Is it a problem that White House b-ball games with the president are male-only affairs? Or that, according to the New York Times story yesterday that since taking office President Obama has played 23 rounds of golf – and none (based on records kept by a CBS reporter) included women? (The first female aide, Melody C. Barnes, apparently played yesterday.)

President Obama finds the whole matter annoying and White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying that the ball-playing “is just part of the culture that I am excluded from. And I don’t care.”

It’s not surprising that Dunn and other females on President Obama’s staff would downplay the exclusion. But how they feel misses a more critical point: When you are the President, there is no such thing as a meaningless basketball game.

Just as Michelle Obama cannot throw on an outfit and step into public without drawing a detailed fashion analysis (or plant an organic garden and not have it be an important initiative), everything – like it or not, fair or not – is a statement. You cannot choose, in other words, the aspects of your non-policy White House living which are meant to be symbolically meaningful and those that are not. It all counts.

Sports are a tool for relationship building for men and women. And while elite leagues and teams are all about skills, there are many more basketball leagues across the country – many co-ed – that are about getting exercise and connecting with others. There are urban professionals leagues in Manhattan, drop-in co-ed play in New Hampshire and competitive co-ed leagues in Chicago (FYI: one busy message board has female former college players looking to join teams).

It is hard to believe that the guys President Obama has invited to play are elite jocks who chose government service over NBA careers. More likely, they are – like those who join recreational leagues – just looking to sweat and bond. (In other words, it’s not about dunking…).

We know The President likes basketball. He made a photo op of filling out the NCAA March Madness playoff bracket (alas men’s side only). He invited the UConn Women’s Basketball team to the White House, but carefully described them as an inspiration to his daughters, not himself.

The male-focused message may be unintentional. But it does normalize the bias belief that men’s play is the real thing and women are wannabees.

No one wants to deny Mr. Obama the fun and fitness of hoops, but he should be astute enough to know that there is an awful lot of political capital embedded in, literally, being able to pass the ball to the POTUS.

By Laura Pappano

Elizabeth Fry, 50, is a powerhouse of an open-water swimmer who last month shattered by more than six hours (six hours!!) Kris Rutford’s record for the reverse Manhattan Island Marathon Swim. On September 18, she completed the 28.5 mile clockwise swim – against the current, down the East River and up the Hudson – in 11 hours, 41, minutes, and 5 seconds. Fry, who also swam the English Channel – three times – as well as to Catalina Island, has completed the counter-clockwise Manhattan Island Swim (with the current) in 7:44:47. A Wesport (CT) resident, Fry is also the event director for Swim Across the Sound, which raises money for cancer patients and their families.

FGN: You swim the English Channel, around Manhattan, off the California coast. Isn’t it awfully cold?

EF: The English Channel, for example, is incredibly salty and cold. You have to prepare yourself for the temperature to be about 58 degrees. If you’re lucky it will be 62. You spend a lot of your training acclimating to a much colder temperature. We can start swimming in Long Island Sound in April or May. If you swim at, say, 53 degrees, 55 is balmy and 62 becomes very tolerable. I don’t mind cold water.

FGN: How do you eat – or drink – when you are swimming for hours and hours?

EF: I don’t train with fluids. During my [competitive] swims, I have scheduled feeding breaks and they are primarily fluids. I have warm peppermint tea with an unflavored protein powder mixed in. I usually stop and tread water and talk to my crew (which includes my sister Peggy, whom I trust with my life). The crew will use that time to assess my mental and physical state.

FGN: Have you ever had to call off a swim?

EF: In 2007, I had a very bad asthma attack crossing the English Channel [Fry was attempting a double cross]. I had gotten to France and it was a very tough swim. When I stood up in France – you have to go above the water line – I felt as if my lungs were compressed. As I walking back into the water I was having an issue with my asthma and my crew handed me my inhaler. I swam another five hours, but then there was a moment in that last couple of minutes in which I felt warm and great. I realized you shouldn’t feel wonderful and great – I might have been ready to pass out – and I said, ‘It’s time.” I had pneumonia by the time I got home. I respect the sport now as an extreme sport.

FGN: Do you ever encounter wildlife during your swims?

EF: Out in the [Long Island] Sound you mostly run into jellyfish. During my Catalina swim, I had encounters with seals, flying fish and a sleeping sail fish. I knew these were shark-infested waters and I asked my friend Marcia Cleveland what to do. She said, “Don’t wear blue or black.” I had seen a 7-year-old wearing a pink bathing suit. It was adorable, so I got one for myself. I was swimming and these things — these flying fish — are coming at me and it turns out the pink suit probably looked like a giant lure. But I also saw a dolphin. If there is a dolphin, it is a great swim.

