When Women Stood: The Untold History of Females Who Changed Sports and the World

Allred, who competed on the first U.S. women’s bobsled team in 1994, spotlights in her incisive debut a host of women in sports and their transformative accomplishments. The female athletes highlighted include household names, as well as those largely unknown, and race is often a factor. Black basketball player Alma English Byrd led her team to win the Arkansas state basketball championship in 1939, despite “having never played on a wood floor before the tournament”; high jumper Dorothy Cure was the first Black woman to set a national record in 1914 for the running broad jump; and tennis star Althea Gibson “transcended her sport during times of racial inequity and violence” and won both Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in the 1950s. Other chapters discuss how patriarchal ideas of modesty shaped the history of women’s sporting attire, detail polarizing public policies about the inclusion of transgender female athletes in women’s sports, and examine how second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s emboldened women to compete in previously male-dominated sports. Allred’s prose is direct, and she lucidly explains how these pioneers have challenged gender and racial stereotypes. The result is an enlightening account of women trailblazers. (Feb.)