'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.'

-- This quote from an item in an 1896 edition of Munsey's Magazine comes to us via Andrew Sullivan's Dish, which in turn links to culture blogger/tweeter Maria Popova's Atlantic review of Sue Macy's new book (right) on women and bipedal empowerment.
Seems likely to this 'Grrl that decades from now some historian will say the same thing about women and electronic communications that Munsey's once said about women and bikes.

On March 12

On this day in ...
... 1986 (25 years ago today), Susan Butcher (left) set a speed record of 11 days 15 hours 6 minutes and won the Alaska's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. She was the 2d woman to win, as Libby Riddles had taken the 1,158-mile event the year before, but she was the 1st woman to dominate the sporting event. Butcher, an 11-year Alaska kennel owner and "former veterinary technician from Cambridge, Mass.," had entered the race every year since 1978. She would win again in 1987, 1988, and 1990. Butcher died of leukemia in 2006, at age 51. (photo credit)

(Prior March 12 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On February 19

On this day in ...
... 2002, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Vonetta Flowers (near right) became the "first black athlete (male or female) -- from any country--to ever win an Olympic Winter Games gold medal." She'd been born 37 years earlier in Birmingham, Alabama, Flowers and her U.S. teammate Jill Bakken (far right) finished 1st in the 2-woman bobsled, winning the 1st U.S. medal in that event in 46 years.

(Prior February 19 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On January 21

On this day in ...

... 2001 (10 years ago today), in Senegal, Jutta Kleinschmidt (right), a 38-year-old German, became the 1st woman to win the Paris-Dakar road rally (below left). She beat her male teammate, a Japanese national; the previous year's winner, a Frenchman, came in 3d. (She remains the only woman to have won the event.) Kleinschmidt, who holds a master's degree in physics, took up the sport in 1987.

(Prior January 21 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 4

On this day in ...
... 1952, Anita deFrantz (right) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned her J.D. from Penn Law in 1977. While in law school, deFrantz was a member of the U.S. Women's Rowing Team, serving as captain at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Canada, where her team won the bronze medal. Her competitive career ended in 1980, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter withdrew the U.S. team from the Olympic Games in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Along with other athletes, lawyer DeFrantz sued the U.S. Olympic Committee on the ground that no organization could block an athlete's right to compete. The effort was unsuccessful, and seen as unpatriotic by some at home. But 6 years later she was named a lifetime member of the International Olympic Committee -- the 1st woman and the 1st African American person to be appointed to that body. DeFrantz was the IOC's Vice President -- the 1st woman to hold the position -- from 1997 to 2001.

(Prior October 4 posts are here, here, and here.)

On August 25

On this day in ...
... 1942, Margaret Thompson Murdock was born in Topeka, Kansas. She would become the 1st woman to compete equally with men in an Olympic sport. After graduating from Kansas State University in 1965, she joined the Women’s Army Corps -- and the Army's Marksmanship Training Unit at Fort Benning, Georgia. "[A]ffectionately known as 'The WAC' by her teammates," she soon become the 1st woman to "set an internationally recognized world record above the men’s mark – in any sport" – when she won the gold medal (right) in a smallbore shooting event at the 1967 Pan-American Games in Winnipeg, Canada. (photo credit) At her 1st Olympic Games, 9 years later in Montreal, she and a male athlete initially tied for 1st place, but on further examination of the targets he was awarded gold; even so, Murdock's Olympic silver medal was the 1st for a woman shooter. She earned a nursing degree a year later, and

became a nurse anaesthetist, in addition to being a competitive shooter,
housewife, and mother.

(Prior August 25 posts are here, here, and here.)

