Women in Sport: Issues and Controversies
by Greta L. Cohen
Paperback from Amer Alliance for Health Physical
ISBN: 0883148137
Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader
Paperback from Northeastern
ISBN: 1555536719
A spectacular transformation in women's sports has occurred over the past century in colleges, high schools, and recreational leagues across the nation. Gradual changes during the late 1950s and 1960s within the fields of women's physical education and amateur sport provided the initial energy for this transformation. But it took the rebirth of a grassroots feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s to catalyze the radical changes in women's athletic opportunities and attitudes toward female athletes. The assimilation of feminist principles into the broader popular culture solidified the belief that sport plays a positive role in the lives of girls and women. Political activists for women's rights codified this attitude with the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments, a law banning gender discrimination in educational settings, thus guaranteeing women's legal right to an equitable share of athletic opportunities and resources.
Though the sea change in American women's sports is evident in schools, the media, and local playing fields, scholars are still in the early stages of fully examining the causes and impacts of this historic change. Women and Sports in the United States brings together scholarly articles, journalism, political and legal documents, and first-person accounts that collectively explore women's sports in America, with emphasis on the post-Title IX era.
This book was published with the generous support of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University.
Kara Goucher's Running for Women: From First Steps to Marathons
by Kara Goucher
Paperback from Touchstone
Media Published: 2011-
ISBN: 1439196125
GET FIT, GET FAST, AND GO FARTHER WITH OLYMPIC RUNNER KARA GOUCHER'S COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO RUNNING FOR WOMENKARA GOUCHER is crazy, madly, head-over-heels in love with running, and she wants to help you feel that love, too. Whether you're just getting started or already a seasoned runner, this is the book that will take you to the next level. Kara Goucher's Running for Women contains her expertise, tips, and tricks targeted specifically at female runners to help you become a better, happier, healthier, and more fulfilled runner. She'll teach you how to:
· GET STARTED WITH THE RIGHT GEAR
· BUILD A SUCCESSFUL SUPPORT TEAM
· FIND THE RIGHT TRAINING PROGRAM FOR YOU
· OVERCOME PSYCHOLOGICAL SETBACKS
· BALANCE RUNNING WITH FAMILY AND WORK
· AND MUCH MORE
Designed to fit your busy lifestyle, Kara Goucher's Running for Women is packed with quick tips, pearls of running wisdom, and sample training schedules and nutrition plans, as well as sections dedicated to running during and after pregnancy, managing the special challenges of the female athlete's body, and maintaining a balance between sporting and family life. Kara Goucher's Running for Women is the ultimate guide for women who want to train for the gold or simply discover their personal best.
Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports
by Michael A. Messner
Paperback from Univ Of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816634491
In the past, when sport simply excluded girls, the equation of males with active athletic power and of females with weakness and passivity seemed to come easily, almost naturally. Now, however, with girls' and women's dramatic movement into sport, the process of exclusion has become a bit subtler, a bit more complicated-and yet, as Michael Messner shows us in this provocative book, no less effective. In Taking the Field, Messner argues that despite profound changes, the world of sport largely retains and continues its longtime conservative role in gender relations.To explore the current paradoxes of gender in sport, Messner identifies and investigates three levels at which the "center" of sport is constructed: the day-to-day practices of sport participants, the structured rules and hierarchies of sport institutions, and the dominant symbols and belief systems transmitted by the major sports media. Using these insights, he analyzes a moment of gender construction in the lives of four- and five-year-old children at a soccer opening ceremony, the way men's violence is expressed through sport, the interplay of financial interests and dominant men's investment in maintaining the status quo in the face of recent challenges, and the cultural imagery at the core of sport, particularly televised sports. Through these examinations Messner lays bare the practices and ideas that buttress-as well as those that seek to disrupt-the masculine center of sport.
Taking the Field exposes the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which men and women collectively construct gender through their interactions-interactions contextualized in the institutions and symbols of sport.
Michael A. Messner is professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. His previous books include Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity () and Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements ().
Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports
by Susan Ware
Hardcover from The University of North Carolina Press
Media Published: 2011-
ISBN: 0807834548
When Billie Jean King trounced Bobby Riggs in tennis's Battle of the Sexes in 1973, she placed sports squarely at the center of a national debate about gender equity. In this winning combination of biography and history, Susan Ware argues that King's challenge to sexism, the supportive climate of second-wave feminism, and the legislative clout of Title IX sparked a women's sports revolution in the 1970s that fundamentally reshaped American society.
While King did not single-handedly cause the revolution in women's sports, she quickly became one of its most enduring symbols, as did Title IX, a federal law that was initially passed in 1972 to attack sex discrimination in educational institutions but had its greatest impact by opening opportunities for women in sports. King's place in tennis history is secure, and now, with Game, Set, Match, she can take her rightful place as a key player in the history of feminism as well. By linking the stories of King and Title IX, Ware explains why women's sports took off in the 1970s and demonstrates how giving women a sporting chance has permanently changed American life on and off the playing field.
Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports
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by Michael Sokolove
Hardcover from Simon & Schuster
Amy Steadman was destined to become one of the great women's soccer players of her generation. "The best of the best," Parade magazine called her as she left high school and headed off to the University of North Carolina. Instead, by age twenty, Amy had undergone five surgeries on her right knee. She had to give up the sport she loved. She walked with a stiff gait, like an elderly woman, and found it painful to get out of bed in the morning.Warrior Girls exposes the downside of the women's sports revolution that has evolved since Title IX: an injury epidemic that is easily ignored because we worry that it will threaten our daughters' hard-won opportunities on the field. From teenage girls playing local soccer, basketball, lacrosse, volleyball, and other sports to women competing at the elite level, female athletes are suffering serious injuries at alarming rates.