FGN: Did you swim as a kid?

EF: I was one of five kids – the middle child – growing up in Long Beach [and later, Westport], and we were always at the beach, in the water and the waves. My parents couldn’t get me out of the water, I was blue, shivering. In 6th grade, I started swimming at the YMCA in Westport. There were no other organized sports when I was a kid. In high school, they did not have a swim team until my senior year. Before then, I played softball and field hockey. But as a senior, I stopped playing field hockey to swim. We had a 20-yard pool, but the facility made no difference.

FGN: What made you interested in swimming in open water – and across huge bodies?

EF: I started open-water swimming when I was about 8 and went to Camp Ak-O-Mak in Canada. We would go up in June, but there wasn’t a heated pool. You swam in a lake. You could almost feel the ice cracking in the morning. But that’s what you were there for. [The camp has produced Olympic swimmers]. The mess hall there had pictures of swimmer and they had this small section of channel swimmers. I remember looking at that. My father being British, we always heard about the English Channel being the Everest of swimming. In 2001, I was working for T. Rowe Price and a group decided to swim the English Channel relay. It was a fantastic experience. I don’t think the notion of swimming the English Channel [myself] ever left my mind.

FGN: Does open water marathon swimming have any relevance in your work life?

EF: I do strategy consulting around mergers and acquisitions. I work with investment advisors, brokerage firms, banks. Swimming requires discipline. You are the only one. You can’t slack and hope someone else will pick it up.  I will go to a meeting and we are meeting a client for the first time and they will go through the introduction and then they say, “And let me tell you about Liz – she swam the English Channel.”

They are not talking about the university I went to or the other things I have done in my life. There are a lot of people I work with who are very accomplished athletically as well. People don’t get to be the CEO of a company in this day and age without having the professional and the physical.

FGN: Any advice for young girls dreaming of these big swims?

EF: I had a big advantage because from a young age I was in open water. I was in the Atlantic Ocean. I was very comfortable with it. That is the biggest challenge – there are no lane lines, you don’t know what is under you. Girls can get involved in a shoreline or lake race – even one-milers or relays. And for the relay division you can wear wetsuits. Longer races can require a lot of training so you want to make sure teachers and parents are involved.

FGN: What do you think about when you swim?

EF: I don’t think about anything. It’s a complete blank. I know some people sing. The only way I can describe it is as a dynamic meditation. I am just totally loving it, looking at my hands in the water, the phosphorescence, the stuff that makes your hands almost light up. The good news is I don’t think it’s cold and I’m not hungry. It’s like you have spaced out while you are driving and all of a sudden you are home.

Lebanon Valley College photo

By Laura Pappano

The phrase “college football” evokes testosterone-charged pre-U.S. Marine-style intensity and mammoth bodies colliding at ridiculously odd angles and high speeds.

That may accurately describe DI teams on Saturday TV or at bowl game time, but how about the 0-6 Amcats at Anna Maria college, outscored this season 302-90? (And the college just spent $2 million to build “Amcat Field” with real NFL turf!)

The team’s problem? Many players are “undersized.” On the upside, the school draws more tuition-paying student/players, kids get to play college football – and people love to watch and cheer on Saturday afternoon.

On some campuses, in other words, football is more about the “event” than about the quality of play. It is this community-enhancing aspect we hear about when colleges start football teams, which they have been doing in recent years.

According to an NCAA study, even as wrestling lost a net of 101 teams between the 1988-1989 academic year and 2006-2007, football added 78 teams (some football teams were cut; the net gain is 31 over that time).

But guess what? Most of the new teams – 49 of them – have been in Division III. (And this current year – not part of the study – is turning out to be a popular time for starting new football programs, the Amcats among them.)

So why can’t DIII football be coed?

There are – and have been – girls playing high school and even college football. Two seasons ago, Holley Mangold (who weighed 315, bench pressed 264 and squatted 525) was certainly not undersized or under-abled to compete for Alter High School in Ohio (they lost the championships by one point).

Mangold played the on the offensive line. But not everyone on the field needs to be as big or as strong as she is. At Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, 5-6, 129-lb No. 93 is the Dutchmen’s kicker, Brittany Ryan (see photo). And at Trotwood-Madison High School in Ohio, No. 85 (nickname: Ocho Cinco) is 5-2, 114 lb. senior placeholder and wide receiver Kryshana Pierce.

