Skimpy Coverage: Sports Illustrated and the Shaping of the Female Athlete

By Bonnie M. Hagerman

Skimpy Coverage explores Sports Illustrated’s treatment of female athletes since the iconic magazine’s founding in 1954. The first book-length study of its kind, this accessible account charts the ways in which Sports Illustrated—arguably the leading sports publication in postwar America—engaged with the social and cultural changes affecting women’s athletics and the conversations about gender and identity they spawned.

Bonnie Hagerman examines the emergence of the magazine’s archetypal female athlete—good-looking, straight, and white—and argues that such qualities were the same ones the magazine prized in the women who appeared in its wildly successful Swimsuit Issue. As Hagerman shows, the female athlete and the swimsuit model, at least for the magazine, were essentially one and the same. Despite this conflation, and the challenges it poses, Hagerman also tracks the distance that sportswomen—including Wilma Rudolph, Billie Jean King, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe—have traveled both within Sports Illustrated’s pages and without. Blending sports with gender history, Skimpy Coverage profiles numerous sportswomen who have used athletics and the platform sport offers to push for empowerment, freedom, equality, and acceptance in ways that have complemented and inspired broader feminist agendas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: May 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780813949246

Book preview

Cover Page for Skimpy Coverage

Skimpy Coverage

Cultural Frames, Framing Culture

Robert Newman, Editor

Justin Neuman, Associate Editor

Skimpy Coverage

Sports Illustrated and the Shaping of the Female Athlete

Bonnie M. Hagerman

University of Virginia Press • Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hagerman, Bonnie M., author.

Title: Skimpy coverage : Sports Illustrated and the shaping of the female athlete / Bonnie M. Hagerman.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2023. | Series: Cultural frames, framing culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022041058 (print) | LCCN 2022041059 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813949222 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813949239 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813949246 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Women athletes—Press coverage—United States—History. | Sports journalism—United States—History. | Human body in mass media—United States—History. | Sports illustrated. | Feminism and sports—United States.

Classification: LCC PN4888.W63 H34 2023 (print) | LCC PN4888.W63 (ebook) | DDC 071/.309—dc23/eng/20221130

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041058

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041059

For Marc

And in memory of the graduate student volunteer Sports Illustrated featured in 1963 who was my first coach. And my dad.

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: How It All Began

1 The Big F

2 Girls Like That

3 An Odd Way to Even Things Up

4 The Frailty Myth

5 The Olympic Ideal

6 A League of Their Own

Conclusion: A Pretty Girl on the Cover

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

When a project spans two decades, like this one has, there are a lot of people to thank for moving it from a possibility to an actuality. It is my profound privilege and pleasure to do just that.

I would never have considered writing a book about sportswomen had I not been an athlete myself. That was made possible not just by Title IX, which Congress passed three years after I was born, but by a family who loved playing sports and made it a priority. My thanks, then, to my parents, Marge and Fritz Hagerman, and my brothers, Kris and Erik Hagerman, who as scholars and athletes themselves, inspired me to learn, to play, and to compete. They have always cheered me on in all of my academic and athletic endeavors, including this latest one. I owe a debt of gratitude, as well, to the many teammates and coaches who have passed through my playing life, one that has encompassed grade school recreational programs, high school varsity sports teams, collegiate crews, and adult tennis clubs. I am particularly thankful for the lessons I learned from coaches Malcolm Idleman, Willie Black, and Curtis Jordan and for the lasting friendships I have formed with teammates across time and sports. Thanks goes also to those athletes I coached at Westfield High School, and the coaches, administrators, and friends I worked with, including Jack Martin, Nancy Carpenter Babbitt, and Sandy Mamary.

This book was originally a master’s thesis and then a doctoral dissertation, and I am grateful to my adviser, Katherine Jellison, for seeing the initial potential in the project, providing valuable guidance, and for encouraging me over the years to transform the dissertation into a book. Graduate school also yielded opportunities to work with professors and fellow graduate students alike whose questions, comments, and contributions have made this book better. My sincere thanks to Alan Booth, Alonzo Hamby, Joan Hoff, Steven Miner, Chester Pach, and Sholeh Quinn, as well as to Ray Haberski, Kimberly Little, and Jeff Woods.

