexualization is a real word. But you get my
drift here. And to discuss this, let's go back to
Brandy Chastain, she of the game winning penalty kick and
the famous sports bra. But let me tell you about
some other photos of Brandy Chastain. Brandy Chastain appeared in
some other photographs that summer photos taken over just weeks
(20:57):
before the World Cup kicked off, and these photos appeared
in something called Gear magazine. I had never heard of it.
In these photographs, Brandy Chastain was naked when she was
wearing soccer cleats but nothing else. In one photo, her
oiled up body was curved around a soccer ball. In another,
(21:18):
she was bent over with a big smile on her face,
and she held two soccer balls that covered her bare breasts.
And Brandy Chastain defended these photographs by saying that she
was proud of her athletic body. She had worked her
butt off to get in shape, and she saw nothing
wrong with showing it off. Some other people argued that
(21:38):
photographs like those they undid much of the good from
events like the World Cup. They said, those are not
photographs of an athletic woman. Those are photographs of a
woman displaying her body for the male gaze and Gear
magazine was marketed towards men, and these photos they kick
(21:59):
started a pretty intense conversation about a trend, a trend
in which more and more female athletes were were posing
naked or opposing scantily dressed, presenting themselves as both fit
and sexual. And sometimes these images were in sports magazines,
sometimes they were in men's magazines like Gear or Details
(22:22):
or Esquire, and sometimes they were in magazines like Playboy.
The phenomenon of female athletes posing nude or or presenting
themselves as beauty objects this is part of what the
feminist scholar Jan felsh And called, way back in nineteen
seventy four, the feminine apologetic. She argued that because sports
(22:46):
have historically been so closely linked with men, female athletes
who do not want to be thought mannish, or or
or or masculine, they have felt compelled to play up
and emphasize their their femininity, their their female heterosexuality, and
female athletes do this in a number of ways. Felshin
(23:08):
said it might be through dress or grooming, that the
wearing a makeup while playing sports, or the feminine apologetic
might come in the form of stripping off one's clothes,
having your photograph taken, allowing oneself to become an object
of of of of the male gays male sexual fantasy.
(23:31):
Maybe the best example of this feminine apologetic at work,
and slightly different from what Brandy Chestain did. Maybe the
best example comes from the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.
During World War Two, some baseball men were looking for
extra revenue and they created a professional baseball league for women.
(23:52):
And one of the demands of the All American Girls
Professional Baseball League was that the female players had to
emphasize widely accepted feminine beauty standards. So the players didn't
wear traditional baseball attire. They wore pastel colored short skirts
while they played the game. Every member of the league
(24:13):
had to attend charm school classes where they learned so
called feminine manners. They were taught how to apply makeup,
how to do their hair so they might be more
visually appealing to the spectators. In this league, if a
batter came to the plate and was not wearing lipstick,
the umpire sent her back to the dugout. The league
(24:34):
was fairly successful. It lasted from the beginning of the
war until nineteen four, though it ended up folding because
of lack of interest. TV had something to do with it,
but I think so did the fact that the dominant
feeling in nineteen fifties America was that real women don't
play baseball. But those rules about makeup and charm school,
(24:56):
I want to emphasize that they were exactly that they
were the rules. If those female athletes wanted to play baseball,
they were re fire to dress and ornament themselves in
those ways. What people were critiquing here in and in
this era was an American culture that seemed to be
more interested in female athletes in various states of undress
(25:20):
rather than female athletes performing strenuously in various sports. Now,
the argument that is often given in defense of images
like those is that, look, this is publicity. Women's sports
are so undervalued that female athletes need to do whatever
it takes to drum up interests, and sex sells sports.
(25:42):
And there is definitely something to the idea that women's
sports need all the publicity they can get because they
are under appreciated in the United States. But the critics say,
here's the problem with saying that sex sells sports. Studies
suggest that's not really true. What is true is that
(26:04):
sex sell sex. Do young men who look at female
athletes in Playboy magazine? Do they find these female athletes hot?
I suppose they do, But do they find them more
interesting as athletes? And are they more likely to watch
them compete? The data says no. I'm not sure there
(26:24):
is any discussion that I have in my sport history
courses that prompts more disagreement from my students than this
critique that I'm just offering up the feminine apologetic. A
lot of my female students, in particular, they object to
me even raising this issue and suggesting that these images
might be in any way problematic. Maybe I possess an
(26:48):
outdated mindset. Could it be, of course, it could be
that I wonder what you think about this issue. That's
all for now. Next time on the Untold History of
Sports in America, presented by One Day University Athletes who
(27:09):
Cheat School of Humans
Host
Matthew Andrews
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