Football is a spectacularly appealing sport with too much of a “No Girls Allowed” culture. It doesn’t need to be that way — especially in DIII.

Word last week that rare film footage of Babe Ruth had been discovered by a New Hampshire man among his grandfather’s home movies provided yet another opportunity to lovingly recall the delightful history of sport, in this case, baseball.

No doubt editors are being deluged with book proposals this week. Surely there is no subject area so worked over as baseball – or football, or men’s basketball, or boxing. Each publishing season brings display tables loaded with new revelations about old times, of fresh twists on familiar historical tales.

Annoyingly, they are overwhelmingly male sagas.

This is not to blame men, but to consider that women’s sports carry a burden: We’d rather forget the past.

In an age when a spectacular WNBA playoff series has record ratings (548,000 – up 73 percent over last year) and thrilling play, who wants to recall rovers and rules against interfering with the shooter? Imagine the scores if no one were allowed to block Cappie Pondexter or Diana Taurasi? How unexciting would that be?

The so-called “milk-and-cookies-era” of women’s athletics (so named for the snacks afterwards) was the Dark Ages of women’s sport. The goal was not winning, but developing social skills. A 1928 book I came across at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, “Field Hockey and Soccer For Women” makes the point. In the intro, Ethel Perrin, Detroit Public Schools health educator advises real cooperation with the opposing team, noting that “the dominant idea of the coach in making arrangements for the game is to ‘take’ every advantage that  the law allows, when a little ‘give’ would be of real social significance to the players.”

Uggh. Really?

Women are clearly tired of playing nice. Maybe that’s why I instinctively shudder when a women’s tennis league in the Northeast states in the RULES that “The home team Captain is responsible for arranging refreshments.”

This is not to say comportment and sportsmanship don’t matter. But the female physical education instructors who fought to keep competition out of sports now look like tragic barriers to the development of high-powered women’s athletics. It feels like progress stalled, seeds buried and left, opportunity cut short.

But this – much as we’d like to let it fade away – is worth grappling with (and reading about).

By Laura Pappano

I can’t wait to see what happens when I tune in to the NFL this weekend. Will we see more dropped passes? Missed routes? Hugging and giggling in the huddle?

After all, the league is kicking off a month-long effort to support breast cancer awareness through its “Crucial Catch” campaign to encourage regular mammograms. Unlike last year, when teams handed out pink ribbons and sold pink fan T-shirts, this year players, coaches, and refs will be having actual pink-colored items touching their bodies.

Smartly, however, the NFL (as it does so well) has imposed limits on the amount of pink. About 100 players will be wearing pink cleats like this, others will wear pink wristbands, gloves, and helmet decals. The captain’s patches will be pink and they’ll use a pink coin for the toss.

Pink, as I’m sure you know, is a very dangerous color.

The explosion of pink merchandise (MLB, NFL, among others), like pink sports gear — from baseball and softball gloves to soccer balls and lax sticks — after all, has been positioned as a concession to female fans and girl athletes. Turn it pink and it’s a little less threatening. We’ve been conditioned to think of pink as soft, gentle, diminutive, a little ditzy, perky, bubbly….(you get the idea). Not hard core competitive stuff.

Of course, that’s precisely what University of Iowa football coach Hayden Fry insisted when in the 1970s he had the walls of the visiting team’s locker room painted pink to “weaken and debilitate opposing football players.” (In 2005 the color was extended to the carpet, urinals and lockers – setting off more than a little debate — photo here).

To be fair, the Iowa shade is a bit paler than the NFL is showing this month. Perhaps it is the difference between dusty rose and a near magenta? We can call it “Power Pink,” but there’s no doubt that the psychological signaling around this color is getting awfully confusing (for a change).

Just 10 days ago Nicole Lavoi wrote on her blog One Sport Voice, about the still-alive-and-well practice of a hockey coach belittling a player by making him wear pink gloves. Did this coach not know about NFL players wearing pink gloves? Or might pink –gasp! — be on the cusp of an image makeover?

Credit those who take a stand and raise awareness about the critical importance of cancer screening (and kudos to Susan G. Komen for the Cure for pioneering the pink ribbon as a symbol of breast cancer awareness in 1991). Heck, the other day I saw a pink oil tank truck and yesterday a pink newspaper landed in my driveway. If this isn’t a sign of success, what is?