I am especially indebted to my colleagues in the field of sports studies who offered incredibly detailed and helpful readers’ reports. I am honored that Lindsay Parks Pieper and Derek Catsam saw such promise in Skimpy Coverage and am grateful to them for their insightful comments and suggestions; they have unquestionably made Skimpy Coverage a better book.

I am fortunate to be surrounded and supported by colleagues, students, and staff from the University of Virginia. I am grateful to my home department of Women, Gender & Sexuality and the stimulating and supportive environment that encourages excellent teaching and innovative research. Many thanks to the support of friends and colleagues like Corinne Field, Charlotte Patterson, Farzaneh Milani, Allison Pugh, Doug Meyer, Lisa Speidel, Bridget Murphy, Lanice Avery, Andre Cavalcante, Matthew Chin, Tiffany King, and Denise Walsh. This project would have never taken its current shape without the many UVA students who have taken my classes on gender and sport since 2008. There are so many of you that it’s impossible to acknowledge you individually, but know that your enthusiasm, passion, and insights contributed to this project and made it better; I am grateful every day to have been able to learn from you. A special thanks to the folks at UVA Library, including Director of Information Policy Brandon Butler and especially librarian Erin Pappas for hunting down resources that were crucial to the book’s completion and for assistance above and beyond the call of duty. I wish also to acknowledge Mike Smith for his help in providing invaluable support and Jenny Lillich for sharing her indexing expertise.

A huge thank-you to my editor Nadine Zimmerli for her constructive criticism, patience, and firm belief that this was a project worthy of publication. Having Skimpy Coverage appear in book form has been a long-held dream, and it is only with her steady guidance that I have been able to transform vision into reality. I hope other authors are lucky enough to have an editor like Nadine in their corner. Many thanks, also, to everyone at the University of Virginia Press, especially Ellen Satrom and Ruth Melville.

While I have been lucky to have the amazing support of colleagues throughout my professional career, I am equally as fortunate in the friendships and relationships that have nurtured me throughout the (long) process of transforming Skimpy Coverage into a book. Amy Nolasco, Farrell Vangelopoulos, Adi Banavage, Larkin Mott, Lorri Bentch, and Andrea Larson provided boisterous encouragement, comic relief, and many much-needed study breaks. I’m also indebted to my in-laws, Harriet and Bob Selverstone, who have been both loving role models and indefatigable cheerleaders.

Finally, to the family I have made. It has been my greatest joy to be Jake and Alison’s mom. They have never known me not to be working on Skimpy Coverage, and their wit, their laughter, and their love have both inspired and sustained me. And finally, to my husband, Marc Selverstone, who has seen this project in all its forms, and its author in all of hers, and still loves me anyway. For being my most favorite (if somewhat exacting) copy editor, my biggest supporter, and my greatest love, I dedicate this book to him and look forward to many more years of loving collaborations.

Abbreviations

AAGPBL All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

AAU Amateur Athletic Union

ABL American Basketball League

ACL Anterior Cruciate Ligament

AFL American Football League

ATA American Tennis Association

CAS Court of Arbitration for Sport

DSD Differences of Sex Development

IAAF International Amateur Athletic Federation

IOC International Olympic Committee

LGBTQ+ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, and Other Identities

LPGA Ladies Professional Golf Association

MLB Major League Baseball

MMA Mixed martial arts

NBA National Basketball Association

NFL National Football League

NHL National Hockey League

NWFL National Women’s Football League

NWSL National Women’s Soccer League

OCR Office for Civil Rights

OPHR Olympic Project for Human Rights

PGA Professional Golf Association

SI Sports Illustrated

USLTA United States Lawn Tennis Association

USWNT United States Women’s National Soccer Team

USOC United States Olympic Committee

USODC United States Olympic Development Committee

USTA United States Tennis Association

WBL Women’s Basketball League

WNBA Women’s National Basketball Association

WPGA Women’s Professional Golf Association

WTA Women’s Tennis Association

WUSA Women’s United Soccer Association

Skimpy Coverage

Introduction

How It All Began

In 1964 Sports Illustrated was ten years old and finally in the black after a decade of losing money for its parent company, Time Inc. But its editors still had a problem: once the college football bowl games ended in January, the sports landscape was pretty bleak until spring training began for Major League Baseball in March. As a result, SI’s editors needed something to rouse the magazine and its readers from their winter doldrums. That something became known as the Swimsuit Issue.¹

