“Moving Forward Together!”
This month, the CSUN University Library is celebrating national Women’s History Month with a special focus on women and sports. Women’s involvement in athletics and the sporting world is an often overlooked history. Women have been, and continue to be, important contributors and leaders in both professional and recreational athletics. From Babe Didrikson Zaharias to Serena Williams, there have been iconic women athletes that shaped the sporting world as well as popular culture.
Women’s participation in recreational activities and athletics programs have immense benefits on individual women and on communities. Nonetheless, social stigmas and structural inequalities have historically prevented women’s equal access to sports. Today’s expansion of women’s sports is the result of grassroots efforts and outstanding leaders. We look at Women and Sports to reflect on this year’s theme from National Women’s History Alliance: “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating & Inspiring Generations.”
All month long, you will find events and programs celebrating Women’s History across campus. In addition to our print and digital book displays, the Library will celebrate the “Moving Forward Together!” theme with an event called “Making Space: Roller Derby in Today’s World.” Keep reading this blog post to find out book recommendations, event information, and more. And while we’re honoring Women and Sports this year, don’ t forget to support CSUN’s women’s sports teams too!
Women and Sports Book Display
In the Library, we’re showcasing books that explore women and sports. Check out books from our print book display in the Lobby, or browse the digital selections below.
Stand up and shout out : women’s fight for equal pay, equal rights, and equal opportunities in sports (2020) by Joan Steidinger
(Re)Presenting Wilma Rudolph (2015) by Rita Liberti 
and Maureen M. Smith
“(Re)Presenting Wilma Rudolph explores the major episodes and sites of memory across the track legend’s life and death. Analyzing newspaper and magazine accounts, dozens of children’s books, and a television movie, among other materials, Liberti and Smith highlight the range of ways meaning was constructed around Rudolph and her accomplishments on the track. Rather than a traditional biography, this book unpacks the collective memories we create and share about the Olympian. A close reading of the stories that are remembered and circulated about Rudolph not only underscore the athlete’s agency but simultaneously minimize and even erase the ways in which racism and sexism impacted her life.”
Figure Skating in the Formative Years : Singles, Pairs, and the Expanding Role of Women (2015) by Hines, James R
“Figure skating, unique in its sublimely beautiful combination of technical precision, musicality, and interpretive elements, has undergone many dramatic developments since the only previous history of the sport was published in 1959. This exciting and information-packed new history explains skating’s many technical and artistic advances, its important personages, its intrigues and scandals, and its historical high points. Abundant full-color and black-and-white photographs illustrate the text.”
Building the WNBA : From “Dunking Divas” to Political Leaders (2024) by Georgia Munro-Cook
“This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), exploring the role of gender, race, and sexuality in the continuing growth of the league. As the longest running and most successful professional women’s sporting league in the United States, the WNBA has evolved into a politically important force both inside and outside the sporting world. Drawing on a variety of research methods, including ethnography, media and literary analysis, and archival research, the book argues that it is its players’ dedication and commitment to ensuring a sustainable league that has enabled the WNBA to survive in spite of an American sporting landscape that is otherwise hostile to women. As such, It will be of interest to academics and students working or studying in the fields of sports sociology, sports management, feminist theory, sports history, and gender studies. Georgia Munro-Cook is a Research Fellow at Griffith University, Australia, working as part of the Inclusive Futures Beacon to promote sport and recreation for people with disability. She is particularly interested in looking at the intersectional barriers women with disability face in engaging with sport.”
Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers : 50 Years, 50 Stories (2022) by Mary Ellen Pethel
“To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of Title IX legislation, Mary Ellen Pethel has written a who’s who of Title IX proponents in Tennessee. The book consists of fifty profiles in biography, interview, and vignette format, introducing Tennessee women instrumental to the passage of the Educational Amendments of 1972 and to the success of women’s athletic programs thereafter. Pethel celebrates the lives and careers of household names like Pat Summitt and Candace Parker, as well as equally important forerunners such as Ann Furrow and Teresa Phillips. Introductory and concluding material discusses education and sport prior to Title IX, the legislation itself, the early controversies and implementation of Title IX, and the future of equity in sport and education.”
Getting in the game : Title IX and the women’s sports revolution (2010) by Deborah L. Brake
“…While [Title IX] has created tremendous gains for female athletes, not only raising the visibility and cultural acceptance of women in sports, but also creating social bonds for women, positive body images, and leadership roles, the disparities in funding between men’s and women’s sports have remained remarkably resilient. At the same time, female athletes continue to receive less prestige and support than their male counterparts, which in turn filters into the arena of professional sports. Brake provides a richer understanding and appreciation of what Title IX has accomplished, while taking a critical look at the places where the law has fallen short. A unique contribution to the literature on Title IX, Getting in the Game fully explores the theory, policy choices, successes, and limitations of this historic law.”
