Eimear Ryan: Can we continue Christine Grant’s pioneering work for women’s sport?

Can we make the same strides for women’s sports in the next 50 years as Christine Grant did in the last? It’s something to keep the mind occupied in the long winter evenings when everything is shut

Can we make the same strides for women’s sports in the next 50 years as Christine Grant did in the last? It’s something to keep the mind occupied in the long winter evenings when everything is shut

We have lost some cultural giants of late: the iconic American essayist Joan Didion; beloved comedian Betty White of Golden Girls fame; and groundbreaking Oscar winner Sidney Poitier. Parasocial relationships are strange. It’s always surprising to me how sad I feel at the passing of a famous person who I have never met, yet whose work means a lot to me. (Maybe I should be less surprised; it’s the job of writers and actors, after all, to affect us emotionally.)

Didion, White, and Poitier all lived to a fine age (87, 99, and 94 respectively). When famous people die before their time, there is always shock along with the sadness. (For context: Didion was born the year before Elvis Presley; White the same year as Judy Garland; Poitier the year after Marilyn Monroe.)

With older celebrities, the sadness is different. Often it’s a moment to pause and celebrate their contribution to the culture, but also, it can feel like the proverbial library burning down. The longer someone is with us, the harder it is to imagine the cultural landscape without them.

The world of women’s sports suffered one such loss in December. Christine Grant, the legendary advocate for equality in women’s sports in the US, was 85 when she died on New Year’s Eve.

In her lifetime she fought for, ushered in, and lived to see huge progress in the participation, support, and audience for women’s sport. As huge as those strides were, she was, at the end of her life, still anguished that she hadn’t done more, that there was still so much left to do.

Born in Scotland in 1936, Grant moved to Canada in her 20s and became a PE teacher and hockey coach. In 1968 she moved to Iowa to pursue a PhD and was shocked at the lack of sporting opportunities for young women in the US: no funding, little equipment and gear, few coaches.

Happily, she met with a forward-thinking administration at Iowa and was soon appointed as the college’s first women’s athletic director, a post she held until her retirement in 2000. In that time, she boosted the women’s athletic budget from $3,000 in 1973 to $6.9m, and supported 11 women’s sports across the university, with particular success in basketball.

In this role, she also had clout on the national stage. She testified multiple times before US Congress about the importance of female involvement in sport, and was a consultant to the Title IX Task Force in 1972. Title IX was a piece of legislation that banned discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational institution in receipt of government funding; this included funding for sports. Throughout her career, Grant had encountered such discrimination again and again.

In a story she often retold, a sports facility was built on the Iowa campus in the late 60s using fees from both male and female students, but there was no provision for women’s changing rooms or bathrooms. When Grant queried this, she was told women weren’t interested in sports.

This is the same chicken-and-egg conundrum that many advocates for women’s sports have bumped up against time and time again, even up to the present day; for example, saying ‘there’s no audience for that’ without testing the audience, or ‘girls aren’t aggressive/competitive’ without ever giving girls the outlet to express themselves. According to Grant, this was the inciting incident that made her a feminist.

Grant lived to see huge progress in the wake of Title IX, when schools and colleges were finally compelled to support their young women in sport as well as their young men. As a result, female sports participation at high school increased from 300,000 in the 1970s to 3,400,000 currently, while college participation has gone from 30,000 in the 1970s to 215,000 today. (If these numbers still seem relatively modest, you might get a sense of Grant’s frustration that she could not do more.)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of Title IX, and it’s a pity that Grant is not around to celebrate it. In a 2012 interview to mark the 40th anniversary, she said: “The law is only about fairness. That’s all it’s about. Looking back, Title IX in my opinion is the most important piece of federal legislation that was passed in the 20th century for women in this nation. I can’t underscore that enough.”

Even in retirement, Grant remained active in the promotion of and the conversation around women’s sports, and always retained an independent streak. In 1981, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) voted to sponsor women’s competitions, essentially ending the women’s collegiate association of which Grant had been president. Grant resisted the merger at the time, and even in a 2021 interview with The New York Times, lamented the lack of female representation within the NCAA: “If your values are money, going with the NCAA is probably a wise choice. If it’s more than money, you might want to rethink that decision.”

There’s the rub, as it were. Equity in funding is vital, and a tremendous start, but it doesn’t automatically lead to equity in esteem or influence. I’ve long been in favour of camogie and ladies football coming under the GAA umbrella as a common-sense solution; a way of overcoming the structural inequalities, like access to grounds, that sometimes stymie the women’s codes. But one only has to look at the IRFU to realise that women’s sport doesn’t always thrive within a joint organisation. And moving towards the centre of power often means giving up a degree of autonomy.

We are lucky to stand on the shoulders of giants like Christine Grant; with that privilege comes the responsibility of seeing a bit further. Can we make the same strides for women’s sports in the next 50 years as she did in the last? It’s something to keep the mind occupied in the long winter evenings when everything is shut; that, and streaming all seven seasons of Golden Girls on Disney Plus. A reliable antidote to the January blues, if ever there was one.