The age of modern sports. Historians have labeled the period from the 1890s to World War I as the Progressive era, largely because progress was the goal of contemporaries, especially members of the urban middle class.
Achievement did not always match rhetoric, but many women did see their positions and the quality of their lives enhanced. Some urban working women, for instance, earned more pay and improved conditions, and perhaps not surprisingly, some of the industries that employed women organized, first, calisthenics or physical culture classes and then team sports to promote personal health and worker efficiency.
Such programs became more widespread after the turn of the century and by the 1920s individual companies and regional industries had multiple teams in sports such as basketball, bowling, tennis, baseball, volleyball, and eventually softball. Among the results were good advertising for the companies and competitive opportunities and even, on occasion, additional income for the athletes.
Another group of women whose lives came to incorporate opportunities for competitive sports were the upper-class women. In the 1870s and 1880s such women had joined clubs, social clubs, country clubs, and then sport-specific clubs, just as had their brothers and husbands. They also engaged in sports in colleges and, importantly, on their vacations or extended stays in Europe. By 1900 seven of these women competed in their first Olympics, in Paris, and despite the enduring opposition of the prime mover behind the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, women consistently competed in the Games thereafter, albeit in small numbers and in socially acceptable sports such as tennis, archery, and even figure skating by 1924. The Progressive era history of middle-class women s sporting experiences is more complicated.
Especially before the turn of the century, they did experience considerable latitude in forming sport clubs and organizing competitions and appeared to gain a degree of physical and personal freedom to sport similar to that enjoyed by their working and upper-class sisters.
Indeed, they initially popularized the newly created sports of basketball and volleyball, and it was the rapid spread of such sports, as well as field hockey, cycling, and tennis, that encouraged their teachers and recreation supervisors to form associations and write rules. In men s experiences, it was precisely such associations that were critical to the promotion and expansion of modern sports.
However, many of the women who came to control sports for girls and adults, especially in institutions such as schools and colleges, had accepted the warnings of the medical profession that unfettered athletic competition would harm female participants, physically and psychologically, and detract from or even diminish their femininity. Consequently, in the 1890s, women physical educators began to limit sport contests, initially by changing the rules of some games, such as basketball, and eventually by altering the very nature of contests.
By 1920 school and college sports were often played not in contests between teams representing their institutions, but in play days or sport days, in which the convened teams were broken up and the players assigned to mixed school teams. By the 1920s the conservative approach of women physical educators was quite distinct from, indeed, out of sync with, the attitudes and expectations of many other people.
The United States was experiencing its first mature burst of popular consumerism, which was buoyed by a fun ethic and a relatively expansive economy. Clubs and teams for women proliferated, in part as more institutions, from urban governments to churches to saloons, sponsored teams or provided facilities. Improvements and declining prices of sporting goods, as well as the increasing popularity of sports spectating and sports as entertainment also spurred the organization of leagues, both amateur and semi-pro. Beyond the pale of physical educators, the latter provided underground opportunities for middle- class athletes.
After 1929 the Great Depression disrupted this sporting boom, but it did not end it entirely. In fact, the popularity of industrial sport likely peaked in the 1930s, and sports such as softball and bowling became extremely popular among women. Women s Olympic competition also gained more popular support, in part because of great performances by athletes such as Mildred Babe Didrikson and in part because support continued to diminish for the mythology of the negative physical and biological consequences of athletics for women.
Significantly as well, women continued to enter nontraditional roles, a trend that became more pronounced as World War II began. After 1941 more and more women took jobs that had once belonged to the men who went abroad to fight. Even professional baseball opened its doors to women via the ÀÍ-American Girls Baseball League financed by Philip Wrigley of chewing gum and Chicago Cubs fame. The All-American Girls Baseball League began play in 1943 in mid-size cities in the Great Lakes region.
The athletes were not, to be sure, the first professional women athletes in the United States. In the modern era that honor likely belongs to female distance walkers in the 1870s and 1880s and rodeo competitors in the twentieth century. Nor were they the only women professional athletes of the decade.
After 1949 the Ladies Professional Golf Association organized, offering 15,000 in purse money spread over nine tournaments. Five years later, women golfers could earn 225,000 a year on the LPGA tour. In the 1940s as well, an even more significant movement developed in African American colleges. Track and field teams were training at places such as Tuskegee Institute and Tennessee State, and these colleges would produce the athletes that would integrate U.S. women s Olympic teams and revolutionize the contests and the records.
By the early 1960s African-American athletes such as Wilma Rudolph ran record-pace after record-pace, opening doors for other black women and paving the way for Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith Joyner, among numerous others. Other sports such as bowling and tennis also integrated in the post-World War II years 13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org. The success of women s tennis, however, did little to help the fortunes of women s professional team sports.
Women s professional team sports achieved popularity for the first time in the 1990s, particularly in basketball and football soccer. This popularity has been asymmetric, being strongest in the U.S certain European countries and former Communist states. Thus women s soccer is dominated by the U.S China, and Norway, who have historically fielded weak men s national teams. Despite this increase in popularity, women s professional sports leagues continue to struggle financially.
The WNBA is operated at a loss by the NBA, in the hopes of creating a market that will eventually be profitable. A similar approach is used to promote female boxing, as women fighters are often undercards on prominent male boxing events, in the hopes of attracting an audience. Today, women participate competitively in virtually every major sport, though the level of participation decreases in contests of brute strength or contact sports.
Few schools have women s programs in American football, boxing or wrestling. This practical recognition of gender differences in physiology has not impeded the development of a higher profile for female athletes in other historically male sports, such as golf, marathoning, and ice hockey 17, www.usa.usembassy.de sports women.htm To sum up all the given information, it should be said that the Americans even can be called partisans of a number of colourful sports that are unlike those in other countries.
The most popular sports are American football, baseball, basketball, bowling and etc. Most games are shown on television, and the camerawork is so skilful that the thrilling events can be followed even if you know nothing about the game. A lot of people are keen on sports, both professional and amauter. Nowadays there are a lot of possibilities for different people to participate in sports for healthy people and for disabled ones, for men and women, children and grown-ups. Every person can choose a definite kind of sport according to his taste.
At present a great number of various clubs, centres and leagues are founded to help people with their choice. If to speak about women in sport, it should be said that women s sports include amateur and professional competitions in virtually all sports. Female participation in sports rose dramatically in the twentieth century, especially in the latter part, reflecting changes in modern societies that emphasized gender parity.
Although the level of participation and performance still varies greatly by country and by sport, women s sports have broad acceptance throughout the world, and in a few instances, such as tennis and figure skating, rival or exceed their male counterparts in popularity. There are also several organizations in the USA which give a possibility for disabled people to look at their lives in another way or show them that their lives are not over yet. 3.