Gender inequality in sports : from Title IX to world titles (2022) by Kirstin Cronn-Mills
Pacific Island Women and Contested Sporting Spaces (2024) by Yoko Kanemasu 
“This book focuses on the variety of strategies developed by women athletes in the Pacific Islands to claim contested sporting spaces – in particular, rugby union, soccer, beach volleyball, recreational sports and exercise – as a prism to explore grassroots women’s engagement with heavily entrenched postcolonial (hetero)patriarchy. Based on primary research conducted in Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the book investigates contested sporting spaces as sites of infrapolitics intersected primarily by gender and also by other markers of inequality, including ethnicity, sexuality, class and geopolitics. Contrary to historical and contemporary representations of Pacific Island women as victims of gender injustice, it explores how these athletes and those who support them actively carve out space for their transformative agency. Pacific Island Women and Contested Sporting Spaces: Staking Their Claim focuses on a region underexamined by sport or gender studies researchers and will be of key interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sport Studies, Sociology and Pacific Studies as well as sport practitioners and policymakers.”
Legendary Lionesses: The England Women’s Football Team, 1972-2022 (2024) by Jean Williams
Gender, Politics and Change in Mountaineering: Moving Mountains (2023) by Jenny Hall, Emma Boocock, and Zoë Avner 
“This book is the first edited collection to offer an intersectional account of gender in mountaineering adventure sports and leisure. It provides original theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights into mountain spaces as sites of socio-cultural production and transformation.The book shows how gender matters in the twenty-first century, and illustrates that there is a need for greater efforts to mainstream difference in representations and governance structures if we are to improve equality in adventure, sporting and leisure spaces.The interdisciplinary volume represents scholars from theoretical as well as applied perspectives across adventure, tourism, sport science, sports coaching, psychology, geography, sociology and outdoor studies.”
Tackling Stereotype : Corporeal Reflexivity and Politics of Play in Women’s Rugby (2023) by Charlotte Branchu
“This book presents a critical rethinking of assumptions that have informed our understanding of women’s engagement in contact sport, based on an in-depth ethnography with an English rugby team. Looking at the day-to-day concerns of women who play rugby, this work provides a refreshing perspective on different ways of doing femininities in postfeminist times. Women’s rugby is one of the world’s fastest growing sports, yet it is also a physical game that is traditionally the preserve of men. Tackling Stereotypes reveals the cultural and symbolic stigma that ‘sticks’ to women’s rugby players and the tactics they use to carve out space for themselves and fight for legitimacy. It also argues that players engage in pragmatic politics, informed by their participation, that aims to enact realistic change. Branchu develops a situational sociology that furthers debates in the understanding of gender, belonging, becoming, embodiment, resistance politics, and the sociological study of sport. Charlotte Branchu is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool, UK.”
Street Football, Gender and Muslim Youth in the Netherlands: Girls Who Kick Back (2022) by Kathrine van den Bogert 
Playing with the boys : why separate is not equal in sports (2008) by Eileen L. McDonagh and Laura Pappano
“Athletic contests help define what we mean in America by “success.” By keeping women from “playing with the boys” on the false assumption that they are inherently inferior, society relegates them to second-class citizens. In this forcefully argued book, Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano show in vivid detail how women have been unfairly excluded from participating in sports on an equal footing with men. Using dozens of powerful examples–girls and women breaking through in football, ice hockey, wrestling, and baseball, to name just a few–the authors show that sex differences are not sufficient to warrant women’s coercive exclusion from competing with men; that some sex-group differences actually confer a sports advantage to women; and that “special rules” for women in sports do not simply reflect the “differences” between the sexes, but actively create and reinforce a view that women as a group are inherently inferior to men–even when women clearly are not. For instance, women’s bodies give them a physiological advantage in endurance sports like the ultra-marathon and distance swimming. So, why do so many Olympic events–from swimming to skiing to running to bike racing–have shorter races for women than men? Likewise, why are women’s tennis matches limited to three sets while men’s are best-of-fives? This book shows how sex-segregated sports policies, instead of reflecting sex-group differences, in fact construct them. An original and provocative argument to level the athletic playing field, Playing with the Boys issues a clarion call for sex-sensible policies in sports as a crucial step toward achieving social, economic, and political equality for men and women in our society.”
The Revolutionary Sport of Roller Derby
Maybe you’ve seen images of fishnet-clad women tearing around a banked track, throwing elbows and taking spills. Maybe you thought roller derby was a 70’s-era spectacle, or a set-piece for Harley Quinn movies. The truth is, roller derby is all those things and much more!
Today, flat-track roller derby is a thriving sport with a decidedly radical attitude. Women, trans, and non-binary folks are at the forefront of grassroots, volunteer-run leagues that challenge and empower. Many flat-track roller derby leagues and organizations actively engage in community organizing, service, and justice-oriented practices, including anti-racist work and creating gender-expansive policies. In addition to regional and place-based leagues, borderless and diasporic leagues are taking shape throughout the roller derby community. From March 7th through 9th, six leagues will partake in the “No Borders Derby Tournament,” celebrating the athleticism and camaraderie of borderless and diasporic leagues. You can livestream the tournament all weekend on Twitch!
If you’re local to CSUN, you may want to catch some derby in action. On March 16th at 4:30pm, you can watch the San Fernando Valley Fer Sures play the RebelTown Rollers at The Cage in North Hollywood.
Finally, join us in the Library and learn all about roller derby on March 25th at 5pm in the AS/RS Viewing Room (Library 1st floor, east wing). Join Librarian Brianna (aka Miss Information #411) to discuss the history and community around this “revolutionary sport.”