Originally conceived as a means to stir the pot a little, the Swimsuit Issue would consume increasingly greater amounts of Sports Illustrated’s creative energies and financial support. It first appeared on January 20, 1964, featuring Babette March having FUN IN THE SUN ON COZUMEL.² By the late 1970s, the sunshine issue had become a Sports Illustrated institution, as well as, according to one reader, an American tradition. During the 1980s, Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue was generating 10 percent of the company’s yearly revenues, an advantage SI exploited by producing calendars with pictures from the issues’ photo shoots.³ By the 1990s, the Swimsuit Issue had become an issue unto itself that remained on newsstands for weeks. It no longer shared space with more traditional sports writing in the magazine’s weekly edition, nor did it appear only in print form; coverage of the photo shoots was now available through videos (and then DVDs). By the twenty-first century, the Swimsuit Issue, which appeared in eleven languages in print and online, attracted tens of millions of consumers worldwide. Sports Illustrated further leveraged the issue by adorning it with trading cards and publishing two Swimsuit Issue-related coffee-table books. The magazine was clearly banking on expectations that gorgeous women, encouraged by water to place their charms on display, would continue to resonate in an international market.⁴ Given the Swimsuit Issue’s spectacular history, it was a pretty safe bet.

Not everyone, however, was happy with the new addition to SI’s winter lineup. Letters opposing the Swimsuit Issue—many of which contained demands for subscription cancellations—began arriving at Sports Illustrated’s offices as early as 1965. These grew in number and vehemence over the years, culminating in a record-high 339 cancellations following Cheryl Tiegs’s 1978 appearance in a fishnet suit. Representing a minuscule percentage of the over three million who subscribed to SI—including the million or so who paid top dollar for the Swimsuit Issue at newsstands—it is not surprising that the magazine did not address those concerns until the twenty-fifth anniversary of the issue in 1989, and then only in jest. It refused to take seriously what some saw as the inordinate (and sometimes offensive) attention the magazine devoted to women whose only connection to sports was strolling—sometimes jogging—on a sandy beach in the tropics. Michael MacCambridge, who wrote an authoritative history of the magazine, contends that SI might have deflected some of these complaints if it had done a better job of covering women in sports.⁵

Officially debuting in 1964, the Swimsuit Issue was designed to buttress SI’s meager winter sports news cycle and to stir the pot a little.

This was, in part, the point Billie Jean King was trying to make when long-time SI contributor Frank Deford quoted the tennis great in that same twenty-fifth anniversary issue. Known for her activism on and off the court, King regarded the Swimsuit Issue as a distraction from the more pressing problem of the magazine’s meager coverage of female athletes: Women should stop screaming about that one issue and start screaming that SPORTS ILLUSTRATED doesn’t carry enough women’s sports. That’s what’s important. That’s what’s sexist. Deford sidestepped King’s indictment, except to differ with her about the importance of the Swimsuit Issue. In How It All Began, Deford noted that of the millions of readers who purchased the issue, some 40 percent were women. Far from screaming about the idea of beautiful women in swimsuits, female readers, according to Deford, actually wanted to be them. And this was not a bad thing. Deford quoted the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joan Ryan, who found that all the SI bathing suit models are muscular and lean and authentic. They don’t mind working up a good sweat. They’re proud of the bodies they’ve worked into shape. There is nothing powdery or gushy about them. In other words, the women in the Swimsuit Issue are not the worst role models a young girl could have.⁶ Perhaps, but the swimsuit models who have appeared in the Swimsuit Issue rarely appeared swimming—or engaged in any sport—in a magazine whose purported goal was to set the sports agenda. As role models for women in sport, Christie Brinkley, Kathy Ireland, and Elle MacPherson might have been athletic looking, but they were not, in fact, athletes.

