One of the surprising things I've found as I've conducted research on sports and Christianity is the way in which rural white southern Protestants tended to be more supportive of competitive women's athletics before Title IX than their more progressive northern counterparts. Susan K. Cahn, author of Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women's Sport (first published in 1994, now in its second edition), is very helpful in explaining why this was so.
From the 1920s into the 1960s, Cahn explains, physical educators controlled women's athletics at most high schools and colleges. They promoted a vision of women's sport that adhered to white middle-class notions of respectable womanhood, emphasizing self-restraint, moderation, and refinement. Because they did not want the supposedly masculine traits of intense competition to corrupt women, physical educators attempted to confine young women's athletic participation to non-competitive intramural sports. Wherever they could, they eliminated championship tournaments at national, state, and local levels.
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