Female Gladiators
Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America
How school-aged girls used the law to gain access to contact sports
Paper – $28
978-0-252-07584-1
eBook – $29.95
978-0-252-09120-9
Publication Date
Paperback: 06/25/2008
Series: Sport and Society
About the Book
Female Gladiators examines the legal and social history of the right of women to participate with men in contact sports. The impetus to begin legal proceedings was the 1972 enactment of Title IX, which prohibited discrimination in educational settings, but it was the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the equal rights amendments of state constitutions that ultimately opened doors. Despite court rulings, however, many in American society resisted--and continue to resist--allowing girls in dugouts and other spaces traditionally defined as male territories. When the leagues continued to bar girls simply because they were not boys, the girls went to court. Sarah K. Fields examines the legal and cultural conflicts over gender and contact sports that continue to rage today.About the Author
Sarah K. Fields is a professor in communication at the University of Colorado-Denver. She is the author of Game Faces: Sport Celebrity and the Laws of Reputation and coeditor of Sport and the Law: Historical and Cultural Intersections.Also by this author
Reviews
"Female Gladiators is the first book to examine the legal and social battles that won women the right to participate with men in contact sports."--Diverse: Issues in Higher Education"A compelling study. . . . A sound, grounded, meticulous, and careful reading of a thorny and heated issue."--Aethlon: Journal of Sport Literature
Blurbs
"Professor Fields makes a fresh and excellent contribution to the literature by suggesting that the intensity of opposition to female football and baseball players was not simply--as is conventional wisdom--a somewhat quaint paternalistic protection of the ‘weaker sex,' but rather due to the role of these major sports in promoting the American construct of masculinity and the desire to save these sports as a male ‘preserve' as gender roles are deconstructed."--Stephen F. Ross, Penn State University
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