Feminism and Figure Skating

[dorispulaski]

Olympia, exactly.

Some more old ladies' war stories:
When I was a junior in high school, you went to the guidance counselor to sign up for your senior courses.

Mrs. Chapman looked at me and said, "I see, Doris, that you have done very well in your math and science courses, but I have to tell you that 96% of the women who graduate from college have to type and take shorthand in their jobs, and you haven't taken either."

"Furthermore, girls should consider before applying to college, that in coed colleges, if they are accepted, they are taking the seats of boys who will be drafted, and possibly die in the service."

Girls that got into UConn at the time were told by some professors that they should flunk their courses, because otherwise boys will go to Vietnam and die.

I am ashamed to say, I bought into this garbage. My only excuse is that I was young and naive. I went to New London Business College that summer, learned typing and shorthand, and got married in the middle of my senior year.

Curiously enough, I am still married to the same man, but after my youngest son went to first grade, I started college in 1972. I majored in physics rather than math, in part, because there were no women's bathrooms in the math building, and running in the snow to get to the bathrrom in the winter in northern VT is no fun at all.

I would hate for my granddaughter to go through that sort of crap.

I would hate for her even worse to be sold to buy food for the rest of the family, something that is happening routinely to young women in Pakistan this year. (It's a bad year there) As bad (and infuriating) as the US was in the 1950's and 1960's, it was a lot better than other places in the world, even today. But frankly, it was not "Happy Days" in any way, unless you were physically stunning or extremely talented in one of the accepted modes as a young woman. (I was (and am) neither)

[Olympia]

Interesting in that it is the most expensive, elitist sport called "the sport of Kings." The rules are the same because half the team is a horse, and women can learn to ride and jump as well as men. Strength is involved but mostly huge money. Pricness Anne met her husband at Olympics and her daughter Zara is an Olympian and will be in the future.

Interesting how elite and expensive it is to be a skater, especially ladies where girls need to be beautiful and thin to be called 'Ladylike." I will always prefer beautiful lines, but that is me. I think FS would be more popular if they decided sport first, art second. Although I'd watch it less, but that is just me.

I think it should be womens event like every other sport. The sexism in figure skating really is worth getting annoyed about, also the racism.

I've thought a lot about the racial aspect of skating. A lot of it, to be blunt, is more economic than racial. As you point out, skating costs money. There aren't many black athletes in riding either, for the same reason, and still very few in tennis, come to that. (Tennis will be the easiest to integrate, because one can learn at least the basics on a public court, as Arthur Ashe did.) For a long time, skating was almost exclusively Caucasian. It was great when Asians started taking part, and it's important to remember that a lot of the breakthrough actually happened in North America. as well as in Asia itself, with Yamaguchi, Kwan, Tiffany Chin, Naomi Nari Nam, McDonough, and Liang, Leung, and now Chan. Now we have to work on opening the door more widely for black and Latino skaters. However, in the current situation, where funds are not flowing in to the various organizations, subsidies will be harder to come by. There are other complex factors at work as well, though. Interestingly, baseball is currently going through a slump in the number of black players, though the number of Latino players remains high. Baseball just doesn't seem to be as interesting to the black community in the U.S. right now; audiences and aspiring athletes look to basketball and football instead. This is true even though a number of people in the major league baseball association, including Jackie Robinson's daughter Sharon, are active in outreach to black communities. So racism isn't always the primary issue, though one must always think of it as a possibility.

[jcoates]

Olympia and Doris, well said.

Too many people forget that political and social movements are often a response to real world problems. My grandmother, for example, was a top student in high school in the 30s and graduated early yet she had no real prospects. Her parents were elderly (she was a very late in life baby), her siblings all dead due to illness, and she was black. She was expected to look after her folks, put her own dreams aside (she wanted to be a teacher and a nun) and find what work she could. (BTW career aspirations to be a teaching nun may sound weird, but 80 years ago it was a guarantee of further education, public respect, and at least in the case of the order my grandmother wanted to join, a chance to travel.) Fortunately for her she lived in DC which at the time had a growing number of government jobs due to FDRs efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression, otherwise she would likely have only been able to get domestic work. She, like many other women, was both helped and hemmed in by a new career in clerical work. Helped because to have any job during the 30s was a blessing and hemmed in because her gender, her race and eventually her age acted as barriers to any serious advancement. She and my grandfather participated enthusiastically in the Civil Rights movement by the time the 60s came around, but the benefit would largely be lost for them. It was about passing out those benefits to the next generations. Before she died, my grandmother was so pleased to see to great strides women and African Americans had made over her lifetime.