Yet, how can we normalize the overly-loaded color pink when guys like my friend, political writer Dave Denison, point out that they have been trained since childhood to find the color repellant? (And Dave in print and in person is the quintessential fair-minded dude).

Can Dave be persuaded by the likes of Brett Favre to rethink his pink aversion? (To be fair, I’m not nutty about the color, either, but perhaps I, too, have fallen under Fry’s spell?) Maybe the NFL needs to stop being so timid and go full tilt. Make the jerseys and helmets pink (think of the merchandising – it could rival throwbacks!). Why not make the football pink? And who says the lines on the field have to be white?

Then maybe we could move past all this silliness about pink – and onto whatever is next.  Like, say, What color is prostate cancer awareness?

R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter, professors emerita at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College and co-authors of a book on Title IX, have collected data on women’s roles on – and off – the field in college athletics since 1977.  They have chaired departments, taught pre-med courses, coached men’s and women’s college teams, and been a force in the governance of athletics for decades. Acosta played varsity basketball, field hockey, volleyball, tennis, softball and badminton for Brigham Young University during her college days; Carpenter was on BYU’s basketball, volleyball, softball, swimming, and gymnastics teams (“The seasons were short” back then, notes Acosta)

Today, Carpenter enjoys waterskiing, golf, and badminton. The day before her 70th birthday in July, Acosta won gold and silver medals in badminton at the Connecticut Senior Games. She also enjoys golf. We spoke with Acosta and Carpenter at their lakeside home last month.

FGN: Your data shows that just 42.8 percent of women’s college teams have female coaches, down from over 90 percent when Title IX was passed in 1972. Why does this matter?

LJC: It is important for female coaches to be around because [playing college sports] is a very intense part of your life and to ave female role models in an intense part of your life is particularly valuable. Guys have role models everywhere – politics, business – they are tripping over male role models.

FGN: But you hear some women saying they prefer male coaches…

RVA: Today if you ask women if they would prefer to have a male or female coach, most would say “male” because that is what they know. I would like to see more females coaching both males and females [only 2 percent of men’s team have female head coaches]. They need to see women as capable leaders, as capable of making decisions.

LJC: The studies [suggesting women prefer male coaches] are flawed. Your feelings for your coach are often related to whether it was a good season for you, if you liked the people you were with. I wouldn’t want to play for Pat Summitt because I am someone who needs to be nurtured. But the door shouldn’t be closed in one direction; it should swing both ways.

FGN: Despite whistleblower laws and other protections, it remains rare for women at colleges and universities to raise concerns of inequities in athletics – and for them to be in danger of losing their job if they do.

RVA: If their goal is to keep their position and they have no allies on campus, they [female coaches] have only one choice: that is to be quiet. If they are not quiet, they are pegged as “troublemakers.”

LJC: And there is no trouble getting rid of them — you just don’t renew their contracts. We get so many calls from coaches and administrators when things are not going well. I ask, “Who across campus can you go to for informal information?” and they don’t even know a name. You need to be respected across campus and that only happens when you spend time on committees. I find myself when I am speaking with coaches telling them that a multi-year contract is more valuable than a raise.

FGN: Is coaching harder today?

RVA: The pressure on coaches for performance is huge. It is a 24/7 job. They don’t have lives. When I see my athletic friends coaching I ask, ‘How did it get to this point? When did athletics become so darned important on campus?”

FGN: But don’t you think sports are important?

LJC: It depends on what your goals are. Where athletics wags the tail of the institution, athletics needs to be downsized. Athletic directors should not make multiples of what presidents make.

RVA: Or coaches.

LJC: If you believe the data – and its hard not to believe the data – what is this about a money-making business? I don’t think athletic directors deserve to be on campus because they are making money. The question is: How do they contribute to the life of the campus? It is not about making money; [athletic departments] launder money!

FGN: So what does this mean in terms of institutional support for men’s and women’s sports teams?

LJC: There is no reason why, for example, the women’s basketball games should always be the warm up games for the men – or that the banquet at the end of the year be humongous for the guys and lunch at McDonald’s for the gals. If you are always the “Lady Knights” [while the men are “the Knights”] it will always be subtly less valued. If you are having an institution support a program – if the band goes to the men’s game and the head athletic trainer goes to the men’s game, the head athletic trainer needs to go to the same number of women’s games and the same with the band. And that is so easy to accomplish.

FGN: You have watched the development of women’s sports for 32 years. What has surprised you?

