Interview: Dr. Bonnie Morris, on her new book, What's the Score?: 25 Years of Teaching Women's Sports History

In this episode, Brenda Elsey interviews women's history professor and author Dr. Bonnie Morris about her book What's the Score?: 25 Years of Teaching Women's Sports History. They discuss the impact of Title IX on women's sports, how teaching Title IX history has evolved since the 90s, the ways women have had more access to sports because of Title IX and who is still left behind. They also discuss some of her favorite guest lecturers and teaching memories.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Brenda: Welcome to Burn It All Down. I'm Brenda Elsey, and I'm so excited to be doing the interview this week, very appropriate to the 50th anniversary of Title IX, we have as our guest this week Dr. Bonnie Morris. She taught for many years a very important, well known women's history class that we're gonna talk about at George Washington University. She's currently teaching at Berkeley. She's the author of this new book that I have read, and I'm excited to talk about, What's the Score?: 25 Years of Teaching Women's Sports History. It is available just about everywhere, and was published I think just this past month by Red Lightning Books. So, congratulations, Dr. Morris.

Bonnie: Thank you. 

Brenda: I’m gonna start right away with a Title IX question. When you're with your students and you're talking about its importance, what’s your headline? What do you start with? 

Bonnie: Well, amazingly, most of the students are not familiar with the history of discrimination in sports. And I usually begin with, did you know that in 1972, women were not accepted at Princeton University? And beyond that, we go into the whole history of discrimination in sports. But originally, Title IX was passed as part of the education amendments of 1972. And it was intended to rectify a whole slate of overt discriminations against women and girls in high schools and colleges. So, there was bias against women entering law school, med school, grad school. You could be asked, “Why should we give a space to you? You're taking the place that a man deserves. You're just gonna drop out, get married, get pregnant.” Other schools had a quota system. So, Harvard and Yale, et cetera, only admitted two women for every three men, putting all the women in competition with each other for fewer spots and requiring that women come in with higher grades and scores.

We kind of begin with that. And then we look at how 99% of the sports budgets nationwide went to boys and men, leaving 1% for women, and that almost immediately, the idea of equality in sports was challenged by football advocates who said, take football out, and divide everything else equally between men and women. So, there was a joke that football is a third sex. And the rest is history. 

Brenda: You've been teaching this class that the book centers on for a long time. Do you feel like when you started, there was a different…Was there more resistance to Title IX? I mean, how have students changed? 

Bonnie: That's a great question. It's really fun to see how things change going through the whole history of this class. I started teaching athletics and gender in 1996. At the time, there was a lot of resentment toward Title IX from male students who misidentified it as a quota law and saw it as reverse discrimination that would take something away from men rather than equalizing access to opportunities for women. I even had a couple of conservative students who were women who had benefited from Title IX, but who said they didn't accept the idea of a government handout on principle. And that has changed hugely. It's just changed in every way. First of all, by now, we've had two generations of young men growing up with feminist moms who were veterans of activism, and they've heard stories from their own mothers about their limited athletic opportunities. They're very much aware that their grandmothers were cut out of sports in many ways, or they might have had moms who were Olympians or what have you.

There's also more acceptance from dads of daughters that there should be equal opportunity, and those fathers have been willing to be advocates. And that's changed the mood in the household with girls starting sports at an early age. What I have now that's really interesting are lots of international students who will enroll saying, gosh, we just don't have a class like this back in Istanbul or Belarus or Korea. And those are wonderful students who also keep me keeping up because they'll point out what's considered “female” here might be masculine somewhere else. I made a mild joke about how our culture believes that, you know, girls love horses, and that's an acceptable focus for a young woman. And my student from Mongolia stood up and said, no, wrong! Not where I am. It's very macho, a girl's not allowed. It's a sacred thing for men and masculinity.

So, we constantly look at what are American gender codes? How do they compare globally? Our have our attitudes changed because so many American women athletes have brought home the gold at consecutive Olympics. And now we have women bringing home more gold than men, and we love a winner in America, and has that lessened some biases. So yeah, in general, people are grateful for the opportunities, and they see all around them that women now outnumber men in the college classroom. 

Brenda: Do you think sports are more sexist than other sectors of society?

Bonnie: I do. I really do. I think they're sort of the last frontier of bias, aside from the really limited number of women directors we have behind the camera in Hollywood film. I think that's emblematic that both sports and the entertainment industry are America's big businesses. What is sort of the signature American industry typically is male dominated. The fact is, sports are also defined by the body. And for a very long time, it was just seen as sort of illicit to have men buying tickets to stare at women. It was seen as little better than prostitution, and women were shamed if they participated in a sport where they got hot and sweaty and their legs were bare and men were cheering, and that that was kind of immodest, in the same way it's considered dishonorable and immodest in many other countries now.