Soccer diplomacy meets ICC

(Another in IntLawGrrls' series of Kampala Conference posts)

With World Cup fever abubble here in my California home (I've got USA in the family pool, my husband's keen on Argentina, and my son's gaga for Ghana), could not let pass this news from the site of the International Criminal Court Review Conference.
In a Sunday prelude to the 2-week conference that began yesterday, the United Nations played a friendly against Uganda Dignity at a stadium in Kampala.
Above, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, center, makes a play for a ball controlled by Uganda President Yoweri Museveni, left. (credit for photo by Stephen Wandera, courtesy of Uganda's Daily Monitor) The 2 arrived for a "six-minute cameo" toward the end of the charity contest, dubbed the "War Victims Day Football Game" and sponsored by the Uganda Victims Foundation and the Africa Youth Initiative Network aided by the NGO No Peace Without Justice.
The U.N. side lost one-nil. Scoring the lone and winning goal was a "Darfur war victim, Abdallah Lasanusi."
The photo's smiles-all-around exemplifies this month's theme of diplomacy, globalization, and soccer -- er, football -- popularized in books like this and this.

On January 2

On this day in...
... 2000 (5 years ago today), Ana María Martínez Sagi died. Born in 1907 in Barcelona, Spain, she was one of the most important journalists and poets of Spain's Republican period, writing not only about politicians but also beggars and prostituted women. (credit for photo of cover of new French book about her) Martínez Sagi established a program to help Barcelona's working women learn to read and write, and she wrote frequently on the issue of women's suffrage, then controversial given that

many progressives, including some feminists, feared that women would vote according to the orders of their husbands or of the church.

She also was an athlete, accomplished in the javelin, tennis, and skiing, and was the 1st woman director of a Spanish fútbol club. Exiled during and after Spain's Civil War, she took part in the resistance while living in France, and taught university French while living in the United States. After the 1975 death of Gen. Francisco Franco, she returned home, where she lived quietly until her own passing.

(Prior January 2 posts are here and here.)

Sugar and Spice in Sports

According to this week's New York Times, the International Association of Athletics Federations, which governs international track and field events, is investigating the eligibility of runner Caster Semenya (left) of South Africa. The IAAF plans to conduct sex-determination testing to confirm her eligibility after concerns were raised during a track and field competition in Berlin. Barry Bearak is the author of the Times piece; he describes Semenya as a "muscular, husky-voiced 18-year-old."
This is a troubling case.
It troubles me that we still expect female athletes to be feminine in their athleticism. Perhaps Semenya would not have been the target of an investigation had she been less muscular, although she might not have handily won the 800-meter race in Berlin with a more petite, more feminine, and less muscular frame. As IntLawGrrls posted during last year's Olympic Games, we are markedly more comfortable with the sport of beach volleyball (right), in which women compete in bikinis, and in which we may easily assess both their sexuality and their athletic skills. (I still remember the collective public angst when American Olympian Kerri Walsh lost her wedding ring in the sand during a 2008 beach volleyball match).
In her NYT article about the IAAF investigation of Semenya, Alice Dreger observes that

sex is so messy that ... science can and will inform [the I.A.A.F.'s] decision, but they are going to have to decide which of the dozens of characteristics of sex matter to them.

Dreger concludes that the IAAF decision will be one based on sport, such as the number of "points awarded for a touchdown," rather than "natural" sex. After all, rigid, naturalized notions of sex and gender do not reflect the experience of many people whose sex and gender are located along a continuum of masculinity and femininity. (One such athlete was Stella Walsh Olsen, on whom IntLawGrrls posted a while back.)
Although many of the early IAAF sex-based eligibility investigations focused on women from the former Soviet Union, Semenya's case involves not only stereotypes of gendered behavior but also implicates issues of race. The sexuality of African women has long been the subject of voyeuristic colonialist study and speculation. Bearak's article notes the comparison to a woman on whom IntLawGrrls has posted: Saartjie Baartman, or Sawtche, the so-called Hottentot Venus, who was

'taken to Europe in the early 19th century and exhibited like a wild beast....'

The colonial fascination with African women's sexuality is well-documented by Anne McClintock in her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995), in which she describes how the African woman "became the prototype of the Victorian invention of primitive atavism." The international perception of Semenya's femininity, or lack thereof, reflects a similar postcolonial racial bias.
If the IAAF has its way, genetic testing will determine Semenya's precise chromosomal constitution. Unfortunately, the results will not encourage us to question our own assumptions either about gender and race or about the ways such stereotypes affect female athletes all over the world.

