Even for the casual observer, it has been a triumphant year for women’s sports. Spring witnessed the highest-profile women’s college basketball tournament ever, with Iowa’s Caitlin Clark becoming the sensation of March Madness. The WNBA, after 26 seasons, is finally gaining traction on TV and attendance was up 16% this season. In soccer, the Women’s World Cup was a rousing success and the domestic league, the NWSL, just concluded its 10th full campaign. In September, American tennis sensation Coco Gauff, 19, won the U.S. Open women’s singles final with a stirring comeback, in a match that earned higher TV ratings than the men’s final. Ten days earlier, 92,003 fans paid admission to watch the University of Nebraska women’s volleyball team win a match at the school’s football stadium, the largest attendance for a women’s sports event in history
It’s easy to assume that these gains are the inevitable product of Title IX, the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. Two generations of Title IX legislation has given women’s sports a vital seismic jolt, but it took a confluence of events in the 1970s to make today’s breakout possible. That messy, eventful decade was decisive in bringing spectator sports into the cultural mainstream, with the advent of “Monday Night Football” on prime-time network television, the dawn of free agency and more extensive integration within sports.
The biggest change of all saw women moving into sports in unprecedented numbers, not only as athletes but as coaches, administrators, sportswriters and spectators. It was overdue. By the 1970s women had been exercising their right to vote for 50 years, but they were still fighting for their right to exercise. Many states prohibited organized girls’ high school sports, and most colleges were barren of opportunity for female athletes. In 1970 the University of Michigan’s annual athletic budget was $1 million for men and $0 for women.
In the late 1960s, a group of female physical educators asked the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), then a men’s-only organization, to sponsor women’s championships. When the NCAA refused, the women formed the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), which in 1971 began offering championships in seven sports. The founders of the AIAW were idealists, envisioning a purer experience than the pressure-filled, overly commercialized world of men’s athletics.
A year later, in June 1972, Congress passed the Education Acts, including Title IX, which outlawed sex discrimination in education. The law wasn’t written with sports in mind, but it gradually became apparent that the federal government would broadly interpret the legislation to include school athletics. Yet for more than a year, there was little awareness of the immense implications. In September 1973, when Billie Jean King routed Bobby Riggs in “The Battle of the Sexes,” the tennis match was widely covered but none of the news coverage mentioned Title IX. It wasn’t on the radar yet, even for most women in sports.
That changed six weeks later, at the AIAW’s first Delegate Assembly, held in Overland Park, Kan. On the first day of the conference, Marjorie Blaufarb from the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (AAHPER) gave a talk titled “Solomon’s Judgment on Women’s Sports.” It was a clarion call about the government’s broad interpretation of Title IX, declaring that Congress would “not subsidize sexual inequality … or unequal educational programs.” Blaufarb’s message galvanized the women at the assembly, who represented 278 colleges. Christine Grant, the women’s athletic director at the University of Iowa, recalled, “This was a meeting of women who loved sport, who had been denied their fair opportunity in sport, and who realized that they were being given an opportunity to be in on a revolution. It was electric.”
The coming years would see a dramatic growth of women’s sports, but Title IX wasn’t the only catalyst. Billie Jean King was integral, banging the drums for equality, founding the Women’s Sports Foundation and launching the slick monthly magazine women Sports, along with her then-husband Larry. Before the decade was out, she founded coed World Team Tennis and helped finance the International Women’s Professional Softball Association. The AIAW was invaluable as well, steadily building an infrastructure of women’s sports.
The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal featured the first women’s basketball competition, with future Hall of Famer Billie Moore coaching the American team to a silver medal. There had been celebrated women athletes before, dating all the way back to Gertrude Ederle, who swam the English Channel in the 1920s. But in watching Olympic basketball that summer, American sports fans were exposed to something new: a women’s team they could rally around. The result was a dramatic increase in attendance at women’s basketball games at places like the University of Texas, under coach Jody Conradt, and the University of Tennessee, under coach Pat Summitt.
In the early 1980s the NCAA executed a hostile takeover of the AIAW, and today the organization celebrates the gains of Title IX, despite having spent much of the ’70s fighting against it. To the NCAA’s credit, its deep coffers and widespread exposure allowed women’s athletics to reach a much broader audience.
But it was the AIAW that created a nucleus of highly committed, highly motivated women who were determined to advance the cause of women’s sports. Along with the opportunity afforded by Title IX and the trails blazed by Billie Jean King, they created a revolution whose impact can still be seen today. At the beginning of the 1970s, only one out of every 27 girls in American high schools was involved in competitive sports. Within a generation it was one in three, and today it’s two in five. As the historian Kathryn Jay explained, “Sports had become too important to American society to exclude half the population.”
That change resonated far beyond sports, changing the country itself. Today, thanks largely to the hard-fought gains of the ’70s, sports enjoys an increasingly central role in our Balkanized and narrowcast society, as perhaps the last substantial piece of common ground in American popular culture. It wouldn’t have been possible without the women.
Appeared in the November 18, 2023, print edition as ‘How American Women Claimed Their Place in Sports’