Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world history examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. After the break Bedlomb at the Rose Bowl, there's a great story from the opening day of the World Cup. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. After the break Bedlomb at the Rose Bowl, there's a great story from the opening day of the World Cup. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 Cheat School of Humans