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A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX
Reviewed by Michael A. Messner
Welch Suggs.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Since its inception in 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments, which prohibits discrimination in federally assisted education programs and activities, has been a political hot potato. The National Collegiate Athletic Association fought against the new law in the early years, arguing that it constituted a federal impediment to local control of college sports. Some argued, as they still do today, that it would destroy men’s sports. Meanwhile, women’s sports activists lauded Title IX as just and necessary civil rights legislation that would aid girls and women athletes to fight for fair and equitable treatment. In subsequent years, as women’s athletics boomed, Title IX has been a flashpoint for numerous legal decisions, clarifications, and policy interpretations by the U.S. Congress and by the Office of Civil Rights. In 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush asked the U.S. Department of Education to hold public hearings on Title IX—hearings in which advocates celebrated Title IX and pointed to the continued need to push toward equity for women athletes, while critics told stories of what they saw as discrimination against men to argue against the “quota system” imposed by Title IX.
A book-length study of such a controversial topic as Title IX demands a careful, well-informed author who can report the “facts” while also examining the nuances of the law’s contradictory impact and the positions of the competing sides in the ongoing debates. Welch Suggs is such a reporter, a fact to which regular readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education can attest. Suggs has collected a rich history of Title IX, collated it into a coherent story that is supplemented by very useful appendices that provide to the reader the actual wording of Title IX, as well as that of the subsequent government clarifications and interpretations of the policy. With A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX, Suggs has done a service to anyone who wants to understand the history of Title IX and the debates that continue to swirl around its implementation. Suggs focuses primarily on Title IX’s effect on higher education, rather than its effect on K–12 education, and this probably reflects both his own standpoint as a higher-education reporter and the fact that many of the public debates (including the 2002 hearings) have focused almost exclusively on Division 1-A universities that have “revenue-producing” football and men’s basketball programs.
Suggs provides a good overview of the history of college sports in the United States. He demonstrates how the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women’s pre-Title IX organization of women’s sports, while vastly underfunded and underappreciated, still offered some women a haven for the development of healthy physical activity that was free from the often brutal violence and commercialization that has plagued men’s college sports. Anticipating his later argument that the “tragedy” of post-Title IX women’s sports lies in its mimicry of the negative aspects of men’s sports, Suggs comes very close to suggesting that in the past, women’s college sports organizations got it right, with their “suspicion of varsity-style athletics” and their “participatory goals of women’s sports.”
Yet, herein lies a tension in the public debates about Title IX, and to a certain extent in Suggs’s narrative. Suggs is right to raise questions about women’s sports’ uncritical adoption of “the male model” of sports. Sport sociologists have documented the many ways that men’s college sports reflect and perpetuate many of the most negative aspects of narrow conceptions of masculinity (including violence to self and others) and promote values of commercialization that are antithetical to what many see as the mission of university life. Suggs points out that women athletes now face a rising rate of serious injury (especially to the knees) and other health-related problems; that their higher graduation rates, compared with those of men athletes, might now tumble; and that the “club” system of youth sports, as a feeder system to the university, has favored white middle-class kids, thus making it difficult for African American women to benefit from Title IX to the extent that white women have. These are all important issues, but since Suggs falls short of a radical critique of men’s sports, two unsatisfactory alternatives remain: women’s sports should use Title IX to “go for the money” and mimic men’s sports as much as possible, including taking on all of the costs and negative consequences of men’s sports; or women’s sports should return to the pre-Title-IX ethic of healthy noncompetitive sports and games. This latter will not happen, of course. As Suggs points out, Title IX and women’s sports are here to stay.
So are we stuck with the unsatisfactory dynamic of liberal, equal opportunity feminism fighting against the backlash of an anti-Title-IX conservatism that claims to fight for fairness for men? I think not. Although Suggs does not become a critic or an advocate—preferring to stay, I believe, in the middle space of the reporter—I think it’s consistent with his reporting to suggest that women’s sports activists need to proceed simultaneously on two fronts. First, continue to use Title IX to fight for equal opportunities (still far from achieved, as Suggs points out with ample statistics on recruiting, coaching, and funding in women’s college sports). Second, wage a critical analysis of the negative aspects of the dominant men’s sports—especially football, I would argue, which stands at the center of the sport-media-commercial complex. Far from being the goose that lays the golden egg (as its advocates like to suggest), institutionalized football is a major reason for the perpetuation of gender inequity in sports, for the ramping up of commercialization processes, and for a disproportionate number of the problems generally associated with college sports. And football’s monopoly over resources, as economist Andrew Zimbalist’s work has so clearly shown, is one of the main reasons that the “marginal” (“nonrevenue”) men’s sports are so vulnerable today when university athletics departments need to trim their budgets. Playing sports is good for girls and women—that has now been established by research, is accepted in public opinion, and is supported by the law. But the question of how we organize our sports—both for women and for men—needs to be put at the center of the table. Until we ask those more radical questions, we will be stuck in the quandary that Welch Suggs so nicely describes.
Michael Messner is professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California, and author of Taking the Field: Women, Men and Sports.
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