Credit: Cathy K. Donovan

A women’s history scholar, Rosoff has written and spoken extensively on images of athletic women in American popular culture. She has taught the courses “Ball Four, Title IX, and Holes-in-One: Sports and Society in Contemporary and Historical Perspective” and “Friday Night Lights and A League of Their Own: Sports in American Popular Culture” in the Honors College at Rutgers-Camden.

As March Madness brackets begin to fill, college basketball fans are tuning in to see the outcomes of their predictions. But does mentioning the sport alone summon an image of men competing?

At a university rich in a legacy of record-breaking women athletes, such as the women's basketball team which consisistently competes for the national championship and Camden’s 2006 national softball champs, sports historian Nancy Rosoff is examining women’s foray into collegiate sports. Why, Rosoff asks, did what they wore while playing matter so much?

Rosoff, associate dean for administration and academic program development on the Camden Campus, has presented her research on the history of women’s sports at venues across the globe. This semester she is teaching the Honors College seminar course “Heroes and Heartbreak: Sports in American Popular Culture.” A major assignment of the course requires students to watch at least five games from the men’s and women’s NCAA Division I basketball championships, with at least two games from each tournament. Rosoff’s students are to compare broadcast coverage between the men’s and women’s games with what appears in print or online.

Rosoff shared her knowledge of women’s athletic journey in the United States with the local community during the March Cappuccino Academy, a monthly public lecture series at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Marlton. Her presentation, “Dressed for Success: Athletic American Women 1880-1920,” included a slideshow stocked with images of advertisements from bicycle saddles to deodorant powder, book jacket covers, college team photos, and vintage Betty Bonnet paper dolls that accommodated girls’ growing interest in sports with golf and tennis accessories. All of the images reflected a major part of women’s sporting tradition: the wardrobe.

Early women athletes donned ankle-length skirts fashioned with pulleys for bicycle riding, aprons to stow extra tennis balls, and more breathable athletic waists to replace rib-fracturing corsets. While these “costumes,” as they were once called, are a far cry from the controversial image of Brandi Chastain celebrating the 1999 U.S. Soccer Team’s World Cup Championship in a sports bra, they still represented a new kind of physical freedom for women.

“Women’s participation in athletic activities challenged conventional limits on their behavior, which had insisted that middle-class and elite women focus on and remain in the private sphere; however, at the same time, dressing in conventional clothing kept women from appearing too threatening,” Rosoff said.

While modesty may have been a goal in women’s athletic clothing designs, some questioned the hazards in wearing long, bulky skirts for physical play. Edwin Sandys, a noted male swimmer outfitted himself in a woman’s bathing suit to test the safety of wearing a skirt in water. Sandys said, swimming “one hundred yards was as serious a task as a mile in my own suit. After that experience, I no longer wondered why so few women swim really well, but rather that they are able to swim at all.”

According to Rosoff, while what a sporting woman wore during play was of concern, women’s need for exercise had been encouraged because of a growing medical concern that a college education would engorge women’s brains and potentially damage their reproductive organs. Harvard physician Edward Clark declared in 1873 that too much education for women would result in “monstrous brains and puny bodies.”

To compensate for a shrinking physique, women’s colleges initiated sports not for intercollegiate play, but for recreational competition among classes. After basketball’s creation in 1891, colleges like Smith and Mount Holyoke quickly initiated the sport with the granddaughters of historic figures like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Ralph Waldo Emerson taking to the courts.

Rosoff also notes that women’s colleges began to implement sports programs as a way to instill a sense of balance between good mental and physical health in their student population. “The sense of balance came from classical times and the idea of everything in proportion allowed college women to develop not only their academic selves, but their physical selves, too,” she said.

When asked if the rising, or disappearance of, hemlines in women’s athletic gear over time indicates a change for the better, Rosoff replied, “Well, you can move. But while some athletic gear may enhance women’s athletic ability or make a fashion statement, it also brings attention, but maybe not exactly for athleticism.”