What did Title IX do for you?

Over the years a number of us IntLawGrrls have talked about the importance of sports – tennis, soccer, track and field – in our lives.
Now, on this 37th anniversary of the U.S. statute that called for parity between men's and women's sports – Title IX – comes Dr. Susan E. Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, with her own, similar account on the White House blog:

I played point guard for my high school basketball team at National Cathedral School in Washington (I also played tennis and softball). What I learned from my coaches and teammates extended well beyond the basketball court. Being part of the basketball team taught me some valuable life lessons and helped shape me as a person. I learned how to be a team player, how great it feels to win, how tough it can be to lose – and how difficult it is to do so gracefully.
As the United States Ambassador to the United Nations – I’m often reminded that in basketball as in diplomacy, you have to know when to throw elbows, and when to show finesse.

Would love to hear, dear readers, what Title IX has done for you.

On June 22

On this day in ...
... 1772, Somersett's Case, in which the Court of King's Bench held that slavery was unlawful in England although not elsewhere in the British Empire, was decided. It is one of the most significant milestones in the campaign to abolish slavery throughout the world. In delivering judgment, Judge William Murray, known as Lord Mansfield (below left), said:

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it's so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.

It was not until 1807 that Parliament abolished the slave trade (prior post). Slavery continued to exist in various parts of the British Empire until it was finally abolished by Act of Parliament in 1833.
… 1920, Marea Hartman, who is credited with the post-World War II integration of British women athletes into full competition and parity with their male counterparts, was born in London. A personnel officer for a paper manufacturer for more than 30 years, Hartman spent most of her off-hours working for athletics without remuneration. She is considered among the longest-serving and most influential people in athletics. For 30 years she was Honorary Secretary of the Women's Amateur Athletic Association and for 13 years was Chairman of the Women's Commission of the International Amateur Athletic Federation. She was named President of the British Athletics Federation in 1991. Hartman became a Dame's Commander of the Order of the British Empire shortly before her death in August 1994. (credit for 1996 British stamp honoring Hartman as 1 of 5 “20th Century Women of Achievement")

(Prior June 22 posts are here and here.)

Equine 'Grrl makes good

Have been a fan of the Triple Crown since covering the Kentucky Derby while a reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, trolling the Churchill Downs clubhouse in Louisville for interviews with the likes of Abbie Hoffman, Amy Carter, Linda Carter, and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush (in the men's bathroom, I fear to admit). Fond memories, too, of witnessing a photo-finish Preakness Stakes at Pimlico in Baltimore. (A junket to the 3d jewel, the Belmont Stakes, awaits.)

And so can't help but celebrate yesterday's Preakness win. A three-year-old bay named Rachel Alexandra (right) beat the boys to the finish line, making the filly the 1st female to win since Nellie Morse 85 years ago. (photo credit)

Rachel Alexandra's achievement inspired headlines like You go, girl!, and Girl Power, and leads like "Girls rule!" -- all phrases that win IntLawGrrls' heartfelt support.

Courtesy of MSNBC.com, here's her victory lap:

Breaking sports news video. MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL highlights and more.

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'I don’t believe that talent resides predominantly among males, or among the upper classes.'

-- Our colleague, Dr. Louise Richardson (right), in an interview with The New York Times on the occasion of her installation last week as Principal (that is, President) and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, an appointment about which IntLawGrrls earlier posted. The arrival from Harvard of Richardson -- an expert on terrorism (prior IntLawGrrls book review) and an Irish-born woman who is also a Catholic and a naturalized U.S. citizen -- apparently continues to raise eyebrows at the 600-year-old institution, which, the Times reports, "has been presided over not only by a man but a British man, and a Protestant (since the Reformation, of course)." There is, for instance, a kerfuffle over the fact that the ban on women at the world-famous St. Andrew's golf club precludes it from extending to her an honorary membership. Richardson put such fuss nicely in its place with these words:

'I see it as a distraction. I’m here to run a university.'

