This week, I had two readings to complete. The first is chapter two of Futbolera. One quote I found to be important from this reading comes when they are talking about how physical education experts sought to limit women’s sports participation to specific sports, saying, “Once again, physical education experts showed the depth of their ignorance in regard to women’s anatomy and musculature. Frequently, in cautioning women against developing large muscles, writers used hyperbolic comparisons, such as women exercising to the point of having muscles like Hercules.” Here, we get to see how a desire to protect traditional femininity lies at the heart of this movement to prevent women from participating in football. By comparing the potential muscle development to Hercules, a figure indicative of peak masculinity, the women who attempt to participate in the sport have their entire identity as women put into question. This sort of label then works to stigmatize the sport in general to a point to where it is easy to rally support against women’s participation in general. The fact that such ignorance can be weaponized to such a heavy degree is so disheartening to see and really shows how murky and contentious of an era this was for women’s sports.
My second reading for this week, “Here’s the Football Heroine”, echoes this sentiment with American women to a degree when they are talking about how women in America had to play the game. In the article, they say, “This newspaper article reveals the methods that women and girls used to play football, firstly playing in secret and avoiding male eyes, secondly, by adhering to social norms about appropriate behavior, and finally, by modifying the sport.” Here, the usage of various adverbs such as “firstly” throughout this sentence works to establish the fact that there are a number of barriers that women had to clear in order to participate in football in a socially acceptable way. Then when looking at what had to be done to make it work, you realize just how stigmatized women’s sports were in America. They couldn’t play football how it was supposed to be played, they couldn’t act how you are supposed to normally act when playing, and finally, they couldn’t even show it to anyone. This sort of secretive nature is an indictment of the sad state of women’s sports in this era of American sports history.
