The joy of sport, the challenge of competition, the privilege of motion and sweat: influences of the girl in that picture - lesbian athletes - Column

Melpomene Journal, Spring-Summer, 2002 by Cate Terwilliger

I am looking at my mother, circa 1953, beaming from a black-and-white photograph of her summer softball team. Businesses around Rushville, Illinois, had ante'd up to buy uniforms -- the local high school didn't have girls' teams, let alone uniforms -- and the players look snazzy in pleated trousers and short-sleeved jerseys with dark snaps and piping. Each is wearing a baseball cap bearing a blocky "R" and the exuberant grin of young athletes fully in their bodies and unweighted by adult responsibility.

For women of my mother's time, those carefree days were short-lived. Two years after her team's picture was taken, my mother was married. She gave birth to my brother 14 months after the wedding; I followed in 1958. We had come from her body and it would never be solely hers again; the energy she had given the sports in which she excelled was now given us. At 22, she was committed to the role society and biology had scripted for women of her generation.

Yet, I have never stopped thinking of her as the girl in that picture, largely because I love the idea of her fully in her own life: pre-matrimony, pre-maternity. I wish I could have known her then, ala "Back to the Future;" I think we would have been friends. When I study that image of the girl who became my mother, time reels back and casts long -- five decades now since that picture was snapped -- and I remember what connects us, what she has given me.

Mother's continuing example

My father also was athletic, but it was my mother's continuing example that most encouraged me to be a competitor. She had grown up playing sports with neighborhood boys, and it showed. I was proud of how she threw a ball (never like a girl), proud that she sweated without apology (or make-up), proud that she could (and still can) beat me in tennis. She was strong, quick and tough, leaving stereotypical notions of femininity -- delicacy, weakness, passivity -- on the bench like a heavy sweat suit. I saw in her natural athleticism a certain freedom, an organic recollection of unfettered girlhood.

I took a longer and more circuitous route to that freedom, one I could not anticipate and would never have invited. As a teen, I was not as secure as my mother, who has a pretty face and feminine form. Long-legged and flat-chested, I looked androgynous and felt awkward -- except on the court. Like most tomboys, I suffered through puberty, reluctant to trade the physical freedom of childhood for a constricting definition of mature femininity. In sports, I found refuge; in other athletic girls, kindred spirits. Relegated to the wings of a high school drama that starred jocks and cheerleaders, we belonged to each other.

In retrospect, life along the margins was good practice for what turned out to be my future as a gay woman. Granted, the dismissiveness that greeted girl athletes in the early '70s (we had uniforms, but formed our jersey numbers with masking tape) was a mild rebuke compared to the overt hostility that visits open lesbians. But I've come to see the experiences as related: Female athleticism and lesbianism are points along a continuum of nonconformity that challenges conventional ideas of womanhood.

Consider that not so long ago athletic women were viewed as a serious rent in the nation's social fabric. Katherine Switzer was nearly manhandled off the course by a race official while running the then all-male Boston Marathon in 1967. The idea that a woman -- a woman -- had the stamina and strength to complete a feat that challenged the hardiest of men was an affront to deeply rooted ideas of male superiority. Switzer had stepped out of her place as a woman into a position previously reserved for men.

The hostility she engendered is difficult to imagine 35 years later, when the sheer number of women playing sports, from the recreational to the professional, has forced a shift in attitude. Athletic women are still nonconformists, but they no longer elicit such nastiness -- at least as long as they pay obeisance to the goddess of conventional femininity. For whenever females intrude upon the power or privilege previously accorded only men, they must demonstrate they are still "real" women and, hence, mitigate the threat they pose to a patriarchal social order.

I recently watched "Fly Girls," a PBS biography on the WASPs -- the Women Air Force Service Pilots -- who, during World War II, ferried fighter planes from factories to bases in order to free male pilots for combat. They also served as flight instructors and towed targets at which troops in artillery training fired live ammunition.

Thirty-eight of the women died in the line of duty. In one instance, sugar was found in the gas tank of a downed plane, suggesting sabotage by male soldiers who didn't take kindly to women encroaching on their turf.

Not surprisingly, newsreels of the day sought to disarm the perceived threat by emphasizing the femininity of these new pilots. "Even before they got a chance to take the polish off their nails, it's out to a dusty Texas drill field with them" said an announcer narrating a film clip of the women doing chin-ups. "Right away, the air force wants to get a little muscle on those pretty arms." Another newsreel featured a shot of a pilot putting on make-up in her cockpit.