Their Day in the Sun: Women of the 1932 Olympics

As anyone whose followed the Olympics this year knows, women made up nearly half of the American Olympic team that went to Atlanta and represented the country's best hopes for medals. But 64 years before Jackie Joyner-Kersee and the women's basketball team strutted their stuff in Atlanta, the first female Olympians were given trowels ""to dig `starting holes' in the cinder track surface"" and divers ""practiced timing and kept legs in shape on a springboard, making their usual approaches and hurdles and landing on a thin mat."" Pieroth, an historian who taught phys-ed and water safety for many years, outlines the athletes' lives, taking the reader through the trials, the Olympics, and their experiences after they returned from Los Angeles. The result is a delightful tale of pain and gain with disapproving parents and media, a swimmer who turned down an offer to join the Ziegfeld Follies to train for the Olympic team and, of course, the swaggering Babe Didrickson. ""If there is anything more dreadful aesthetically or more depressing than the fatigue-distorted face of a girl runner at the finish line,"" wrote one journalist, ""I have never seen it."" It didn't change the status of women's sports overnight (in 1939, for example, Minnesota outlawed strenuous competition for girls). But for that year, before politics hijacked the games, even journalists cheered for the girls and women who defied the norms of the day to win fans and medals. (Oct.)