Coming On Strong

Gender and Sexuality in Women's SportSecond Edition

Author: Susan K. Cahn
An updated edition of the pioneering study with a new chapter on the Title IX era's accomplishments and failures
Cloth – $125
978-0-252-03955-3
Paper – $25
978-0-252-08064-7
eBook – $19.95
978-0-252-09752-2
Publication Date
Cloth: 04/06/2015
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About the Book

Acclaimed since its original publication, Coming on Strong has become a much-cited touchstone in scholarship on women and sports. In this new edition, Susan K. Cahn updates her detailed history of women's sport and the struggles over gender, sexuality, race, class, and policy that have often defined it. A new chapter explores the impact of Title IX and how the opportunities and interest in sports it helped create reshaped women's lives even as the legislation itself came under sustained attack.

About the Author

Susan K. Cahn is a professor of history at the University at Buffalo. She is author of Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age and co-editor of Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader.

Reviews

"Coming on Strong is no less relevant today than when it was in the first edition in 1994, and those who previously missed Cahn should definitely take the opportunity to read her now."--Nordic Sport Science Forum

Blurbs

"Coming on Strong has long been the go-to book for the history of women in sport. Now it moves boldly into the twenty-first century. Assessing the enormous changes that have reshaped the sports landscape since the 1970s, it reminds us that the playing field is still far from level and challenges us to make the ongoing quest for gender equity in sport part of the larger struggle for social change."--Susan Ware, author of Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports

"In this classic study of gender and sports, historian Susan Cahn provides a thorough, readable, and insightful account of the challenges facing female athletes. . . . Throughout she asks pointed questions about the racial and sexual meanings of women's sports, including popular preoccupations with the threat of the 'mannish Amazon.' A carefully researched history, Coming on Strong also provides critical evaluations of the effects of Title IX, the emergence of women's sports stars, and the continuing role of gender in producing an even playing field for contemporary female athletes."--Estelle Freedman, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America

"A must-read, both for scholars of sport and for anyone who cares about sport as a still-unrealized site of social justice."--Michael A. Messner, author of It's All For the Kids: Gender, Families and Youth Sports

"The single best history of American women's sports ever written."--Contemporary Sociology