Forcing Femininity

After reading “Gender equity and geography bees” in the Title IX blog, it made me pretty angry, but at the same time it made me think about how the world has improved (in terms of women’s sport) over the past eighty years. One of the main things I was thinking about was the female apologetic and how it has been around throughout the past eighty years.

I was not alive eighty years ago, but I have read multiple articles this week about women’s sport and how it was viewed many years ago. “The World-Beating Viking Girl of Texas” is an article about Mildred “Babe” Didrickson. She was an extremely accomplished athlete in the 1930’s in pretty much every sport there was; however, her main sport was track and field. At the 1932 Olympics she won two gold medals and a very debatable silver medal. Although her accomplishments are incredible, that is not what I want to talk about. What I found interesting, yet terrible, about the article was how it kept talking about how Babe had a masculine figure and how she could also cook and sew. I found this to be very demeaning of women, but that was just how it was back then. This great athlete was being asked if she could sew and cook; what does that have to do with winning gold medals? Nothing. But the fact that those kind of questions were asked shows the female apologetic. Babe was not apologizing by showing her femininity, but the media was almost forcing her to appear extremely feminine by asking her questions that were considered feminine qualities at that time.

Another article I read was about the rules of conduct in a women’s professional baseball league. These rules made the female apologetic very easily visible. The first rule states, “ALWAYS appear in feminine attire when not actively engaged in practice or playing ball.” (Women and Sports in the United States 59) Just by reading this it is easy to see that in the 1940’s and 1950’s, even professional women athletes were told to look feminine when not engaged in their sport. This is again the female apologetic almost being forced upon women. These women did not have a choice whether or not to wear slacks in public, they were told if they did not wear a dress, they would be fined and possibly suspended.

This leads me to the geography bee which was discussed in the Title IX blog. One of the reasons the writer gives for the girls “possibly” not doing as well as the boys is that they are in “a time when girls are ingesting different messages about what it means to be a girl (and) when being smart is not as highly prized as being pretty.” This statement could be true, but it could also be false. Either way, the point is that the female apologetic is still out there and now it affects young girls as well. If little girls think that being pretty is more important than being smart, there is something clearly wrong with the world. This is why I feel that we need to get rid of the female apologetic; ridding the world of this mindset would benefit both women and men. Women should not have to act feminine if they do not want to, and they should not feel like being feminine makes them more “likable.”