29 JUNE 2022between the first- and second-year classes at the women’s college, to
play a game recently invented by a physical education teacher up the
road in Springfield named James Naismith.
Never before had women played a sport like this, in teams. The entire
student body turned out to watch the first women’s basketball game.
Nine women on each team stood on the f loor wearing bloomers,
billowy pants that cut off below the knee and dark stockings pulled
up below. Some rolled up their long sleeves to the elbow on thick, dark
fabric of their blouses covered by a square sailor-style collar.
The game went on for two 15-minute halves—as per the rules of
Naismith’s game, which Berenson had adjusted for her female stu-
dents. Unlike his version, her play-
ers couldn’t dribble more than three
times, and running was cut down by
having players stay in certain zones
of the f loor. They shot a soccer ball
through two peach baskets pinned
to a backboard made of chicken
wire. The cheering and screaming
of the spectators was a high-pitched
sound I do believe no one had ever
heard before and was deafening,
Berenson remembered later.
The students were hooked.
Each year, the championship
game between the school’s best two
classes turned out almost the entire
campus. Berenson became known
as the first expert on women’s bas-
ketball. But despite the student
body’s enthusiasm for the game,
Berenson refused invitations for
intercollegiate play. She believed
allowing women to play sports as
men did—competitively—would
become “a menace to real physi-
cal education for women.”M
EANWHILE, ACROSS the country, the women at Stanford,
founded in 1891 as a coeducational university, took it
upon themselves to set up competitions. Some under-
graduates organized a basketball game against Cal in- The teams played in front of a crowd of 500 women—men
weren’t allowed to attend—at the San Francisco Armory. Playing by
Berenson’s rules, the game ended in a 2–1 Stanford victory. All points
were scored on free throws.
But rather than embrace women on campus and the new sport’s
glimmer of gender equality, Stanford and other schools retreated, fear-
ing that the increasing number of women enrolling were making the
schools too feminized. The school limited female enrollment to 500.
Later, when the school was bleeding money during the Great Depression
and having to turn away thousands of qualif ied female applicants each
departments when it became clear that this law
would also apply to sports programs.”
It didn’t take long for sports to become the
rallying point to raise support for the new law
of the land. While chauvinistic administrations
could devise excuses for the lack of women faculty
in an English department, funding for school
sports was different. “What is so crystal clear
about athletics is, you look at these budgets, and
if women get 1% of what the men get, it’s such a
clear case of discrimination,” Ware says.
Controversy erupted. Men’s coaches and ath-
letic directors claimed equal budgets for men’s
and women’s sports would spell the end of men’s
sports as we know it. Many schools failed to act
until regulations were finalized in 1988, covering
athletics and all programs in higher education.
O
N A SPRING day in 1893, students at
Smith College in Northampton, Mass.,
filled the gym, dressed in their
school colors. Senda Berenson, the
director of physical education, had set up a match
5
TI 0TL
E^
“THE INITIAL
SUPPORTERS
[OF TITLE IX]WERE (^) JUST AS
SURPRISED AS
THE ATHLETIC
DEPARTMENTS
WHEN IT
BECAME
CLEAR THAT
THIS LAW
WOULD ALSO
APPLY TO
SPORTS
PROGRAMS,”
SAYS WARE.