RVA: What has surprised both of us is soccer. When we started, it was almost non-existent. Now it is a huge sport – and becoming more and more popular.

LJC: The face of athletics changes, sports become popular and unpopular. They wax and wane. Gymnastics for men and women is a contracting sport. Same with wrestling. To the wrestler on the team, it is the only thing that exists. In the world, wrestling is waning. It is not waning because of Title IX, but because of poor administrative decisions.

FGN: How long will you continue to track the data?

RVA: We were going to stop after 25 years and colleagues said, “You can’t do that!” People trust us. That level of trust has developed because we always keep our word.

By Laura Pappano

In a sports culture in which OBP, ERA, PR, SOG, QB Ratings (among others) rule the landscape, Linda Jean Carpenter and R. Vivian Acosta track stats you won’t catch among box scores, but that have served a generation: Women’s access to play and power in college athletics.

“There isn’t a Congressional hearing or scholarly work on the issue of women in coaching and administration that doesn’t cite their research,” Donna Lopiano, former CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, shared in an e-mail.

Beginning in 1977 using pencil and paper (the second year they switched to IBM punch cards and now use  actual modern computers), Acosta and Carpenter have made a career of surveying Division I, II, and III colleges to record women’s participation on the field and in coaching and administrative suites. They have tallied numbers and types of women’s teams, percentages of female head coaches plus paid and unpaid assistant coaches, and athletic directors. In 1994 (in a nod to an increasingly complex college sports structure) they added percentages of females in sports information director and athletic trainer roles.

In other words, these two women whose own sports experiences – as players, coaches, researchers, administrators, professors (Acosta has a PhD and Carpenter a PhD and law degree) – could shape a compelling narrative of the rise of women’s athletics, have through their data done something even more valuable: Made concrete the wins and losses for the women’s sports movement since the Title IX era began in earnest.

Their longitudinal data, said Lopiano, has provided “critical factual evidence of the absence of progress in opening the highest status and highest paying coaching position to females in college sports.” She says “there is no comparable work like it in the field” and is why “the advocates of Title IX continue to use and depend on this data.”

The project began — as many important things do — by chance.

Shortly after the passage of Title IX,  Acosta was waiting to speak at a conference organized by the AIAW, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (it governed women’s college sports until the NCAA took over in the 1980s).

“I was eavesdropping and I heard someone say, ‘Have you noticed how many men are coaching women’s teams?’ and someone else said, ‘Yeah. Has a study been done on this?’ – and a little light bulb went off,” Acosta recalled last month during an interview at the lakeside home she shares with Carpenter.  “I went to Linda and said, ‘We can do this. All we have to do is count!’”

Counting, of course, was (and is) a mammoth task that takes months. Even today, while they use computers to sort and tally data, all the surveys are sent out on paper because, says Acosta, “people expect it and it takes them 10 minutes.” The next round of surveys will be mailed in a few weeks (see photo above of Carpenter and Acosta in Carpenter’s office with surveys). They collect two year’s worth of data each time and make their reports available for free online. Click here for the most recent.

In it, Acosta and Carpenter note that 2008 marked the “highest ever participation by female athletes” with 9010 women’s teams, or an average of 8.65 per school (most popular women’s team offered by colleges, in order: Basketball, volleyball, soccer, cross country, softball).

At the same time, however, the representation of females as coaches of women’s teams “remains low.” When Title IX was passed in 1972, over 90 percent of head coaches of women’s teams were women. Today, it’s 42.8 percent. A few other results of note:

–  21.3 percent of athletic directors are women, up from 18.6 in 2006
–  Only 27.3 percent of head athletic trainers are females
–  Only 11.3 percent of head sports information directors are female
–  Only 2-3 percent of head coaches of male teams are female (while 57.2 percent of women’s teams have a male head coach)

Check out Acosta & Carpenter’s article in Academe (journal of the American Association of University Professors), looking back on 37 years since the passage of Title IX.

Coming Tomorrow:  Q & A with Acosta and Carpenter

By Laura Pappano

Obviously, it sounds like negotiation hoopla.

Members of the NFL Players Association charged with forging a deal with the league (NFL owners last year voted to opt out of the present collective bargaining agreement) insist they are not just thinking about themselves.

Baltimore Ravens cornerback Domonique Foxworth, one of the youngest  guys ever voted onto the NFL Player’s Association executive committee, said in this week’s New York Times that a lockout – if it comes to that – will not just be a bummer for “billionaire owners” and “some players who might not get a chance for a life-changing payday” but will hurt thousands of “regular people” like parking attendants, concessionaires and souvenir vendors.

