Title IX Girl

I remember watching the Los Angeles Olympics at age twelve with my mother. In particular, I remember watching the first women’s Olympic marathon. I remember some commentators suggesting there were questions about whether it was bad for women’s “reproductive organs” to run that distance. I remember my mother agreeing, and saying that women should not be doing sports at all. As a child, I had no experience to disagree and I was used to adults telling me what was right and wrong, so I agreed.

During the next two years of junior high P.E., I try so hard to do what the coach tells me to do. I don’t want to be the “last-picked” kid who is so uncoordinated that I make any team I’m on lose, which was always my experience in elementary school (though I did try hard to avoid any contact with the ball or game play, if possible). I learned the rules for all the games and got A’s on written exams. But then came the timed exams for pullups, pushups, situps, and the dreaded one-mile run. They were so awful. I got terrible pains in my shoulders from the one-mile run and couldn’t keep running. I walked most of it and felt terribly embarrassed. Coach insisted she could tell me what I was doing wrong, and she did point out that I was clenching my fists. Once I stopped doing that, my one-mile run time improved considerably. But I still hated it.

In high school I found out that if I joined the swim team, I could get P.E. credits such that I never had to run that mile again. This seemed a great trade off, even if I had to wake up at 5 a.m. every morning for the next three years. I had always been an early bird and I figured I would love swimming. I didn’t count on my mother insisting once more that as a girl, I shouldn’t be doing intense exercise, that it was bad for my “female parts,” and in addition, that the regulation team swimsuit that I had to buy was totally immodest and that she would not help pay for it. In the end, neither she nor my father came to any of my games and they have persisted to this day in sending me links to various articles on-line that purport to prove the dangers of racing in marathons or other events.

For context, let me add that my mother is 40 years older than I am, and in many ways is more my grandmother than my mother. I have heard from many women friends who are just a few years older than I am that I am very lucky. I was born in 1970, which was on the cusp of all the advantages that came to women born post Title IX. I had the chance to be on a women’s swim team when it was brand new, even if people like my mother were still getting used to the idea. I didn’t participate in any college sports nor did I get any athletic scholarships (I had a very good academic scholarship for undergraduate and graduate studies, so no harm there). I also was in my thirties when it was almost normal for even amateur women to sign up for marathons, no need to prove anything. I started doing triathlons in 2004, and I’ve had a great experience in local and national competitions.

It is often sad to me that my mother’s generation and even the one after her did not have these advantages. It’s sad even think of them as “advantages” as not as just plain normal. My mother is very small and she is not athletically minded. But who knows? One of my sisters was a gymnast. Maybe my mother would have enjoyed that, or dance, even if she hadn’t wanted to do running. She is now one of the fittest 94 year-olds that you will meet. She always made sure to put walking into her daily routine. She knew it made her happier and it made her feel better physically. In her seventies, she used to put three grandkids on a sled and pull them with a rope around her waist for a couple of miles on snowy roads. She walks every day.

And yet, I still mourn for her loss and the loss of so many women in not being encouraged to participate in sports of any kind, being told that it would be bad for their bodies, and also that it was somehow “unfeminine” to compete.