Jaime Schultz - Womens Sports: What Everyone Needs to Know

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Oxford University Press 2018

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schultz, Jaime, author.

Title: Womens sports : what everyone needs to know / Jaime Schultz.

Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Includes

bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017054908 (print) | LCCN 2018000951 (ebook) | ISBN

9780190657727 (updf) | ISBN 9780190657734 (epub) | ISBN 9780190657703

(pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190657710 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Sports for women. | SportsSex differences. | Sex

discrimination in sports. | Women athletesHealth and hygiene.

Classification: LCC GV709 (ebook) | LCC GV709 .S38 2018 (print) | DDC

796.082dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054908

For Nella and Sylvie, or Sylvie and Nellawhichever they prefer.

I owe my gratitude to a number of people who have helped with this book. I deeply appreciate Lucy Randalls editorial guidance. It was a pleasure to work with her and the staff at Oxford University Press, including Gina Chung and Hannah Doyle, as well as with project manager Rajesh Kathamuthu and copy editor Daniel Hays. The Press secured two excellent reviewers, and I am grateful to Rebecca Alpert and the anonymous scholar who helped me strengthen the manuscript. Several friends and colleagues generously offered their expertise throughout the writing process. Thank you to Shireen Ahmed, Mianne Bagger, Jonna Belanger, Paulina Rodriguez Burciaga, Erin Buzuvis, Megan Chawansky, Brenda Elsey, Sarah Field, Kristine Newhall, Maureen M. Smith, Nancy Williams, and Amy Wilson. Finally, and as always, I offer my eternal love and gratitude to Team Schef: Paul, Nella, and Sylvie.

For better or for worse, sport matters. It brings together friends, families, communities, and stadia full of strangers. It rallies nations and stokes rivalries. Sport gives us a sense of history, a sense of tradition, and a sense of identity. It instills civic pride, affords temporary escape during difficult times, transcends social boundaries, and acts as an agent of social change. Sport has sparked riots, incited wars, and paved the way for diplomacy and reconciliation. Sport is dramatic, it is uncertain; it stirs our passions and tests the boundaries of what it means to be human.

There is, of course, a dark side to sport, one riddled with problems that include corruption, cheating, violence, injury, greed, discrimination, and exploitation. Even so, we remain sports crazed. The rates of consumption are telling. A 2014 global survey found that in France, 65 percent of adults followed sport. This was the low end of the scale. India provided counterbalance: 93 percent of the population identified as sport fans. The United States fell somewhere in the middle, where 70 percent of Americans follow sport, a diversion to which they each devote an average of 7.7 hours per week.

Individuals who choose to follow sport can consult a variety of media outlets. At least 20 percent of urban US newspapers are devoted to the coverage of sport, but television, for now, reigns supreme. Of the more than 7 billion people in the world, an estimated 3.6 billion television viewers saw at least one minute of the 2012 Olympic Games. The 2014 Fdration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Mens World Cup reached a global in-home audience of 3.2 billion people, and 750 million tuned in for the 2015 FIFA Womens World Cup. Advertisers paid $5 million for each thirty-second commercial that aired during the National Football League (NFL) Super Bowl 50 (2016) as 111.9 million viewers made the game the third most watched broadcast in US television history, just behind the 2014 and 2015 Super Bowls.