And I think that you also have a combination of spectator love of violence that's part of the rough sports of football or ice hockey. And we've been reluctant, on paper anyway, to see women hit and hurt, although that hasn't really interrupted intimate violence and domestic violence, has it? Nor have we removed all men who are guilty of those crimes from athletic celebrity. So we have a very mixed and contradictory set of attitudes in the United States. And what's really interesting to me is only recently have we started looking at traumatic brain injury in young men in peewee football, or the rate of predatory abuse of boys by their coaches.

Brenda: Yes, I think there are some members of Congress, in fact, that oversaw athletics programs – I'm speaking about representative Jim Jordan, whose involvement in Ohio State has never been reconciled with the survivors of that program who were abused. And that's a really important point to bring up. One thing that, you know, of course it's a piece of legislation. There's been ways in which it hasn't really been implemented, but I think a lot of what you're saying, we would totally agree with. It’s monumental changes in terms of numbers – a little bit less so for women of color. What does that gap between opportunities for sports between white women and African American women, Latinas, why does that keep on keeping on? 

Bonnie: That's a great question. There's several different factors. First of all, in terms of Latina women and girls, a lot of it is that there's a customary emphasis on being available to help with family responsibilities, older girls doing a lot of caregiving for younger siblings. So, coming home after school to be of service in the home. And that that has a very important value, but it tends to mitigate against girls doing after school sports or activities that would require a lot of practice time, travel time and evening time. That's very different than the issue for African American girls, where there might be more support for sports in school, particularly at historically Black colleges and universities, where there was fantastic women's track long before it was really elevated for white women, and the best track team in the country were the Tennessee Tigerbelles in the 1950s. But in terms of increasing opportunities for sports in all colleges, part of the issue is that many schools are landlocked, and adding sports for women where you already have like a determined set of teams for men comes up against a lack of green space, lack of funding to expand, having to share time with men in gyms that have been really set up as community spaces for guys and as a source of community pride.

These are all conditions that are in part about where people live, but there's something else too. A lot of schools, including Georgetown where I taught as well, evened out their spending on sports by adding women's crew. And that has been primarily a very white sport – need to be near water, a shell and a boathouse are very expensive. It's not a traditionally Black sport. The coaches often recruit white women who have already participated in other sports but haven't started rowing until they enter college. And the Women's Sports Foundation did a study a number of years ago that looked at the problem that crew did not resolve the issue of increasing opportunities for minority women.

Brenda: So, throughout the book, it's very clear that homophobia has played a really central role in creating obstacles and scrutiny for women's athletes. And I wanna ask, it's pride month, I know you've written about some disappearing spaces in the public sphere for lesbians. Where do you see sports right now in relation to the lesbian communities?

Bonnie: What a great question. We have Maybelle Blair coming out at 95, if I'm not mistaken, in the new League of Their Own film series, because there was so much pressure in the World War II era professional league to appeal to a mainstream public that couldn't afford scandal as Philip Wrigley introduced a women's baseball team while men were away at war. Lesbians have always been a mainstay of sports excellence, but have been asked to be silent about it. And the reasons are many. One is obviously we've taken a long time to come to accept lesbians as deserving of equality, justice, and contributing to our country in huge ways. But women's sports have also been cast as this wholesome, family entertainment alternative when men's sports are in trouble, when the headlines tell us about male athletes misbehaving, committing crimes, guilty of assault, gambling, drinking, womanizing, teams going on strike for millions of dollars. Onlookers, fans, sportswriters tend to move their gaze over to what women are doing and say, isn't it beautiful that women play for the love of the game? Let’s show more support.

But when you put that kind of pressure on women's sports to deliver clean-cut family entertainment, a lot of sponsors are hesitant to then back a player who's coming out and proud. Cameras don't always wanna linger over same sex couples holding hands at WNBA games. And I have to credit the players who have come out and who have been advocates, whether it's finally, you know, Billie Jean King or Layshia Clarendon, or obviously Megan Rapinoe. And what we need to do is look at the way that society has said in so many ways you can succeed as an athlete, but fail as a woman. And for many years girls, were “suspect” if they were simply talented at sports, in the same way boys were bullied and gay baited if they weren't good at sports. So, it's one of the most outstanding ways to look at homophobia in American society. If you're a boy and you don't do sports, you're gay. If you're a girl and you like sports, you're gay.