On February 26

On this day in ...
... 1957, "one the greatest athletes in American sporting history," Connie Carpenter-Phinney (left), was born in Madison, Wisconsin. The winner of many national and international cycling championships, she won gold in Los Angeles "in the 1984 Olympic road race, the first ever for women." A dozen years earlier, at age 15, she speed-skated for the U.S. team in the Olympics at Sapporo, Japan. She's the 1st woman to have competed in both Summer and Winter Olympic Games. (photo credit)
... 1984 (25 years ago today), approximately 1,000 U.S. Marines left Beirut, Lebanon, thus bringing to an end American military presence in the city. The withdrawal came several months after a bomb blast killed hundreds of U.S.and French servicemembers.

(Prior February 20 posts are here and here.)

On January 24

On this day in ...

... 1924 (85 years ago today), the opening ceremony of the 1st-ever Winter Olympics took place in Chamonix, France. The Games -- featuring 291 athletes, from 16 countries, competing in 16 events in 9 sports -- would run from January 26 to February 4. Of the 291 athletes only 13 were women. (IntLawGrrls' prior posts on women Olympians are here and here.) Among them was the Games' youngest competitor, 11-year-old Sonja Henie (right) of Norway, who placed last that year but "would later become the greatest women’s figure skater ever," not to mention a highly paid Hollywood star. Henie was also an all-time favorite of this IntLawGrrl's mother.

... 1984 (25 years ago today), Apple introduced the Macintosh computer, "starting the second major revolution in the personal computer industry." This was in part because this original Mac (left) in part because it came with a device designed to aid user navigation of cyberspace: the mouse. Nostalgic MacHeads can see video of the rollout here. (photo credit)

On December 25

On this day in ...
... 1998 (10 years ago today), Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, 2 former leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime that had reigned in terror over Cambodia 2 decades earlier, published letters asking to come out of hiding and return to society as "ordinary citizen[s]." At the time Prime Minister Hun Sen welcomed the request. But today both former leaders await trial before an internationalized criminal tribunal, as various IntLawGrrls have documented in our Khmer Rouge Accountability series.
... 2002, sports history was made when, her "blond hair cascad[ing] out of her helmet," "[h]er fingernails ... painted cherry red," Katie Hnida became the 1st woman to play Division I-A college football. Hnida tried in vain to kick an extra point for her team, the New Mexico Lobos, in a Las Vegas Bowl contest against the UCLA Bruins. She would succeed in a game the next year. Later Hnida (right) would reveal that while on her prior team, in Colorado, she had suffered sexual assault and sexual harassment. Earlier this year, she tried out for a minor league football team in Colorado.

On September 23

On this day in ...
... 1923 (85 years ago today), Dorothy Wiltse was born in Inglewood, California. Her father, a 2d baseman for a local semi-professional team, taught her to play baseball at an early age. At age 12 she led the team that won the 1936 Southern California girls softball championship, then played semi-pro ball while working at a furnace company after she graduated from high school. In 1944, Dottie Wiltse Collins (left), as she was known after marriage, began a professional career that lasted well over a decade. An "ace pitcher" for the Fort Wayne Daisies, an Indiana "team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, established in 1943 by Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley to keep ballparks busy while men were away at war." She was the model for the pitcher played by Geena Davis in the 1992 film A League of Their Own (right). Collins died last month in a nursing home in Fort Wayne.
... 1971, in Montreal, Canada, the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation was adopted.

