Did you catch any of the 2024 Olympics track and field events? Did you see women tearing up the course and setting record after record?
It’s been breathtaking and inspiring, a bit the same way I feel these days watching the 2024 presidential race after Kamala Harris sprinted off the starting block and proved herself capable of outpacing Donald Trump in early laps.
But both those Olympic competitors and Harris didn’t get where they are without a long and arduous struggle to overcome entrenched stereotypes and myths about what women can do and should do.
The 2024 Olympics in Paris are the first games where women and men had an equal number of track and field events in which to compete. There was a time not too long ago when the Olympics offered women only a handful of competitive opportunities. The men in charge clung to their conviction that women did not have the needed physical or mental abilities.
I’ve been reading about the long slog toward Olympic parity for women in Maggie Merten’s excellent book: “Better Faster Farther, How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women” (Algonquin Books July 2024). In it, the Seattle journalist charts what it took for women to pursue running when everyone told them they couldn’t. She shares the stories of women sent to psychiatrists because their desire to run was seen as mentally unhealthy. She tells about Bobbi Gibb who famously hid in the bushes to run the Boston Marathon in 1966 much to the annoyance of race officials who refused to count her as a race finisher. It was not until 1974 that the Boston Marathon let women officially enter. It was not until 1984 that women were allowed to run in an Olympic marathon.
Mertens shares extensive research about the claims historically used to limit women’s athleticism: they would collapse, they would harm their reproductive organs, they would lose their femininity, they just couldn’t hack it. She writes that we were trained to see “men’s running as natural, as human. Women’s as divergent.”
Bobbi Gibb seized on the publicity over her Boston race to speak out whenever she had a chance hoping her story could make a difference in those views of women’s abilities and place in society. She told Mertens she “saw her act of sneaking into the Boston Marathon as a way to change hearts and minds not just about what women could do in the running world, but in the world in general. ‘If i could change this false belief about women, I could throw into question all the other false beliefs that have been used for centuries to keep women from having full human and civil rights and developing their potential.’”
The false belief Gibb cites reflects the same objections that for years stymied women from running for elected office. It was unladylike to be ambitious, they wouldn’t fulfill their destiny as wives and mothers, they wouldn’t be able to raise money, they didn’t have the stamina for the campaign trail.
“Often we are putting those physical stereotypes onto what women are allowed to do in other parts of our society,” says Mertens when I asked her about the parallels of women in sports to women in politics. “There are jobs we assume women can’t do and certain political offices we assume that they don’t have what it takes for. We think of this as a natural, biological difference. We see that play out so much in the sports world – the stereotype that women are not cut out for this.”
She recalls watching the 2016 race between Hillary Clinton and Trump while she was starting to work on her book. “There was a lot of conversation from Trump himself about Hillary Clinton that she is not strong enough to do this, and this undertone that you have to be a big strong man to be in this position of political power,” Mertens says.
“We are seeing women athletes do things that they’ve been told they can’t do or that have never been done before, but should be the norm,” Mertens adds. “Now seeing Kamala run, I think it creates momentum and a shift in what our new norm is.”
Or what our new norm should be. We still don’t have political parity. Women hold just 28.7 percent of the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the U.S. Senate, women hold only a quarter of the seats. Still, the total number of women in the 118th Congress set an historic record. “Counting both the House of Representatives and the Senate, women account for 153 of 540 voting and nonvoting members of Congress. That represents a 59% increase from the 96 women who were serving in the 112th Congress a decade ago,” according to the Pew Research Center.
And, of course, we still don’t have a woman in the White House. Mexico recently elected its first woman president. Canada, England, Germany, India, New Zealand, Israel, and Argentina are among the 15 other nations that have had female presidents or prime ministers.
Mertens says that she found a lot of hope in her research on the gender barriers in sports, that “we are not going to be able to see women truly as equals until we can see them as equally impressive in the world of sports.”
Could the same be said for finally sending a woman to the White House?
Linda, Thanks a ton for your terrific article on Maggie Mertens’ new book “Better, Faster, Farther” and how running has changed what we know about women’s participation in sports.
Glad you highlighted the fact that the 2024 Olympics were the first where men and women had an equal number of track and field events. You also helped us to realize how far we’ve come recalling how Bobbi Gibbs had to hide out and sneak into the Boston Marathon in 1966 when women weren’t allowed to participate.
Best of all were your questions to Seattle journalist Mertens about the parallels between women in sports and women in politics. It’s a powerful reminder about the barriers that have existed in both fields. Let’s hope we will now see women tearing up the political course and shattering records.
I’m sure you also remember Jean when women were told they were unelectable , that no one would turn out for them. Just like women athletes were told no one would turn out to see them play. Well, Kamala’s rallies certainly show how hordes of people will turn out to support a woman candidate, and the Paris Olympics showed that hordes of people will turn out to watch all the awesome women athletes.
But why are fewer women running for Congress this year? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/11/politics/women-candidates-congress-election-dg/index.html
With the Olympics just finishing and the Harris race just starting, there couldn’t be a better time to read Merten’s book. Thank you for another great article.
There’s a reason why women have proven themselves over the past generations to be far more trustworthy than power-at-any-cost men. They tend to favor nurturing the planet, rather than conquering it. Stereotype, I know, but look at where today’s uber patriarchal Trumpian Party wants to take us, dragging kicking and screaming into the 19th Century.
Thank you for writing about this book; it’s at the top of my reading list right now! I especially appreciate the mirroring of running for sports with running for office. Women have faced headwinds in both cases for far too long.
I remember the 1984 Olympics in particular because the company I was working for did the advertising and marketing for New Balance and I found myself realizing for the first time what a ridiculously long time it took for the allegedly civilized world to realize that women could run marathons competitively, just like men. It’s such an obvious truth, yet it remained buried until it was confirmed. Women entered, qualified, competed, and excelled. As that contemporary sage Homer Simpson would say, “Duh.” The same is true for politics.
Maybe we have finally come to our senses about the fact that women are human beings, equal to men, and that their individual capabilities, talents and ambitions have nothing to do with their gender. Other countries have figured this out; it’s time we did. When a capable and competent female human being is elected POTUS in November, that will be a welcome sign that we have finally evolved to a level of intelligence that, until now, we have only pretended to posses.
Yes Kathleen! And maybe a day will come when we talk about whether men are equal to women!