Sometimes that's about antagonistic attitudes about women moving into the male sphere or the expectation that girls be beautiful to look at in a certain way, versus the expectation we train young men to be warriors, and sports is kind of a surrogate for that. All of that is changing all the time. I certainly have lots of students who've talked about being harassed by a coach who uses homophobic language. And one of the biggest issues is trash talking, when you go play against a rival team and they use, you know, the term dyke as a slur. I certainly don't see it that way. I'm out and proud. But that can be a way of trying to demoralize a player. And I think the best film for people who were students of this phenomena is Diane Mosbacher’s Training Rules, which looks at homophobia and women's sports, just an outstanding film. And it centers around Rene Portland, now deceased, who was a coach at Penn State and would not allow lesbians on her team.

And it shows how even a school that has a non-discrimination statute can have a homophobic coach, because the athletic director looks the other way, or the students are afraid to complain. They don't wanna lose playing time or…We also have certain sports stereotyped as gay, whether it's, you know, softball or rugby. And so in the film, there's a lot of humor about how some heterosexual or closeted female athletes will go to great lengths to wear pink ponytail ribbons, or a lot of makeup, or a fake engagement ring – or a real one – to kind of make a statement about heteronormative femininity. And in some ways, this is also because we still see men as the primary audience for all sports. We do see lesbians supporting women's sports, and that actually intimidates some sponsors.

Brenda: How do you get students…Let me just say, how do you think people, that may or may not be your students, go from a place of kind of they're willing to think about an issue, whether it's Black Lives Matter, whether it's Title IX, and they're consuming sports and they get to a critical space. And how do you kind of see that moment where they become activists?

Bonnie: Yes. Yes. Yes. Wow. Okay. So, right now I have two different streams of students. I have students who come into class, you know, woke, activist, ready to be, you know, involved online in some kind of campaign. They're the head of a club, whatever, but they don't know the history. They don't have the backstory that would enable them to do a really good quick soundbite if they have the opportunity. And then in contrast, I've had students who are just dynamic, you know, Olympic athletes, but don't know how to write a letter to the editor because they just haven't had occasion where that's something they needed to sit down and do. I think often the turning point is when something happens right in front of you that's offensive and you wanna take action. It might have to be personal or something that happened to a teammate or really overt bias that affects your team.

I think for a lot of Americans, a turning point we can point to was March 2021, the NCAA March Madness tournament in Texas, where the men's teams had access to a fully equipped gym and the women basically had, you know, a chair and a towel. [laughs] That was such an obvious disparity. And because, you know, one player made a video and showed what it looked like, the pressure was on the NCAA to make rapid changes and issue a report and an apology. So, a big change since I first started teaching is the internet. And that permits very rapid even flash mob level activism. It can also be a weapon turned against athletes because we have athletes who are stalked or trolled by overzealous fans or critics.

But I would say that one of the things that I do in class is really take a day and talk about how technology has changed. Where do we get our information? What to do if you wanna report a hate crime, or if you feel you're being harassed. How to talk to your Title IX compliance officer? What not to do in sending an angry email. You know, write what you want and then write the revision and hit send. And I think that I've seen a number of my students graduate to becoming Title IX lawyers, filmmakers, people embedded with the Olympics, looking at homophobia and the Olympics. They've all gone on to great careers. And at the same time, I'm very poignantly aware that I have male students graduating into six figure incomes in sports, and that is not true for women, which is why we have somebody like Brittney Griner, languishing in prison in Russia, having played overseas to make ends meet. And these are news headlines that awaken people to the ongoing issue and lack of equality. 

Brenda: So, when we look at the guests that you've had, so, some of this book reviews or uses your class experiences to highlight different kinds of people involved in sports and advocating for women. Obviously you love all the guests in your, but who do you think has made the biggest impact on your students when they come to visit?

Bonnie: Wow. What a great question that no one has ever asked. I would certainly say that the one time I had Christine Brennan, you know, the eminent sportswriter who I admire so much, that was just a spectacular occasion. And there is no nicer person in the world. She's just in every way gracious, informed, approachable, and yet business-like, savvy, veteran of sports reporting. At the same time, bringing in my own PE teacher was a remarkable opportunity for my students and myself to hear what coaching was like in the first year of Title IX law, when there was no overtime pay for PE teachers who did after school varsity. My friend, Dorothy Hersh, who's a lacrosse ref, talked a lot about being harassed by dads as a referee and having homophobic slurs hurdled at her across the field. The interesting thing is that I've also taught students who were Olympians, pro sports athletes, but they usually wanted to be sort of on the down low. One guy made it clear that he played for the Dodgers, he had returned to Berkeley to finish his degree. He didn't wanna be treated any differently than anyone else. But on the last day of class, he did present me with a signed bat. And everybody's jaws dropped. Those are some outstanding memories. 