Noted Foxworth , “I just want to introduce that there is a third party that doesn’t have a voice.” NFLPA President Kevin Mawae has put out the same message.

The only folks who buy this may be the ten-year-olds in fantasy leagues who are already fretting about no 2010 season (trust me, it’s a topic).

But here’s a suggestion for the NFLPA: If you really want to use your clout, don’t stop with the concessionaires!

Hyatt Hotels – at least three in Boston – are outsourcing their housekeeping staff, laying off 100 who have worked cleaning rooms and making beds in some cases for more than two decades.  Adding to the insult: the housekeepers who were earning in some cases $15 per hour trained their $8-an-hour replacements (they were told trainees would cover vacations, according to The Boston Globe).

Hotels – and those who clean the rooms – are essential to the sports industry. Heck, the Hyatt in Cambridge boasts that, “when Boston’s national sports teams win home games-the hotel exterior lights will change colors.”

The San Francisco Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf features fan information on its site and one fan noted that the Grand Hyatt in New York is a popular place for baseball, hockey, basketball, and football teams to stay, “making it a good place for autograph hunting and gawking at multimillion-dollar ballplayers.”

The matter is that housekeeping is a woman’s job. It is also an immigrant woman’s job. Who knows where 21-year-veteran housekeeper Drupatie Jungra – who is 55 years old – will find work now?

President of the Massachusetts Lodging Association, Paul Sacco, pointed out that hotel guests would not be affected. “If you stayed at the Hyatt last night and you bumped into the housekeeper, would you notice a difference?”

Unions can be pig-headed and a barrier to reform. But in the same week that that textile worker and union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton – the real life “Norma Rae” –  died of brain cancer, it’s worth remembering they can also protect women who don’t have the attention of NFL players, who don’t have a voice – or, it seems, even a memorable face.

By the time Kim Clijsters charged toward the net to hit a final, overhead smash against Caroline Wozniacki and claim the 2009 US Open championship (7-5, 6-3), I was wondering if I really should be thinking so much about her uterus.

Sure, as a mother of three who plays tennis, I grinned with satisfaction to see a fellow mom triumph over a perky and fashionable 19-year-old and become as, The New York Times pointed out yesterday, “the first mother to win a Grand Slam title since Evonne Goolagong Cawley won Wimbledon in 1980.”

But amid the celebratory chatter (and the frequent camera glimpses of her adorable curly-haired, binky-mouthed daughter Jada), I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is this such a big deal?

Was I missing something about the experience of childbirth? Or, more accurately, was I missing something, some critical something that left me when I gave birth? Did childbirth transform me physically, handicapping me in some way that I hadn’t considered – and no one dared share?

The prospect – and problem – of women playing competitive sports, historically speaking, has been rooted in the alleged physical strains that are part of being female and bearing children. Fortunately, we now understand that blood doesn’t really rush from the uterus to the brain making females barren if they do anything more challenging than needlepoint (a Victorian belief). And all those pamphlets from Kotex and Modess warning girls they’d better sit out gym class now seem quaint.  In other words, having your period is now O.K., athletically-speaking.

Giving birth, however, remains a suspect activity. But why is this?

Holly Powell Kennedy, the Helen Varney Professor of Midwifery at the Yale School of Nursing whose work has pinpointed a prevailing “fear” of childbirth as a natural process, says, women are just as strong, powerful, and physically capable once they become mothers as they were before giving birth.

In fact, she says in an e-mail, “the physical work of motherhood is considerable and they can develop additional strengths as a result.” She notes one problem identified in a recent study of childbirth advice books is a prevailing concern that having a baby forever damages a woman’s body. That implication spills over to athletics.

“Perhaps the amazement which the sporting world and Clijsters expressed at her victory will become passé in the future with her stunning example of maternal athleticism, where her body was perhaps even stronger after becoming a mother!” says Kennedy.

It is true: athlete-moms remind us that giving birth is a physical experience in a way that, say, lawyer-moms don’t.  One has only to recall that conventional wisdom once held that women’s smaller average head size meant they weren’t as smart as guys (nothing to do with being barred from college, of course…) to realize that barriers to women’s participation are often camouflaged as physical limitations.

In other words, it may be time to re-frame pregnancy and childbirth not as a career-ender for female athletes, but as just another type of cross training.