The numbers are frightening and irrefutable. Young female athletes tear their ACLs, the stabilizing ligament in the knee, at rates as high as eight times greater than their male counterparts. Women's collegiate soccer players suffer concussions at the same rate as college football players. From head to toe, female athletes suffer higher rates of injury, and many of them play through constant pain.
Michael Sokolove gives us the most up-to-date research on girls and sports injuries. He takes us into the homes and hearts of female athletes, into operating theaters where orthopedic surgeons reconstruct shredded knees, and onto the practice field of famed University of North Carolina soccer coach Anson Dorrance.
Exhaustively researched and strongly argued, Warrior Girls is an urgent wake-up call for parents and coaches. Sokolove connects the culture of youth sports -- the demands for girls to specialize in a single sport by age ten or younger, and to play it year-round -- directly to the injury epidemic. Devoted to the ideal of team, and deeply bonded with teammates, these tough girls don't want to leave the field even when confronted with serious injury and chronic pain.
Warrior Girls shows how girls can train better and smarter to decrease their risks. It makes clear that parents must come together and demand changes to a sports culture that manufactures injuries. Well-documented, opinionated, and controversial, Warrior Girls shows that all girls can safeguard themselves on the field without sacrificing their hard-won right to be there.
Runner's World Complete Book of Women's Running: The Best Advice to Get Started, Stay Motivated, Lose Weight, Run Injury-Free, Be Safe, and Train for Any Distance (Runner's World Complete Books)
by Dagny Scott Barrios
Paperback from Rodale Books
Media Published: 2007-
ISBN: 1594867585
Now with a fresh design and thoroughly updated information, this nuts-and-bolts guide is designed specifically to address the unique challenges and rewards the sport presents to the fastest growing segment of the market--women runners
More than 10 million women across the country now identify themselves as regular runners. In response to the dramatic increase in the number of women in the sport, Dagny Scott Barrios and the experts at Runner's World have created this singular guide--now updated with 25 percent new material--where women will discover how to:
· train for any race, from a 5K to a marathon
· eat nutritiously and for maximum energy
· lose weight permanently
· deal with self-consciousness and body image
· run during pregnancy and through menopause
· choose the best clothes and accessories
· run anywhere safely
· prevent and treat injuries, especially those that women are most likely to encounter
With clear photographs, running sidebars, and testimonials from women runners of all ages and abilities, this comprehensive resource provides the most current practical advice available anywhere for women runners of all levels.
Bird at the Buzzer: UConn, Notre Dame, and a Women's Basketball Classic
by Jeff Goldberg
Hardcover from University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803224117
On March 6, 2001, the top two women's college basketball teams in the nation, UConn and Notre Dame, played what was arguably the greatest game in the history of the sport. When UConn's Sue Bird hit a twelve-foot pull-up jumper at the buzzer over national player of the year Ruth Riley in the Big East Tournament championship game, it marked the end of an epic contest that featured five future Olympians and eight first-round WNBA selections.Bird at the Buzzer re-creates this unique season with a detailed account of the games that led up to--and beyond--the tournament finale; profiles of the two coaches, UConn's Geno Auriemma and Notre Dame's Muffet McGraw; close-ups of the players who made the year so memorable; and, finally, an in-depth recap of the game worthy of being designated ESPN's first-ever women's basketball "Instant Classic."Author Jeff Goldberg shows us the drama on the court and behind the scenes as the big game pitted Riley and the upstarts from Notre Dame against what many believed was the most talented team in UConn history, under Hall of Fame coach Auriemma. A see-saw affair in which neither team led by more than eight points, the 2001 Big East championship game encapsulates the quintessential inside story of the individual talents and skills, team spirit and smarts, and the moment-by-moment realities of college athletics that made this season a snapshot of sports at its finest.(20110215)
Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sports
by Susan K. Cahn
Paperback from Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674144341
Today, there are women athletes who are media celebrities and a source of inspiration for many. But not long ago, being serious about sport was considered appropriate only for men and boys. Throughout the twentieth century, women's increasing participation in sport has challenged our conception of womanhood. Some celebrated the female athlete as the embodiment of modern womanhood, but others branded her "mannish" or lesbian. Ultimately, she altered the perception of sport as an exclusively male domain.
Susan Cahn's story of how sport has changed women's lives and women have transformed sport is an important chapter in the wider history of women's struggles to define their role in the twentieth century. For the women who dared to compete, participation in sport enabled them to expand the boundaries of women's activities and to claim that strength, skill, physicality, and competitiveness could be authentic attributes of womanhood. This is the legacy they passed on to the new generation of women for whom athleticism is becoming a way of life.
Crashing the Old Boys' Network: The Tragedies and Triumphs of Girls and Women in Sports
by David F. Salter
Hardcover from Praeger Publishers
ISBN: 0275955125
Crashing the Old Boys' Network is the first book to examine the intense, and sometimes hostile, debate about Title IX and its application to girls and women in all areas of athletics. The facts and figures are highlighted by spirited commentary from Billie Jean King, Donna Lopiano, Pat Summitt, Chris Berman, and many others. By using the commentary of well-known personalities and experts in a variety of relevant disciplines, this book uncovers the roots of this controversy at all levels of athletics. While many believe Title IX and gender equity to be applicable only to intercollegiate athletics, its reach touches girls in high school athletics as well. While not protected by Federal law, girls in youth sports, women in professional sports, and women in the sports media also suffer the negative effects of gender discrimination. While detailing many personal accounts and documenting a host of legal battles, the greatest value in this book lies in the successful examples it provides. Many opponents proclaim Title IX to be a grim reaper for football and men's basketball. The author provides examples demonstrating how Title IX and gender equity can be achieved with rational, well-designed plans of action.
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