Women Sport Science

A new edition of a sports icon's memoir, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Kathrine Switzer's historic running of the Boston Marathon as the first woman to run. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to officially run what was then the all-male Boston Marathon, infuriating one of the event's directors who attempted to violently eject her. In one of the most iconic sports moments, Switzer escaped and finished the race. She made history - and is poised to do it again on the 50th anniversary of that initial race, when she will run the 2017 Boston Marathon at age 70.

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."

Set against the backdrop of an American town that without its consent had become a vast social experiment, Outcasts United follows a pivotal season in the life of the Fugees and their charismatic coach. Warren St. John documents the lives of a diverse group of young people as they miraculously coalesce into a band of brothers, while also drawing a fascinating portrait of a fading American town struggling to accommodate its new arrivals.

Based on her inspiring, viral 2018 commencement speech to Barnard College’s graduates in New York City, New York Times best-selling author, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and FIFA World Cup champion Abby Wambach delivers her empowering rally cry for women to unleash their individual power, unite with their pack, and emerge victorious together.

Behind the scenes, female athletes are suffering from disordered eating and substance use; depression and anxiety; emotional and sexual abuse; racism and discrimination; self-harm, and even suicide ideation. When global tennis star Naomi Osaka and gymnastics world champion Simone Biles took breaks from competing to tend to their mental health, many were compelled to ask: What is causing this mental health crisis in women’s sports? In The Price She Pays, Katie Steele and Dr. Tiffany Brown illuminate where we are going wrong—and how we can correct course.

While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, twenty-six-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge's order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media.

For decades, osteopathic physician Larry Nassar built a sterling reputation as the go-to doctor for America's Olympians while treating countless others at his office on Michigan State University's campus. It was largely within the high-pressure world of competitive gymnastics that Nassar exploited young girls, sexually assaulting hundreds of them under the guise of medical treatment. In Start by Believing, John Barr and Dan Murphy confront Nassar's acts, which represent the largest sex abuse scandal to impact the sporting world.

At the height of the Great Depression, Sam Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, began dreaming. Like so many others, he wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm, he recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education if they would come play for his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices faced by their families, the women followed Babb and his dream.

Women’s sports receive a fraction of the airtime allotted for men’s sports, as well as a fraction of the marketing dollars, media coverage, and training resources. For every dollar that the NBA’s highest-paid player brings home, the WNBA’s highest-paid player earns just half a cent. But while misogyny in sports is particularly visible, it’s not unique. Women athletes face the same sexist barriers found in all career fields: the motherhood penalty, transphobia and misogynoir, underpromotion, and more. But women in sports are fighting back.

Two-year-old Rachel Haines didn’t know that she would be committing to 21 years of hard work, dedication, and perseverance as she jumped into the foam pit during her first “mommy and me” gymnastics class. She had no idea that one day she would become a two-time National Team Member, two-time National Champion, and a Division I college gymnast at the University of Minnesota. Nor could she have known that she had just signed herself up for serious injury, emotional distress, and continuous sexual assault by world-renowned trainer turned serial molester, Larry Nassar.

Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world's war zones; from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston's streets were filled with women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colors playing soccer in any open space they could find.

In 2008, Lynn Barber's passion for birding led her to drive, fly, sail, walk, stalk, and sit in search of birds in 25 states and three provinces. Traveling more than 175,000 miles, she set a 21st century record at the time, second to only one other person in history. Over 272 days, Barber observed 723 species of birds in North America north of Mexico.

When Chloe Dalton was eight years old, she would practise her goal kicks in the half-time break of her brothers' rugby matches, all the while telling impressed onlookers: 'Girls don't play rugby.' Sixteen years later, Chloe Dalton won Olympic gold playing rugby sevens for Australia and is now a fixture in the AFLW. In 2020, she started her own news platform, The [Female] Athlete Project, because while she was surrounded by women achieving incredible things in sport, nobody was hearing about them.

Documenting multiple challenges at every turn - as a target for racism from society at large and sexism both inside and outside of the Negro League - this is the unique story of the first woman to play professional baseball on a men's team, breaking barriers in sports while believing, "There's got to be a first in everything. Maybe it will be me." The text explains that as players began to leave the Negro League for major league teams, Toni Stone seized her only opportunity to play professional ball and replaced Henry Aaron on the Negro League's top team.

Inspired by TRUE Events! - In a historical with romance, action-adventure, family, foreign and national intrigue between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, all kinds of exciting things...Through blizzards, gale-force winds, temperatures falling below -80, and over 700 miles of death-dealing terrain, teams of brave men and courageous and smart dogs of in dominatable fighting spirit, mush sleds across the Alaska wilderness, in an around the clock relay, race with lifesaving serum for 11,000 plague-ravaged people inaccessible by everything, but death and their determined rescuers, warring with the...

In a society that is digging deep into the misogyny underlying our traditions and media, the world of sports is especially fertile ground. From casual sexism, like condescending coverage of women’s pro sports, to more serious issues, like athletes who abuse their partners and face only minimal consequences, this area of our culture is home to a vast swath of gender issues that apply to all of us - whether or not our work and leisure time revolve around what happens on the field.

On the face of it, women's sport is on the rise, garnering more attention and grassroots involvement than ever before. However, the truth is that in many respects progress is stalling, or even falling back. Sharron Davies is no stranger to battling the routine sexism the sporting world. She missed out on Olympic Gold because of blatant doping among East German athletes in the 1980s, and has never received justice. Now, biological males are being allowed to compete directly against women under the guise of trans 'self-ID', a development that could destroy the integrity of female sport.

Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy, brown hair tucked under a topee, Workman was a force on the mountain and off. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers, became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas, the first woman to lecture at the Sorbonne, and the second to address the Royal Geographic Society of London.

They've traded punches in knockdown brawls, crashed biplanes through barns, and raced to the rescue in fast cars. They add suspense and drama to the story, portraying the swimmer stalked by the menacing shark, the heroine dangling 20 feet below a soaring hot air balloon, or the woman leaping nine feet over a wall to escape a dog attack. Only an expert can make such feats of daring look easy, and stuntwomen with the skills to perform - and survive - great moments of action in movies have been hitting their mark in Hollywood since the beginning of film.

Set against a backdrop of social change during the 1970s, State is a compelling first-person account of what it was like to live through both traditional gender discrimination in sports and the joy of the very first days of equality - or at least the closest that one high school girls’ basketball team ever came to it.