The female athletes who did show up in Sports Illustrated were also muscular and lean and authentic. But while the magazine spent huge amounts of money publishing and promoting swimsuit models, female athletes, as King complained, appeared infrequently in its pages—and when they did show up, they were often depicted as swimsuit model stand-ins. Thus, when the public was asked to think of women in Sports Illustrated, they thought of swimsuit models instead of sportswomen. This was hardly surprising and became even more understandable when Sports Illustrated began to include notable (and attractive) female athletes in the 1997 Swimsuit Issue—a trend it repeated in succeeding years.

Skimpy Coverage: Sports Illustrated and the Shaping of the Female Athlete argues that throughout SI’s decades-long history and dominant publishing performance, the magazine has conflated prevailing notions about swimsuit models and sportswomen, thereby constructing an image of the female athlete via the stories the magazine covered—and those it left unexplored. In presuming to set the sports agenda, Sports Illustrated thus provides a valuable lens for analyzing and assessing a history of female athletes. For SI, the idealized qualities of those athletes—highly feminine, good-looking, straight, white, able-bodied, and cisgender—mirrored those it prized in swimsuit models. This book, therefore, maintains that the female athlete and the swimsuit model, at least for SI, have been essentially one and the same.

This history of SI and its emerging archetype of the female athlete is worth telling if only for charting the distance sportswomen have traveled—both within Sports Illustrated’s pages and without—since 1954. That trajectory is at the heart of Skimpy Coverage and reveals an important story not only for sports history but for gender history as well. Numerous women, such as Billie Jean King, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe, have used sports and the platform it offered to push for empowerment, freedom, equality, and acceptance in ways that have complemented, inspired, and challenged broader feminist agendas.

This, then, is a history of the female athlete according to Sports Illustrated, the first to explore SI’s rendering of sportswomen in a book-length treatment. Skimpy Coverage tracks those sportswomen from SI’s first issue on August 16, 1954, to the end of its weekly publishing schedule in 2018, and then into the 2020s as it appeared as a monthly print magazine. As a longitudinal study, Skimpy Coverage allows for a deeper and more sustained engagement with topics the magazine returned to again and again when reporting female athletes, including their femininity (or lack thereof), their access to sporting opportunities (or lack thereof), and their available professional prospects (again, or lack thereof). In addition, it incorporates reporting from SI for Women (and its various iterations), SI.com, and the Swimsuit Issue. Collectively, they offer a more nuanced appraisal of the Sports Illustrated sportswoman.

Before the SI sportswoman could appear, however, Sports Illustrated had to clear a number of hurdles to make it onto midcentury newsstands. The juggernaut that SI became was neither immediate nor assured and had its origins in a fairly practical and pedestrian twentieth-century decision.

Muscles

With $10 million either to invest or to lose to the government’s taxmen, Henry Luce, the legendary founder of Time Inc., was looking to launch a new magazine in 1954. Even as company executives debated the pros and cons of numerous proposals, ranging from true crime to short fiction to intellectual discourse, Luce, though not a sports fan himself, could not help but notice the strong appeal of sports to the American public. The postwar boom had produced a variety of changes in American society, including the growth of a moneyed leisure class that liked to relax and was willing to pay for it. Indeed, Americans at this time spent some $18 billion on spectator interests and recreational sports, including table tennis, softball, bowling, golf, and boating.⁷ Americans clearly were playing sports, but would they read about them on a regular basis?

Serious challenges faced those bold enough to even consider launching a weekly sports magazine in the early 1950s. The NBA and the NHL, as well as the AFL and the NFL, were all small outfits at the time. Major League Baseball, the most popular and significant of the professional sports organizations, had its own problems: its westernmost team in 1954 was the St. Louis Cardinals, and that team was experiencing a downward slide in its fan base. As for golf, only a dedicated few were interested in anything more than its major championships, while Jack Kramer’s professional tennis circuit was still trying to gain its footing. And the undeniably popular sports of boxing and horse racing had to contend with charges of impropriety.⁸ As a result, a sports magazine could not count on such struggling entities to provide consistent and newsworthy stories.

