Female gladiators: Gender, law, and contact sport in America

In 1972 the United States Congress enacted Title IX which prohibited gender discrimination in educational settings. Although the legislation itself excluded contact sports, women and girls were undeterred by any legal limitations of the law, and its enactment seemed to change females' attitude towards sports which society had previously deemed too strenuous or violent for girls to play. After 1972, inspired by Title IX, women and girls began to demand access to contact sports from which they had historically been excluded, and when the leagues continued to bar girls because they were not boys, the girls went to court, asking permission to join the teams. Although Title IX could not help the girls legally, it nevertheless triggered many lawsuits. The Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution and the Equal Rights Amendments of state constitutions instead provided the legal mechanisms that courts ultimately utilized to open the doors for these athletics. Many in American society, however, still resisted having girls in the dugout and in other spaces that tradition defined as "male." This opposition caused lawsuit after lawsuit in jurisdiction after jurisdiction to open first one sport and then another until the courts had ordered equal access to all culturally significant sports.; This dissertation provides a close reading of the published legal decisions in which school-aged girls attempted to gain access to the contact sports (defined by Title IX or the league administration) of baseball, basketball, boxing, wrestling, ice hockey, football, and soccer. It also examines attempts to make field hockey co-ed. By analyzing the language of each decision and how each judge contributed to the discussion of sport and gender equality engaging the courts and the country, it establishes that while Title IX provided the social catalyst for change, the Equal Protection Clause was the actual legal force responsible for changing the gender of contact sport. Further, using contemporary media sources as well as contemporary cultural and historical scholarship, this project argues that the cultural significance of athletic contests determined the intensity of the battle to keep these sports masculine.