The vast abundance of choices women have now (while certainly not as expansive as they should be) are far superior to what my grandmother ever had and are the direct result of more than a century of steadfast agitation by women's rights advocates in the US. Something like suffrage might seem like an easy issue to address now, but it took decades of state by state progress to get the government to acknowledge the right of women to speak for themselves at the ballot box. Women were beaten, jailed, assaulted, shunned and worse just for having the nerve to speak up and ask for better. That is, in my mind, the heart of feminism: to be able to speak up for yourself and to question the current rules and the authorities who impose them. To make your own choices.

Feminism or gender debates may be uncomfortable, but they are necessary. One can never assume that a social issue or its residual effects are a closed subject. Once you do, the problem will begin to rear its head again and we wouldn't even notice at first.

BTW, skateluvr, body and appearance issues in ladies skating have changed with the times. Dorothy Hamill, and many 1970s era women skaters had fuller figures and were certainly not excessively thin. That trend really began with female pair skaters from the gorilla and flea or one and a half teams. It eventually spread to singles once the jumping demands increased. That happened to coincide with the increase in preference for very thin women in the broader society. Sadly, that has led to some calling some young women fat who have any curves to speak of.

[sky_fly20]

imo, like most sports, figure skating is a male oriented sport
but as decades pass by, a lot of changes have happened not just in figure skating but sports in general
barriers are still there but there have been new stereotypes added as well , and despite the men's figure skating still popular, I do think
most people nowadays associate figure skating as feminine and for the ladies
thus men are mostly pushed into other winter sports like Hockey

and shouldn't this thread moved into politics ?
this is getting political, LOL

[Olympia]

Golly, jcoates, I'd love to have met your grandparents. When I think of that generation, I realize that we are, as the saying goes, dwarves standing on giants' shoulders. There are so many heroes and pioneers who got us to where we are today.

As for your point about changing standards for the appearance of female skaters, I remember that in 1976, when Dorothy Hamill won the OGM and was being groomed to be a professional star, she was told to get her weight down to 110. I think she's five foot three. For that height, 110 is a trim but healthy weight. She had muscles and a bit of substance and looked like a person, not a character out of Titania's court in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or a runaway from nursery school.

[dorispulaski]

jcoates, thank you for the great story about your grandmother.

And Olympia & jcoates, yes the appearance requirements for women in skating have changed (especially when I think back to Dorothy's era (and for that matter, Tai Babilonia & Randy Gardner). As you pointed out, the requirement for ultathinness didn't come until the pro years then. But didn't it perhaps really change with Peggy Fleming and her very popular TV specials following her Olympic win. For 3 years before Peggy, the ladies champion was Sjoukje Dijkstra of the Netherlands for three years running.

http://media.nu.nl/m/m1czsv6aprg4_505x800.jpg

When she retired, Sjoukje didn't even have to go ultrathin for Holiday on Ice:
http://www.holidayonice.nl/images/Sjoukje_Dijkstra.JPG

After Peggy, people were extremely critical of Trixi Schuba's appearance:

And yet Trixi was no larger than Sjoukje:
http://www.jacksonskates.com/assets/...20Schuba73.jpg


I wonder whether that wasn't because skating was visible to the general public only in Sonja Henie movies, during the Olympics, and occasionally on ABC's Wide World of Sports=the women only had to meet the appearance requirements to equal other female athletes: the drivers of drag racers (Shirley Muldowney) and women skiers like Penny Pitou. As skating evolved into a media event in the 1970's, the pressure on the women in competitive skating to meet show business requirements of thinness and appearance was greater, perhaps, down into the competitive ranks?

Elaine Zayak and Rosalyn Sumners were the first two US girls who I remember being heavily criticized for their weight in ladies' skating in the US.. (1982-1984)

[Tonichelle]

Here I thought we were talking sports (my reference to protecting male ego). I didn't live through the "horrors" bu had I been in AK all those years ago my independence would probably be greater than what it is today. Maybe on the east coast were under valued? But in AK we I guess had it made... then we got civilized.

[jcoates]

Toni does have a point. Women's suffrage, which is at the root of the development of rights and discussion of feminism in any circumstance, is largely an outgrowth of successes won in western frontier states in the US. Yes there were plenty of suffragists on the east coast and much of the intellectual basis for the movement was based there. But the actual initial success in changing laws to give women more guaranteed rights actually started in the west where less established frontier living left little room for many standard gender roles. Able bodied people were needed to do whatever work presented itself and women had more opportunities to be self reliant and to prove themselves to men.

