Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy. Robyn Ryle
hand-picked by committees of faculty, physical education departments, and student body groups. To be a cheerleader was to be a shining example of leadership and athleticism, an honor for college men. Cheerleaders were the ultimate model of masculinity—the kind of men all the other guys wanted to be.
Today 97 percent of all cheerleaders are women, and boys who cheer are hardly ever seen as manly.[2] So what happened? Why did cheerleading experience a total gender reversal?
Rooter Kings, Yell Leaders, and the
Birth of Cheerleading
To understand the strange history of gender in cheerleading, we have to go back to the very beginning, to the story of when cheerleading first began. The University of Pennsylvania claims to have organized the first-ever cheer ensemble in 1894, though the Princeton Yell, a pep club, had already been around for a decade. These groups of men were sometimes called “rooter kings” or “yell leaders” and they became a crucial part of the college football scene. Cheerleading was important enough to have its own national fraternity—Gamma Sigma—and every year they partnered with sports journalists to pick an All-American cheer squad, the best of the best in the cheerleading world.[3]
The skills associated with being a male cheerleader weren’t that different from what we expect from cheerleaders today. They yelled and led the crowd in cheers. They had megaphones, which they often tossed around. They would arch their body from side to side and shake their fists at the crowd as they encouraged them to enthusiastically root for their team. These early cheerleaders wore full-length white trousers with a V-neck sweater and a hat, very different from the short skirts we’ve come to expect today. Male cheerleaders were so important to college football games that they sometimes got blamed when the team lost. As cheerleading evolved, it came to incorporate some of the more athletic aspects that we associate with cheerleading today. Squads began to include gymnastics, like at the University of Kentucky, where boys wishing to try out had to first complete a six-week tumbling course.
Hog-Calleritis and Why Women
Make Lousy Cheerleaders
It wasn’t until the 1930s that some women began to show up on cheerleading squads. When women did start cheering, their presence was often met with hostility. They still weren’t eligible for election to the All-American squad, and some universities, like the University of Pittsburgh, outright banned girls from cheerleading. The University of Pittsburgh didn’t lift their ban on women as cheerleaders until 1954.[4]
The arguments against women as cheerleaders at places like the University of Pittsburgh rested on two assumptions: that women lacked the necessary skills to be cheerleaders, and that participating in cheerleading would make girls “too masculine for their own good.”[5] Experts of the time argued that girls clearly couldn’t perform the gymnastic stunts required to be on a squad. Women and girls weren’t athletic enough to go flipping through the air like the men and boys. Additionally, all the yelling required of cheerleaders would lead to “hog-calleritis,” or “loud, raucous voices” that were clearly not appropriate for young ladies. It was also argued that cheerleading would cause girls to become “overly conceited.”[6] In sum, cheerleading was too hard for women, in addition to running the risk of making them too full of themselves and giving them voices that sounded too much like men.
Play Days, Tea, and Early Women’s Sports
Girls in this time period weren’t leading cheers, but they still played sports, even if the sports they were playing were different from those of boys. For middle-class and upper-class women, physical education programs began at colleges and universities as early as the 1860s and 1870s. These programs were governed solely by women and gave college women an opportunity to participate in at least 14 different sports, with basketball being especially popular. Beyond college campuses, many working-class women bowled and played softball and basketball for industrial leagues, usually sponsored by companies or factories. At many high schools—especially small, rural schools that lacked enough students for intramural play or substituted competitive sports for physical education—women’s basketball thrived.[7]
As far back as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were playing sports, but the idea of women athletes made some people nervous. Women who led physical education programs worked to ensure that the sports girls played never became too competitive, due to concerns that competition would lead to strenuous physical activity that might harm women’s menstrual cycles, their ability to have children, and their attractiveness to potential spouses. The fear was that if girls got too competitive on the basketball court, they might not be able to get married or become mothers, and these were seen as two central roles for women to fulfill.[8]
This fear of competitiveness meant that girls could play basketball, but not the same version of basketball that boys played. Not long after basketball was invented in 1891, female physical education professionals came up with a modified version of the game that would be safe and appropriate for girls. Girls’ basketball had six players rather than five, with three offensive and three defensive players on each team. Girls couldn’t cross the half-court line because it would cause too much exertion, and could only dribble three times before they had to pass the ball. In girls’ basketball, players were forbidden from doing anything as masculine as snatching the ball from their opponents. Not surprisingly, these rules made girls’ basketball a slower game to watch as well as to play.[9]
Those in charge of women’s sports were also concerned that too much competition would cause women emotional distress, sending them into a state of hysterics. Or that the women might get scratched up in a way that would lead to blemishes on their faces, which would destroy their “feminine charms.”[10] The question of who would watch women play sports also posed potential problems. Would men be allowed as spectators? What would women wear while they played, and how would they ensure their bodies were properly covered? How could women be protected from the hundreds of potentially leering eyes?
Because of these fears, women’s sports at the collegiate level remained a deeply segregated and secluded institution. From the top to the bottom, women’s sports were played and controlled by women who worked hard to protect female athletes from the dangers of too much competition, as well as what they saw as the commercialism and exploitation rampant in men’s sports. In men’s sports, the health and well-being of all athletes were sacrificed to the irresistible urge to win at all costs. Men’s sports produced stars, but they didn’t provide equal opportunities for all men to participate in physical education, which was an important goal for women’s sports participation.
Women’s physical education defined itself against the corrupt world of men’s sports, and that meant downplaying the competitive part of sports as much as possible. Instead of tournaments, women would often have “play days.” On play days, teams from other schools would come and visit—but rather than competing against each other, women from different schools would be distributed evenly across teams. The only way to tell who was from which schools were the colored pinnies (pinafores) or aprons they wore. All the women would share a locker room to encourage sociability and, at the end of the day, they might all have tea or a meal together before heading back to their home schools. Play days emphasized the participation of all over the elite performance of a few that characterized men’s sports.[11]
Some historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) did depart from this noncompetitive model. This was because they were sheltered from or ignored by the dominant model of physical education programs at white colleges. That HBCUs decided to go their own way allowed them to develop some of the most successful women’s athletic programs of the time period. At Tennessee State University, the Tigerbelles developed a premier track and field program for their women athletes, winning the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) competition every year from 1956 through 1968. Women from Tennessee State accounted for 25 of the 40 Olympic medals won by women in track and field between 1948 and 1968.[12]
World War II and the Big Switch