In addition, sportswriting was not considered a quality expression of the literary form, nor could magazine publishers conceive of a single magazine that would appeal to American fans with their varied and wide-ranging interests. The last successful general sporting magazine was a product of the mid-nineteenth century, when John Stuart Skinner, the Father of American Sport Journalism, published American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine in 1829. Although other magazines had catered to Americans’ interest in playing and reading about sports—by the 1890s, sports-minded Americans could choose among forty-eight periodicals for the latest news about a variety of sporting endeavors—many of those magazines failed within several years. Those that did survive met their ultimate demise following the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic depression that lasted until World War II. And why roll out a new magazine at all when television sets were becoming fixtures in Americans’ homes? Television would allow fans to see sports competitions in real time, theoretically making sports magazines and newspapers obsolete.⁹ Thus, by the onset of the postwar era, the prospects for publishing a successful sports weekly magazine were dim at best.

Despite this unfavorable environment, Luce moved forward with the project, one that insiders dubbed Muscles. And that was the other problem: the new magazine did not have an official name. Luce wanted his new weekly to be titled Sport, but a journal by that name already existed, and its current owner wanted $250,000 for the rights to the title; Luce was willing to pay only $200,000. When talks stymied, Luce accepted sportsman and entrepreneur Stuart Scheftel’s offer of his defunct title Sports Illustrated for $10,000 and a subscription to the new magazine.¹⁰

With a title in place, Luce challenged the American people to give the new sports weekly a try. He was confident that, given the chance, Sports Illustrated could make sports even more enjoyable. "And that, Luce contended, could have consequences. As he put it, At last, America will have a great National Sports Weekly."¹¹

The Accepted and Essential Weekly Reporter of the Wonderful World of Sport

Even when Sports Illustrated was nothing more than Project X, those at Time Inc. who supported Luce predicted that it would not be A sports magazine. It would be THE sports magazine. To transform prophecy into reality, Luce marshaled and then applied the wealth generated by his publications Time, Life, and Fortune to promote, and later to sustain, his fledgling endeavor. He did this against the advice of company aides and in the face of criticism from Business Week, which predicted that Sports Illustrated would never top a million subscribers. Undaunted, Luce urged potential readers to have a look at this new magazine of Sport. Not just one issue, please. Take a year’s subscription and see how you get on together. You may find that it makes more enjoyable what you already enjoy. Henry Luce was successful in his salesmanship. When Time published its first issue of Sports Illustrated on August 16, 1954, new subscribers numbered 350,000, making SI the largest circulation launch at that point in magazine history. Publisher H. H. S. Phillips Jr. welcomed readers in the inaugural issue with the hope "that in some tomorrow you will no longer think of Sports Illustrated as Time Inc.’s newest baby, but as the accepted and essential weekly reporter of the Wonderful World of Sport."¹²

Longtime editor Andre Laguerre, who remained at the helm of SI for fourteen years (1960–74), adopted this philosophy and regarded SI as the authority that set the American sports agenda. The writers who worked for Laguerre and followed in his wake—most of whom were overwhelmingly white and male—also embraced the idea that Sports Illustrated alone determined which sports mattered and which did not.¹³ Renowned SI writer Dan Jenkins told Michael MacCambridge that the magazine was edited in those days from the standpoint of ‘What we think is important is what you should think is important . . . and if you don’t agree with it, that’s your problem.’ It was totally arrogant, but I think it was right. SI’s Bill Leggett reminded MacCambridge that many people watched certain games "because Sports Illustrated told them it was important." And most of those people—77 percent of them—were male. SI’s target market was—and has remained—men in their midthirties, even as the magazine shifted toward attracting a younger and active demographic. With an editorial board, a stable of writers, and a list of subscribers that was overwhelmingly male, SI framed sportswomen, when they appeared at all, as objects of the male reader’s gaze.¹⁴

