Invisible Seasons

Much has been written about the history and impact of Title IX on sport. While popular lore casts Title IX as the most significant factor in the advancement of women's athletics, sport historians have pointed out its social, philosophical, and legal limitations. Kelly Belanger fills a gap in the Title IX scholarship by focusing on the rhetoric—the strategic use of language—people deployed to defend or derail the legislation. In Invisible Seasons Belanger uses the Michigan State University (MSU) women's basketball team's Title IX activism as “a microhistory of rhetorical activity” to highlight relatively unknown individuals “who changed college sports and used the art of rhetoric to do it” (pp. 5, 3). Belanger opens with a historical overview of women's sport in the 1970s to contextualize the anxieties sparked by Title IX. Tasked with implementing the law, which was penned in 1972, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) established ambiguous guidelines for intercollegiate athletics along with a 1978 deadline to follow the new rules. The uncertainty surrounding HEW's stipulations allowed many college programs to evade compliance by not counting revenue-producing sports, even though Congress had explicitly rejected this practice. Belanger adeptly shows how the MSU administrators' rhetorical choices centered on monetary issues to sidestep equity concerns. Female administrators and athletes at MSU pushed back against the university, albeit with different rhetorical tactics. Fearful of termination, female administrators frequently used apologetic, constrained speech, in line with conventional gender norms, and performed “decades of quiet, behind-the-scenes advocacy” (p. 172). Female athletes, conversely, led at MSU by the basketball player Kathy DeBoer, felt freer to use more straightforward, “fighting words” (p. 168). Belanger expertly assesses the motivations for the various rhetorical strategies used at the university, as well as their successes and failures. The activism of the women's basketball team in 1978 led to a lawsuit, which the parties eventually settled out of court

Art · Basketball · Legislative history · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · American Sports and Literature · Business Law and Ethics · History · Law · Public Administration · Sports, Gender, and Society

• Perceptions of the sport leadership labyrinth through the career pathways of intercollegiate women administrators

  Open Access•Lindsey Darvin, Meg G Hancock et al.•SN Social Sciences•2021

  Add to list

• Public Opinion, Crisis, and Vulnerable Populations

  Open Access•James N Druckman, Elizabeth A Sharrow•Politics & Gender•2020

  Add to list