Women in sports. Women s sport in the United States, which has a population of 268 million, reaches far beyond its borders and has had an enormous influence on women s sport around the world.
Two sports that originated in the United States, basketball and volleyball, are now among the world s most popular sports. In addition, the United States has become a major training center for athletes from many nations and Title IX, the 1972 U.S. legislation that has been credited with encouraging much of the growth in women s sports in the United States, has also helped to influence thinking about women s sports elsewhere in the world.
U.S. companies are also major producers of sports equipment and clothing. Women s experiences in the sporting life of the United States defy neat historical generalizations. In part this is because women never constituted a single group, and their behaviors and attitudes never conformed to a single general pattern. Women s roles also varied across time, connected as they were to the broader ideological and economic contexts. Sometimes women were active participants in the modern sense in a sport, while at other times they were behind-the-scenes producers or promoters.
Occasionally as well, women were consumers of sports, or spectators, and there were times when perceptions of women s physical and moral natures, affected sporting values, codes of conduct, rules, and even whether an activity was a sport or not. Indeed, the perceptions of women as the weaker sex helps to account for both the designation of bowling as an amusement when women engaged in it in the nineteenth century and the development of the divided court in basketball.
Even today fans and the press persist in requiring basketball to be preceded by women s. Women play women s basketball, while men simply play basketball 13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org . 2.4.1.