Thus, if Sports Illustrated has set the sports agenda, it was one that simply did not prioritize female athletes, often ignoring them completely or trivializing their accomplishments for a male readership. When it did include women, the magazine consistently prioritized whiteness—normalizing the white female as the athletic archetype—often relegating Black female athletes to its quadrennial coverage of the Olympic Games. Thus, by the early 1970s, thousands of Americans read Sports Illustrated every week, but they encountered female athletes in the magazine’s pages only infrequently, and Black sportswomen even less so. When they did, the sports angle was often included only incidentally, a reality highlighted by two of SI’s own staff writers. In 1973 Bil Gilbert and Nancy Williamson, as part of their landmark three-part series on women and sport, had singled out SI for its substandard coverage of sportswomen. Rather than describing how well or badly the athlete performed or even how the contest turned out, they noted, writers tend to concentrate on the color of the hair and eyes, and the shape of the legs or busts of the women.¹⁵

Such a dynamic began to attract the attention of scholars during the 1980s when Mary Jo Kane argued that Sports Illustrated continued to overemphasize sportswomen’s femininity while underemphasizing their athleticism. Angela Lumpkin and Linda D. Williams offered a similar critique in a 1991 study, asserting that the nature of SI’s coverage contributed to a general trend that focused on the attractiveness of female athletes first and their athletic ability second. In 1992 Gina Daddario asserted that the presence of models in the annual Swimsuit Issue crowded out female athletes in the magazine’s pages both literally and figuratively. Ten years later, Janet S. Fink and Linda Jean Kensicki found that SI created a false reality in which female athletes were remembered for their sex appeal rather than their athletic aptitude. In 2011 Kim Kayoung, Michael Sagas, and Nefertiti A. Walker considered the portrayal of female athletes in SI Swimsuit Issues from 1997 through 2009, concluding that the athlete models were depicted as highly sexualized and without any relation to their sports.¹⁶

Other studies of sportswomen in SI have tended to focus on more quantitative concerns. Scholars have documented the frequency with which female athletes appeared in the magazine, the number of column inches devoted to features on female athletes, the number of times female athletes landed on the cover of SI, or the number of articles the magazine gave to sportswomen as opposed to sportsmen. These studies have offered significant insights into the magazine’s marginalization of female athletes.¹⁷ As journal articles, however, they are limited in the depth and breadth of their analyses. As a result, they fail to provide a comprehensive view of the varied challenges sportswomen have faced over the last six decades and how these concerns have been reflected in the pages of Sports Illustrated.

Skimpy Coverage builds on this early scholarship, as well as on more general works that chronicle the history of sportswomen. Ellen Gerber, Jan Felshin, Pearl Berlin, and Waneen Wyrick published the first historical account of the topic, The American Woman in Sport, in 1974. Since then, additional histories have appeared, including Susan Cahn’s Coming On Strong (1994, 2015), Mary Jo Festle’s Playing Nice (1996), Lissa Smith’s Nike Is a Goddess (1999), and Jaime Schultz’s Qualifying Times (2014). Although important works, none of these titles have addressed Sports Illustrated and the magazine’s importance in shaping an image of the female athlete that was consumed by millions of readers.

In addition to expanding the literature on women and sport, Skimpy Coverage also adds to the conversation about gender and physical empowerment. As early as 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft explored what scholars 150 years later would dub the muscle gap, postulating in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that no judgments could be made about a woman’s physical capabilities until they enjoyed the same opportunities as men. While Wollstonecraft did not specifically address women’s involvement in sport, she was ardent in her belief that both men and women should acquire strength of mind and body. Early feminists echoed Wollstonecraft and made entitlement to physical freedom a popular topic. For example, in 1895 suffragist (and cofounder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union) Frances Willard published A Wheel within a Wheel: A Woman’s Quest for Freedom, in which she extolled the liberation associated with learning to ride a bicycle. Twenty years later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian work Herland described a female-dominated world in which women fully embraced their social, political, and physical freedoms, producing a society that was unparalleled in its level of sophistication and civilization. By 1954, Simone de Beauvoir had published The Second Sex, in which she promoted the importance of physical freedom for women, as well as the virtues of athletic competition—noting that women’s contests were valuable in their own right and should not be compared with men’s. She further acknowledged that athletic participation rewarded women with the means to battle the timidity and weakness society had tried to instill in them since childhood. Iris Marion Young built upon de Beauvoir’s work when she explored the differences in feminine and masculine ways of moving, and the ways in which society valued that movement, in her 1980 essay Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality.