Brenda: And I think you have a very good friend of the show as a former student, Elana Meyers Taylor, who is a big flamethrower and we admire her very much. So, thank you for your part in creating such a human.

Bonnie: Well, that was just, you know, when Elana was my student, she was a star softball player. And that is a very important story, because adding the softball field was a way that George Washington University was in compliance with Title IX. They followed the prong of continually adding women's sports, but they had a very unique strategy, which not all schools can imitate. They bought a former two year women's college, Mount Vernon. And in acquiring that campus, they suddenly acquired a huge amount of athletic space, which became the women's softball field, the women's lacrosse field. And we had a state of the art softball facility added when the guys were still traveling over to Virginia to play baseball. So there was a lot of tension around that, which we addressed in class. And I watched Elana play softball. And then of course, the question for her was, you know, now what? When you graduate, what opportunities are there for you? And she was approached by somebody saying, have you ever thought about training for Olympic bobsled? And the rest is history. She's won more medals than any woman in bobsled and has challenged the color line in winter sports and is an advocate for the Special Olympics, became president of the Women's Sports Foundation. Still responds to every email I send her. And just a spectacular person. 

Brenda: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was really fun to watch her this past time and many years prior. Okay. From your book, one of the things for people to know is that there are discussion questions, resources, syllabi. So if you're one of those people out there that just started teaching sports, this is a great way to make sure your sports class doesn't actually mirror the sexism in sports itself. You don't make that mistake. Fellow professors that are out there, there are people who have written about this, and we've been teaching it a very long time. So, there's a number of questions I just wanna ask you, two of your own questions that are here. One of the ones is: name the first female athlete you admired.

Bonnie: Oh, wow. I would certainly say that I was hugely impressed by the Japanese women's volleyball team at the 1972 Olympics, because we all watch film clips of their brutal practices and the stamina that they had to endure that kind of training. I would certainly add, shortly after that, I was a fan of Martina Navratilova. I also would say that I was a very political little kid, and the first poster of a woman I had on my wall was Shirley Chisholm. So, politician, not so much as an athlete.

Brenda: Although being a woman politician, she did a lot of marching. 

Bonnie: That’s right. 

Brenda: Last one, because it's Title IX. One of the good questions you have in here, which is something I'm scared to ask my students: how would you enforce Title IX better?

Bonnie: One of the things I think that has to happen is that schools need to understand many of the things that help bring people to women's games are the most cost effective. It is free to advertise. Put up a poster. There is such a lag, in particular during like homecoming week or parents weekend. I've seen many examples where a school will send out a mailing to families – “While you're here, take in a men's game at a discount with this code.” And they promote the men's football game or the basketball game, ignoring the statistical reality that 60% of those parents are coming to visit a daughter, and one extra sentence or even eight words, you know, “and while you're here, also a women's game,” would equalize the promotion. So, promotion is low cost.

There should be every effort to steer away from cutting existing men's programs and justifying it as something necessary to put more money over to women, because that just creates hostility between the teams. There has to be some recognition that what student athletes need is also attention. Are they getting the same per diem? Are they getting transportation? Are all of those things on the big checklist fair and equal? I think a lot of students also want better enforcement of attention to the harassment and sexual predator concerns on campus with a compliance officer. There's too many examples where somebody who's known to have, you know, a reputation, and is kept on as faculty. Well, students have complained for years. So I mean, that's part of in enforcing Title IX.

And I think that the United States has to look in general at the issue that sports is a business, and if you allow students to be outstanding up until the minute they graduate, and then there are no professional opportunities for them, you're saying that men are now prepared to enter the workforce as star athletes. Women, now you go do something else. And that, that has to be challenged. So, the big problem for women is that they may be covered in their student years, but professional opportunities lag. And that includes that we don't always see women as athletic directors, as coaches, or as officials and referees. We tend to stereotype that men have more expertise and they're favored for those jobs. So, one of the big issues is who's being hired as an expert, and whom do we credit as an authority figure? 

Brenda: Well, let's hope that those are all resolved before we have to wait another 50 years for the hundredth anniversary of Title IX. Dr. Bonnie Morris, thank you so much for being at Burn It All Down. I encourage everyone to go and get What's the Score? You can also follow her work at her website, www.bonniejmorris.com. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Bonnie: Thank you. I am delighted.