Women champions boycott world chess tournament, in Russia, over Georgia

I have a love-hate relationship with chess: my father was a junior champion and we had beautiful chess sets and a handmade board, as well as chess books in Russian, inherited from my Lithuanian grandfather. (image credit) We also had chess books in English, which my brothers read, memorizing moves in the hopes of beating my father, who studied George Koltanowski's column in the newspaper and even took us all to a tournament in Sonoma to play against the master, who could beat two opponents playing simultaneously while blindfolded. I loved the pieces and the heritage, but couldn't get interested in the competitiveness and strategy. And there didn't seem to be any women chess champions out there to inspire me, or even any girlfriends playing chess.
Today, however, there are 64 women qualified to play in the world championship being held in Nalchik, a Russian city in the Caucuses. Among them are former (women's) world champion Maya Chiburdanidze of Georgia. She and 8 of her consoeurs (5 other Georgians, Marie Sebag of France, Irina Krush of the US and Tea Lanchava, born in Georgia but now living in the Netherlands) have been disqualified, however: on August 12, they wrote to the World Chess Federation to protest the location of the tournament because Georgia was in a "state of war" and did not show up.
Claiming logistical impossibility, the president of the Federation, who is also president of the Russian republic of Kalmykia, replied that the tournament could not be moved, and asked that players not mix sport and politics (just like the Olympics, n'est-ce pas?). But in turning it into a "sport," the Federation seems to have done just that: chess is a game of strategy, of brain not brawn, but the tournaments are apparently segregated and male players obtain the title of world champion, while female players become the "women's world champion." Looks like the 'Grrls will have to keep mixin' it up.

On women playing well

To Jaya's excellent post yesterday on "Olympian Courage," I'd like to add a bit more recognition for women's plays during this Summer Games season.
Here's to:
► Hamchétou Maïga-Ba (left) and all the women hoopsters who represented Mali. These 2008 Beijing Games marked the 1st time a women's basketball team was sent by the country, which the New York Times described as "a predominantly Muslim country where women are subject to traditional subservience, genital mutilation, inequitable access to education and household violence." But the simple feat of fielding a team may have begun to change things. Maïga-Ba, who plays forward for the Women's National Basketball Association's Houston Comets, said of the land of her birth:

'Everybody is proud of us, even the guys.'

► Mona Eltahawy (right), an Egypt-born, New York-based commentator. She published in the Washington Post a stinging op-ed, which criticized Saudi Arabia for not including any women on its Olympic team. The Post then published its own editorial echoing Eltahawy's complaint.
Caveat:
No country deserves to claim too-high ground on the matter of women in the Olympics. The Times article reminds:

Women were not allowed to participate at the 1896 Summer Games in Athens, the first Olympics of the modern era.
They were expected to contribute applause, not athletic skill. Not until 1984 were women permitted to run the Olympic marathon, in reefer-madness fear that they might grow old too soon with such exertion; or worse, they might grow a mustache.
Or their uterus would fall out, as if it were a transmission.

Nineteen women competed in the 1900 Paris Olympics. The art student who took 1st place in the 9-hole golf tournament (above), Margaret Abbott, "is now recognized as the first female American Olympian winner."
Even today, when many women from many countries compete in many events, there's much room for improvement. More than 1 commentator's wondered if women's beach volleyball would get as much air time if its bikini-clad competitors covered up. (To which should be added this question: Would an activity so singly centered in 1 nation even be included in inter-national competition absent the costumes?) Then comes news, from Nayeli Rodriguez at Slate's XX Factor blog, on "the International Table Tennis Federation’s latest strategy for reversing low attendance to its matches": "draw attention to the sexier side of table tennis" by "urging lady players to adjust their competition outfits to flaunt more 'curves.'" (credit for 2007 photo at right of Chinese champion Wang Nan)
Here's hoping one day for an Olympics where attention's focused on how well women played, and not on how well they looked while playing.

Sweet Home Chicago redux

My home city's humming these days.
Chicago's Sen. Barack Obama just clinched the Democratic Presidential nomination, in a year when another of the 3 last-remaining candidates, Sen. Hillary Clinton, was born in Chicagoland.
The Chicago Cubs hold the best record in baseball this season, fully 100 years after the last time the North Siders won the World Series. On the South Side, the Chicago White Sox are 1st in their division, too.
And then there's the international scene.
As posted, more than a year ago the City of Big Shoulders elbowed out Los Angeles to become the U.S. entrant in the '16 Olympics competition. Yesterday the city made the final cut: as Doha, Qatar, Prague, Czech Republic, and Baku, Azerbaijan fell by the wayside Chicago was named 1 of 4 finalists to sponsor the 2016 Olympic Games. It competes from now till October 2, 2009, against Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Madrid, Spain, and Tokyo, Japan. One tough bunch.


(credit for photo of 1967 sculpture by Pablo Picasso, Chicago's Civic Center landmark)