Feminist scholars therefore have long prioritized a woman’s right to physical expression as part of a larger discussion about equality. The translation to sports was a harder sell, however, as many second-wave feminists did not immediately embrace the transformative power of athletics and its use as a vehicle for promoting women’s equality. In the final installment of their 1973 three-part series on the status of women in sport, SI’s Gilbert and Williamson asserted that the women’s liberation movement has stirred up interest in athletic equality even though the most active women’s rightists have paid little attention to sport. They quoted the activist and radical feminist Robin Morgan as acknowledging the error: We were slow getting into sports because many of us didn’t know the field. But now the movement is becoming active in this area. We’ve become conscious of the body. It is a woman’s right to control her body, be it wanting an abortion or wanting to strengthen it through sports.¹⁸ Despite the delay, the activism of Billie Jean King, Serena Williams, and the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, among others, clearly showed that battles in the sports arena could advance women’s rights outside of it and that issues of equality and social justice were concerns for all women. Skimpy Coverage illuminates this important connection and places the challenges and contributions of sportswomen—particularly Sports Illustrated sportswomen—within the broader history of gender and women’s history.

This focus on Sports Illustrated underscores the importance of the magazine as the flagship of all general sports print media sources. Through 2016 SI enjoyed a subscription rate that was almost 30 percent higher than its nearest rival, ESPN The Magazine. With its long history, broad reach, and wide appeal—at its zenith, over three million people subscribed to SI and over thirty-four million people read it every week—Sports Illustrated’s portrayal of females, both as athletes and as swimsuit models, is one that Americans have consumed on a regular basis.¹⁹ Its treatment of sportswomen, in particular, delivered a clear message about how its readers should regard female athletes—and related issues of race, class, and sexuality—both in the magazine’s pages and on the playing fields.

The simple fact is that Sports Illustrated, as the leading sports weekly in the nation, has contributed to the real-life rendering—and consistent selling—of the female athlete. If Sports Illustrated has set the sports agenda for the last six decades, or even just believes that it has, it is worth considering the place that sportswomen have occupied in its pages. Of particular note is the amount and type of attention they commanded, especially in comparison with what swimsuit models enjoyed. Throughout Sports Illustrated’s history, it was the swimsuit models who invariably came out on top in such matchups. Rarely did the achievements of female athletes generate the hype the magazine devoted to its female swimsuit models. And when they did, it was often unrelated to their athletic prowess.

Media Circus

The case of the righteous Scarlet Knights encapsulates much of what Skimpy Coverage seeks to highlight. On April 3, 2007, the Tennessee Lady Vols defeated the Scarlet Knights of Rutgers in the women’s NCAA championship basketball game. Fifteenth-ranked Rutgers—coached by the legendary C. Vivian Stringer—had surprised everyone by reaching the final, upsetting both number one–ranked Duke and perennial powerhouse UConn on its way to the championship game. It seemed an unlikely outcome for a team that had lost four of its first six games, but the Knights had regrouped to end their season with a 27–9 record. Although Rutgers failed to cap their Cinderella season with the title, they were poised for a strong return the following season. In fact, because the team’s starting lineup remained fully intact for the 2007–8 season, SI ranked them third behind the University of Tennessee and top-ranked University of Connecticut.²⁰ It seemed that Rutgers had arrived, especially given the media frenzy that followed their participation in the 2007 championship game.

