Women's Sports: A Global History (265-0-20)

Instructors

Caitlin Fitz
847/467-2906
Harris Hall - Room 205

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L07: Mon, Wed, Fri 11:00AM - 11:50AM

Overview of class

From the multiracial maidens who ran eight-mile races across eighteenth-century London to Brazil's outlawed futboleras, female athletes across time and space have confronted, challenged, and transformed ideas about gender, race, class, and sexuality. Criticized (by women and men) for grunts that were too gross, shorts that were too short, and leotards that were too long, female athletes have been politicized for centuries. Would sports destroy girls' uteruses, condemn them to "bicycle face," perhaps even render them lesbians? Would female athletes blur gender lines, emasculating men while empowering ugly, ambitious "man-girls" with overwrought biceps? What if Black women beat white women? What if women beat men? And if women's sports were separate from men's, would they ever be equal?

Our Evanston location enables hands-on exploration of these global histories. We'll meet NU suffragist Frances Willard, who named her bicycle Gladys and urged women worldwide to ride their way to empowerment. We'll watch Olympic organizers respond in 1924 when NU undergraduate backstroker Sibyl Bauer became the first woman to break a men's world record. We'll learn what ensued at NU's Dyche Stadium in 1932, when sprinters Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes became the first Black women to qualify for the US Olympic track team. We'll play low-contact basketball, one of the only sports available to midcentury Midwestern girls (though it spread as far as Peronist Argentina, where the YMCA promoted it as a safer, more feminine alternative to soccer). We'll Jazzercize, exploring why some have characterized this global 1980s fitness craze—invented in Evanston by NU alum Judi Sheppard Missett—as part of a broader cultural backlash against Title IX. We'll also explore how tampons, sports bras, ponytails, and sex testing have shaped the global history of women's sports.

Learning Objectives

Learn to analyze primary sources; engage in reasoned and respectful discussion and construct thoughtful, evidence-based arguments from course readings and lectures; explore how female athletes across time and space have confronted, challenged, and transformed ideas about gender, race, class, and sexuality.

Evaluation Method

Participation; 3 short papers; oral history project (paper or podcast) in lieu of final exam

Class Notes

History Major Concentration(s): Americas, European, Global
History Minor Concentration(s): United States, Europe, OR by request

Class Attributes

Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
Historical Studies Distro Area
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity

Associated Classes

DIS - Kresge Centennial Hall 2-319: Thurs 10:00AM - 10:50AM

DIS - University Hall 318: Thurs 10:00AM - 10:50AM

DIS - Kresge Centennial Hall 2-331: Thurs 11:00AM - 11:50AM

DIS - University Hall 318: Thurs 11:00AM - 11:50AM

DIS - University Hall 312: Thurs 1:00PM - 1:50PM

DIS - Harris Hall L05: Thurs 1:00PM - 1:50PM