Acclaimed since its original publication,Coming on Stronghas become a much-cited touchstone in scholarship on women and sports. In this new edition, Susan K. Cahn updates her detailed history of ...women's sport and the struggles over gender, sexuality, race, class, and policy that have often defined it. A new chapter explores the impact of Title IX and how the opportunities and interest in sports it helped create reshaped women's lives even as the legislation itself came under sustained attack.
Amy Bass' "Sports History and the Cultural Turn" is an insightful and comprehensive analysis of the state of sports history, making a strong case for its scholarly excellence and innovation, ...relevance to other subfields, and worthiness as a strand in grand narrative history. Appreciative of Bass' discerning overview, Cahn makes her comments in the spirit of further inquiry into the peculiar status of sports history.
Sexual Reckonings is the fascinating tale of adolescent girls coming of age in the South during the most explosive decades for the region. Focusing on the period from 1920 to 1960, Susan Cahn reveals ...how both the life of the South and the meaning of adolescence underwent enormous political, economic, and social shifts.
Sexual Reckonings is the fascinating tale of adolescent girls coming of age in the South during the most explosive decades for the region. Focusing on the period from 1920 to 1960, Susan Cahn reveals ...how both the life of the South and the meaning of adolescence underwent enormous political, economic, and social shifts. Those years witnessed the birth of a modern awareness of adolescence and female sexuality that clashed mightily with the white supremacist and patriarchal legacies of the old South. As youth staked its claim, the bodies and beliefs of southern girls became the battlefield for a transformed South, which was, like them, experiencing growing pains.Cahn reveals how young women, both white and black, were seen as the South's greatest hope and its greatest threat. Viewed as critical actors in every regional crisis, from the economic recession and urban migrations of the 1920s to the racial conflicts precipitated by school desegregation in the 1950s, female teenagers became the conspicuous subjects of social policy and regional imagination. All the while, these adolescents pursued their own desires and discovered their own meanings, creating cracks in the twin pillars of the Jim Crow South--"racial purity" and white male dominance--that would soon be toppled by the student-led civil rights movement. Sexual Reckonings is an amazingly intimate look at a time of deep personal exploration and profound cultural change for southern girls and for the society they inhabited, a powerful account of the clash between a society's fears and the daily lives and aspirations of its most prized, and unpredictable, population.
<!CDATAA spectacular transformation in women's sports has occurred over the past century in colleges, high schools, and recreational leagues across the nation. Gradual changes during the late 1950s ...and 1960s within the fields of women's physical education and amateur sport provided the initial energy for this transformation. But it took the rebirth of a grassroots feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s to catalyze the radical changes in women's athletic opportunities and attitudes toward female athletes. The assimilation of feminist principles into the broader popular culture solidified the belief that sport plays a positive role in the lives of girls and women. Political activists for women's rights codified this attitude with the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments, a law banning gender discrimination in educational settings, thus guaranteeing women's legal right to an equitable share of athletic opportunities and resources.
Though the sea change in American women's sports is evident in schools, the media, and local playing fields, scholars are still in the early stages of fully examining the causes and impacts of this historic change. Women and Sports in the United States brings together scholarly articles, journalism, political and legal documents, and first-person accounts that collectively explore women's sports in America, with emphasis on the post-Title IX era.
This book was published with the generous support of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University.>
Cahn relates her experience in living as a lesbian and describes how she struggled to cope with her chronic fatigue syndrome. Many people see homosexuals as disgusting, sinful, tolerable, abominable, ...and crazy. Although their is no proof that homosexuality and mental disorder is correlated, many psychiatrists still believe that several mental diseases are caused by homosexuality, and are finding reparative therapies and reconversion programs to treat homosexuals.
Border Disorders SUSAN K. CAHN
Disability Histories,
11/2014
Book Chapter
Sin Fronteras—without borders.¹ Feminists have pushed us to look beyond the borders that divide us, to explore borderlands to understand the people situated between or near borders as having a ...certain wisdom, an ability to bridge differences, to teach us ultimately about both ourselves and others.² Queer theorists, too, have shaken off any notion of fixed, unified sexual identity and replaced it with fluid desires that gravitate toward particular identity narratives that are, in essence,not of the essencebut culturally produced.³ Disability studies scholars have also challenged us to explore the “liminal spaces” and put forward an idea
The power of oral history to broaden historical knowledge, rethink existing understandings and blur the outmoded distinction between "popular" and "professional" scholarship is discussed as a worthy ...approach taken by many writers of sport history.