But the heightened interest surrounding the team had nothing to do with their play on the court. The morning after the final game, popular shock jock Don Imus took to his nationally syndicated radio show, Imus in the Morning, to describe the Rutgers players as a bunch of nappy-headed hos. SI contributor Aditi Kinkhabwala noted that the incident would plunge the Scarlet Knights into a maelstrom of media coverage and a nationwide race and gender debate. Throughout the media circus, Sports Illustrated found that the players were universally applauded for being eloquent and dignified in the many news conferences, phone calls, and television appearances that ensued. But the reason for all the media attention was not lost on them: junior Essence Carson wondered, Where were these major networks when we were making history [on the court] for a prestigious university?²¹

Rutgers’s 2007 Cinderella season showcased some of the best qualities associated with sports, even as it highlighted the dismal media coverage female athletes often endured.

It was an excellent question for both major television networks and major sports magazines like Sports Illustrated. Rutgers was a compelling story. Not only had the team overcome a dismal start to make it to the championship game, but the players had earned back the respect of their coach, who was so disappointed in their behavior during the early part of the season that she barred them from their locker room for an entire month and took away their practice gear.²² But their resilience, their ability to overcome and win against all odds, failed to merit a story in Sports Illustrated, which explored (and condemned) Imus’s racist comments but ignored the quality of play that put Rutgers in the path of Imus’s ire in the first place.

For decades, the media has alternately praised or punished sportswomen for displays of traditional, white femininity or the lack thereof. As a result, female athletes have had to contend with sexism as well as racism and homophobia, all the while battling assumptions that they are the weaker sex, unable to deal with the attendant injuries that result from transgressing a male preserve. Even in such an environment, American females have participated in competitive sport in increasing numbers at the high school and collegiate levels, thanks in large part to the passage of Title IX in 1972, and have enjoyed a growth in Olympic and professional opportunities that emerged during the twentieth century. Over the last twenty years, sportswomen have increasingly used these platforms to advocate for change for themselves and their teams, criticizing a media that has often treated them and their concerns as an afterthought or as tabloid fodder. These are issues that crystallized around the reporting of the Scarlet Knights in 2007 but have dominated Sports Illustrated’s coverage of female athletes since the 1950s.

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Organized thematically, Skimpy Coverage addresses the issues Sports Illustrated revisited time and again when addressing female athletes in its pages, many of which were raised by the magazine’s own Gilbert and Williamson in their landmark series. Their work is a touchstone for my own, with an important caveat. Although Gilbert and Williamson focused important attention on the sexism women confronted in sport, they failed to explore the overlapping oppressions of sexism and racism experienced by sportswomen of color, thus further prioritizing and normalizing whiteness in their reporting. Skimpy Coverage seeks to correct that oversight through a comprehensive account of the Sports Illustrated sportswoman.

Chapter 1, The Big F, examines how issues of femininity have long bedeviled female athletes, especially in the pages of Sports Illustrated. Susan Brownmiller’s 1984 classic, Femininity, which Sports Illustrated specifically referenced, informs this chapter, which includes discussions of how women strove to be uniformly and perfectly feminine and the benefits that accrued from those displays. This examination reveals the ways in which femininity remains a goal for female athletes in the twenty-first century.

The staying power of this ideal reflects, in part, stubborn stereotypes that a sportswoman’s masculine interest in sport reflects a corresponding masculine interest in other women. Thus chapter 2, Girls Like That, begins with Billie Jean King’s then-shocking 1981 announcement that she had had an affair with a woman, making her the first American athlete to admit publicly to such a relationship while still actively competing. Although innuendoes about lesbianism dominated the early years of organized sport for women, more recent controversy has focused on the rights of trans women and women with Differences of Sex Development to compete in sport. This chapter concludes with the selection of Megan Rapinoe, an out lesbian and vocal social activist, as Sports Illustrated’s 2019 Sportsperson of the Year and the progress such an award represents—or fails to represent—for the magazine, LGBTQ+²³ sportswomen, and female athletes regardless of their sexuality or gender expression.

Chapter 3 explores the passage of Title IX and the conflicting messages Sports Illustrated transmitted in describing the law’s guidelines and impact. While all SI writers regarded Title IX as a momentous paradigm shift in American women’s sports—it guaranteed equity for females in institutions that received any kind of federal funding—they could not agree whether such a change portended good or ill effects. "An Odd Way to