Prologue
Imagine, if you will, a father and son on a city bus. Or it might be grandfather and grandson; the boy is young, no more than six. They sit together near the front. At the next bus stop, an older adult male steps on, and, spying the young boy, greets him in a friendly tone: "Hiya, tiger! Who's your team in the World Series?" Shyly, the little boy whispers "The Dodgers," and the two adult men, strangers mere seconds before, laugh together. A three-generational conversation about baseball has begun, initiating the youngest participant into a lifelong cozy world of man-talk about sports.
Familiar to most of us. Now, let's imagine a mother and daughter are on that bus; the six-year-old girl uncomfortable and itchy in her required school uniform skirt. At the next stop, an elderly woman gets on, sees the girl, and shouts "Hey there, cub! Who ya favor for the Superbowl?" Heads turn. A crazy lady. The mother covers her daughter with a protective arm. Passengers aren't acculturated to view this moment as three generations of athletic women, or as a normal conversation bringing a strong girl into the fold. At best, the strange woman remains that: a stranger, socially marginal in her odd behavior. We still don't expect women to initiate, share, participate in, or pass along sports literacy. In other words, except on a few annual occasions, we don't expect women to know the score.
Very early in life, girls get left behind and left out of a swath of popular culture expected from most males. It's even considered "cute," or appropriately feminine, when a woman doesn't understand the rules of a game or what just happened on the field. Male companions interpret the action for her―or, intent on the outcome, the score, explain what happened afterwards.
Not knowing the score puts women and girls at a disadvantage. It extends to not knowing the score historically (who were the top women athletes of all time, and how many broke records set by men?) or financially (what are the salaries for the best women players in the world, and why doesn't the women's national soccer team earn as much as the men's?) Ignorance of the score is a social justice disadvantage, too, as we seek ways to undo centuries of racism. Not knowing how long and how totally America's sports were segregated limits athletes' alliances now. Throughout Jim Crow segregation, many Black athletes' scores weren't even entered into official state statistics, making it impossible to be certain (and pass on) just who had the best season or set time-shattering records. Taking the image of "the bus ride" further: we know that women athletes often endured long bus trips to away games, while better-funded men's teams flew and enjoyed better hotels. But we don't hear as much from the Black women who always rode in the back of the bus; or how Black women athletes, denied a bed at whites-only motels on the road, slept on the hard seats of their own team buses the night before away games.
As a women's history professor, I was already "keeping score" of how far women had come, how well or poorly we were doing, how far we had to go. Too many of my own students started college not knowing when women won the right to vote; year after year, this never changed. Among the many student-athletes I taught, more than half were female, but none could name five female athletes who had won gold at the Olympics. None had heard of an African-American woman named Toni Stone, who had played pro baseball along with men in the Negro Leagues; no white students knew about segregated baseball, for that matter. Though many of my students in Washington, D.C. were pursuing careers in government, or were interns on Capitol Hill, they were unfamiliar with Title IX law and with past rules that kept Congresswomen from using the sports club available to male elected representatives.
But I hadn't learned any of that either, in high school. As a young girl, I would not have had an answer for which team I favored even if Toni Stone herself got on my bus in L.A. and challenged me to a friendly woman-to-woman conversation about sports. We had all been left out of sports literacy, not encouraged to learn the names of Black or white sports heroines, and allowed to feel it didn't matter if we were ignorant in this area.
There was a score to settle, and I invented a class to launch the conversation. The class was called Athletics and Gender. I taught it for 25 years.
