| Abstrakt: |
Scholarship on the 1970s ‘women’s movement’ in the USA has grown in recent years. However, this area has yet to fully incorporate women’s athletic experiences. This paper brings together these two areas of scholarship through analysis of women’s experiences playing professional football in 1970s America. Women athletes articulated little connection between football and the larger feminist campaign for corporeal autonomy and equality and some pronounced a distinctly antifeminist identity. My intent is not to force the feminist mantle on these women or to contest their self-descriptions. Rather, I seek to locate their experiences within the larger women’s movement using historian Anne Enke’s idea of ‘contested space’ (Finding the Movement, 2007). Drawing on interviews with 13 women on three different teams during the 1970s, I argue that while women football players did not explicitly alignwiththe feminist movement, they were apart ofthe larger revolution in women’s social rank. Football players fought for the freedom to be physically active in public, and to gain all of the positive attributes that sport can offer. It is therefore imperative that we take seriously women’s sporting participation and locate it within the broader social context of the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