[dorispulaski]

Even in Alaska, things weren't perfect. But yes, in the slightly more uncivilized days, I think things were better there than on the east coast.

In Kodiak, Alaska, where I moved shortly after I married (Mr. Ski joined the USCG because of the draft; it was his preferred form of service, and he was transferred to Kodiak) , in some ways, women had it made because they were a lot fewer of them than the men.

However, women's jobs were mostly limited to fish packing, secretarial, taxi driver, store clerk, waitress, bar girl, and prostitution. On the east coast, there would have been few if any female taxi drivers and female bar tenders. Those were men's jobs there.

My first job in Kodiak was with a construction firm as a secretary. I also did the payroll. It used to bite my butt that the "stake hopper," the teenage boy who held the pole for the surveyor, earned twice as much as I did, and I actually had to know something, whereas he just had to do what he was told. His job was to hold the surveyor's pole for sighting and to pound little stakes into the ground. There was no way I could qualify for that job; it was listed under Job Wanted Men.


When the construction job finished up, I took the civil service test and got a job as a stenographer with the Naval Investigative Service Office. I was refused a job with the Navy film office, because "I was too pretty." That was a shock. I had always been considered rather plain. However, with scarcity, comes lowered standards and (sometimes) increased opportunity.

I was fired from my job in Alaska with the Naval Investigative Service Office because I became pregnant with my younger son. I did not seek medical care until after I was fired, since my medical care would have been through the military. If I had sought medical care, I would have been fired sooner. Furthermore, when they fired you for being pregnant, they didn't hold the job for you for after you had the baby.

And you got to listen to the commanding officer tell you how lucky you were to be fired for being pregnant, and how his wife wasn't pregnant.

So yes, it was better, I think that Alaska was better than the east coast, though still not perfect.

For one thing, secretarial work made enough to pay you to do it. On the east coast, when Ski was mustered out, secretarial work in VT paid so little and required such a high level of dress to be maintained that it didn't pay to work if you had to pay for childcare.

A look at secretarial life in the era from a humorous perspective can be seen in this song from "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"

Already smitten with Finch, Rosemary fantasizes about life married to him.

New Rochelle, New Rochelle,
That's the place where the mansion will be
For me and the darling bright young man
I've picked out for marrying me.

He'll do well, I can tell,
So it isn't a moment too soon
To plan on my life in New Rochelle,
The wife of my darling tycoon.

I'll be so happy to keep his dinner warm
While he goes onward and upward;
Happy to keep his dinner warm
Till he comes wearily home from down town.

I'll be there waiting until his mind is clear
While he looks through me, right through me;
Waiting to say, "Good evening, dear.
I'm pregnant. What's new with you from down town?"

Oh, to be loved by a man I respect;
To bask in the glow of his perfectly understandable neglect.
Oh, to belong in the aura of his frown--darling busy frown.
Such heaven--wearing the wifely uniform
While he goes onward and upward.
Happy to keep his dinner warm
Till he comes wearily home from down town.

And that, mind you was considered an attractive fantasy.

Women's sports? What women's sports. There were none at my high school.

But you could skate on the pond in the winter; such wonderful, flying freedom!

[Olympia]

Yes, it's interesting to remember that the first state where women had the vote (in local elections, not national ones) was Wyoming. The second was Utah.

As for women's sports (thank God for Title IX, which truly did change the world), when I was in high school, we had one really talented athlete in our school. When I showed up for my first school-wide volleyball practice, I was taken aside and told that if this girl ran to my spot to make a play, I was to step aside and let her take the ball. This was all that the school could do for her, to accommodate her talent. I don't know whether she had the opportunity to try for any national track or swimming teams--maybe her family wouldn't let her--but there were no team sports in her immediate environment where she could have played up to her potential. Her only obvious chance to excel was to be allowed by the school athletic program to dominate any team she was on. I think she later became a gym teacher at the school. I can just imagine what would have been available to her today.

There are a lot of good things about the good old days, but in other ways, it's far better to be in the here and now.

[CdnSkateWatcher]

When I started work in the 1980's, it was still okay in my office for men to have a bit of a grab and grope with female staff, and for them to patronize and use "cutesy" terms for them. If you complained, your career was done - you were a troublemaker and "one of those feminists". Of my graduating class, in a highly literate and well-off city, I was the only female to go to University - the rest went to secretarial college.

