From the “muscle moll” to the “butch” ballplayer: Mannishness, lesbianism, and homophobia in U.S. women’s sports

In 1934, Literary Digest subtitled an article on women’s sports, “Will the Playing Fields One Day Be Ruled by Amazons?" The author, Fred Wittner, answered the question affirmatively and concluded that as an “inevitable consequence” of sport’s masculinizing effect, “girls trained in physical education today may find it more difficult to attract the most worthy fathers for their children” (1934: 43). The image of women athletes as mannish, failed heterosexuals represents a thinly veiled reference to lesbianism in sport. At times, the homosexual allusion has been indisputable, as in a journalist’s description (Murray n.d.) of the great athlete Babe Didrikson as a “Sapphic, Broddingnagian woman” or in television comedian Arsenio Hall’s more recent (1988) witticism, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we put one on Martina Navratilova?" More frequently, however, popular commentary on lesbians in sport has taken the form of indirect references, surfacing through denials and refutations rather than open acknowledgment. When in 1955 an Ebony magazine article on African American track stars insisted that “off track, girls are entirely feminine. Most of them like boys, dances, club affairs, " the reporter answered the implicit but unspoken charge that athletes, especially Black women in a “manly” sport, were masculine manhaters, or lesbians.