There’s lots I could share about the impact the death of Gloria Steinem on September 2 has had on me, but today, I want to focus on two lessons I learned from following Steinem’s writing, advocacy and philosophy and how they are connected with the work we share on the Fit is a Feminist Issue blog.
The first was use your voice. Steinem wrote and spoke a lot about women’s agency, even if she didn’t use those words in the second wave of feminism. It’s hard to imagine but back in the 50s and 60s, women couldn’t get their own bank account, a credit card, or a loan without their husband’s signature. Steinem along with other feminists of her generation, spoke up and out about the egregious policies in existence that treated women like chattel.
Speaking up in the US led to the implementation of Title IX, in which sex discrimination could not be used to bar women and girls from physical education or access to federal funding for the same. There were women’s baseball teams during the war, and they all but disappeared after WWII when the men came back and real baseball could be played again. It wasn’t only women in tennis who got a boost when Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in 1973, it was the whole idea of sports-minded women getting their due on the playing fields and the locker rooms.
The second lesson I took from Steinem was to take up space. In sports, we see discrepancies regarding the prize money, sponsorships, and salaries for women athletes, who have not been kept pace with what men have enjoyed for the last 40-plus years, even though women’s hockey and football (soccer), to name two sports, have been taking off, with growing audiences, followers, and secondary school programming.
In 2021, the NCAA faced a media storm during March Madness, after men were given state-of-the-art training spaces complete with equipment, and women got a few yoga mats and a single dumbbell tree. In case you thought there were fewer women’s teams compared to men competing for the space, there were 64 teams each.
Using your voice and taking up space are often considered being too loud or too much. In the fitness world, it can mean seeking pay equity, and challenging sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia in sport policy and programming. It can mean taking apart the patriarchal beliefs that deny women full access to global playing fields. It can mean not letting things slide one more time because the system says no.
It can be seen as looking for more than we deserve. And yet, we have just as much right to be in the gyms, lifting those weights; in the pool, swimming those lengths; or on the court, landing those shots with tennis balls, soccer balls, or basketballs.
MarthaFitat55 still has her Why Not? poster from 1975 but lost all her copies of MS Magazine in a flood in 2001.
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