Fast forward to 2011. My highly academic, and tall, skating daughter, has been presented with the following:
a) Go to college. You'll get a job there, and until you're married, you'll need to support yourself.
b) Don't work so hard in school. You're stressing yourself out; do you thinkyou need to see a doctor for your anxiety over school, and maybe some meds?
c) Why are you setting your goals so high?

These all from a school guidance counsellor ... and I've heard teachers giving the same messages to girls (oddly enough, the female teachers too).

As a skater, who has height and - though only a size 4 - curves:
a) You're too tall to skate. Judges like small dainty girls.
b) We don't make skating dresses for girls with curves very often.
c) You look weird out there on the warmup: skaters are supposed to be small and skinny.

So, although we've made progress, there are still stereotypes and messages to overcome.

[Scrufflet]

Whew! Did this thread ever strike a nerve! Thank you, thank you DorisP, Olympia and all. This thread should be required reading for males/females in a 9th grade course which goes through to graduation! I'm of your generation, Doris, and some of those things happened to me too. I wish that I'd not bought into so much of that garbage; it pains me to see young girls buy into it. Progress IS so slow; we sure can't take it for granted.

I have an interesting story about an ancestor of mine. I have an old family photo of a Caucasian woman circa 1880 in India, standing with 4 young Indian girls, some dressed in saris, one in English attire. We were puzzled until we found a note from an aunt saying that this was our great-great aunt Rosetta who spent 60 years as a missionary in the Punjab. She would go to the banks of the river and rescue unwanted female babies left there for the crocodiles. If she were here today, I think she would be amazed at the progress in some ways but astounded by the utter sameness in others.

So does this have anything to do with skating? Oh yeah! Every time I see a female skater try to vary from the "ice princess" script, I applaud! Athletic and enjoying her power and strength? More applause! Baby ballerinas and jumping beans evolving? Yay! Best of all, seeing Joannie Rochette, combining the grace, elegance with the power, strength and athleticism to just be a superb woman out there on the ice!

Thank you Doris!

[jcoates]

Olympia, a bit of trivia about Title IX...Billie Jean King actually wanted to be a pro baseball player while growing up. Her brother Randy Moffitt was a local star who went on to play with distinction in the Major Leagues. Since no team sport opportunities were available for young girls in the 40s and 50s, even in relatively progressive Long Beach CA, Billie's parents introduced her to tennis. They encouraged her to participate which is pretty remarkable given the staid atmosphere of the time. (BTW, my mom is exactly one day older than Billie and has told me about similar experiences.) Billie has said she always preferred team sports, which is why she values her doubles titles more than her singles ones. It's also why she started World Team Tennis as a sports league.

Lastly, for anyone who is interested on learning more about these issues, please check out the Women's Sports Foundation (incidentally also founded by Billie). They have a long history of honoring and promoting women in all sports and skating greats like Fleming and Kwan have long been supportive of its efforts,

[Olympia]

That's so interesting, jcoates. I knew about the pivotal role that Billie Jean played in the development of women's sports, but I didn't realize her strong preference for team sports.

Does anyone remember when she played Bobby Riggs in a match and beat him? There's a wonderful TV movie about it, When Billie Beat Bobby, in which Holly Hunter played King and I think Ron Silver played Riggs. The final scene showed a bunch of college girls in their dorm TV room watching the match, and on the screen little pop-ups told what became of these young women in later life ("became a CEO of..." and so on). The implication is that the progress in sports fed into the general spirit of opening horizons in the larger world.

There's precedent for this: many people feel that when Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball in 1947, it was the first great feat of the civil rights movement. Well, think about it. Suddenly Jackie Robinson was coming to people over the radio, and later on TV, in their own homes. The same was true for tennis. People who otherwise would not have been exposed to high achievers who weren't supposed to have that potential were being exposed to the greatest athletes of their time, and surprise! These athletes were black/women/Asian or whatever. And equally as suddenly, people who actually were black/women/Asian or whatever had role models.

Scrufflet, that story is heart-stopping. The saddest thing is that as you say, some matters have not improved since that time. But how admirable of your great-great aunt Rosetta, who got herself over there and lived a life of action on behalf of the girls who were in such danger. Treasure that photo!

And CdnSkateWatcher, good luck to your daughter in whatever she chooses to do. Remind her that she doesn't have to figure it out right away. An avenue may open up for her in a few years that isn't even apparent right now.

[seniorita]

I cant contribute anything to the thread but I just wanted to say thank you for all the posts I read, there were many things and situations I did not know and it is still hard to understand why they existed..or still exist