Sports, Women, and Femininity!

When my daughters were little, they both played soccer with a vengeance.  The younger followed her older sibling into the sport, and eventually was invited to play competitively in China when she was in high school.  Their Dad, politically left, nevertheless did not initially approve of their adoration of sports.  As I recall, he told me they would be better off doing something more ‘feminine’.  When he came to their games, he would sit on the sidelines and read his newspaper, which felt humiliating to both daughters.  I reminded him that his biggest complaint about his own parents was that they had rarely approved of the things he loved to do as a boy, having their own agenda for him. He relented, though we were no longer married, and he had not listened to me much when we were.  The newspapers came down, and he actually watched the games.  Thank God no one used cell phones back then.  Over the years he has learned to feel pride in their physical accomplishments as well as the intellectual ones. Our eldest has worked in the outdoor education field for years, rock-climbing, river rafting and climbing mountains; the younger has her son playing soccer at age three.  If she had a daughter I’m sure that little girl would be playing on a toddler team too.  Watching the US Women’s Soccer team play in the finals was marvelous, but seeing men cheering on the sidelines was thrilling.  Perhaps the feminist movement has made more of a difference than I had thought, altering the very view people in this country hold about what is feminine, whether they are left or right, progressive or not.  Women can excel at sports and still be beautiful.  One of the most important aspects of “Little Nancy: The Journey Home” for me was learning how I was taught to view myself as a child, how I did as I grew up, and how I do now.  I am relieved there are less limits for my daughters than there were for me, and less reason to hide.  My daughters are both beautiful, inside and out.  I trust they will come to realize this at an earlier age than I did.