Throughout history, women were often denied the opportunity to compete, not because they lacked talent, but because society limited what their bodies, ambition, and presence were allowed to be.
The 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919, granted women the right to vote, but girls were still largely pushed toward what Dr. Jay Coakley, Executive Director of the Center for Critical Sport Studies at the University of Colorado, described as “grace and beauty” sports.
“They generally, absolutely, involved no physical contact between participants,” Coakley said. “In women’s basketball in the early 20th century, there were rules that prevented full-court basketball and discouraged contact between players and involved rules that limited the physical exertion that was expressed by the players.”
Even In Sports, Women Were Expected to be Restrained and Contained
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That thinking began to shift in the late 1930s and 1940s, when World War II changed the structure of everyday American life. Women stepped into roles that had long been considered out of reach, as men went off to war. The change was not immediate, but it raised new questions about what women were capable of doing — in the workplace, in public life and on the playing field.
The founding of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in 1943 marked one of those turning points.
“Chicago Cubs owner Phil Wrigley, concerned about the negative impact of World War II on baseball, forms the All-American Girls Professional Softball League. The league will soon switch to baseball,” according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame website.
Black women at the time were still excluded from opportunities in sport, but carved out their own place with the Negro Leagues when denied a chance to play in the AAGPBL. Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson and Connie Morgan still faced resistance and challenges to their ability to play while playing with men, but each made history in a game that had not been built with them in mind.
Coakley said these changes helped challenge long-held beliefs about women’s abilities.
“As women had that experience, and as people had opportunities to view them having that experience, that opened up the door for raising questions about the need for equity, the need for women to have opportunities to participate in a range of sports,” he said.
That Fight for Opportunity Would Continue Across Generations
And Black women would remain central to it.
Few names carry that legacy more powerfully than Althea Gibson. Long before Serena Williams dominated the sport of tennis and before Coco Gauff emerged as a new face, Gibson broke through the sport’s color barrier. She became the first Black woman to compete in the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Championship on August 28, 1950.
Her presence in that space was not freely given. The United States Lawn Tennis Association had refused to invite her to compete until tennis champion Alice Marble publicly argued that Gibson deserved the chance. Gibson’s eventual rise in the sport was a signal that Black women also belonged in spaces that had long tried to exclude them.
Her breakthrough helped reshape the future of tennis and expanded the imagination of what was possible. That is part of the power of women in sports history: one athlete opens the door, and generations walk through it.
The Same can be Said of Title IX
Before Title IX passed in 1972, opportunities for women and girls in sports remained sharply limited. After it became law, participation grew dramatically. According to the National Women’s Law Centerless than 16 percent of all college athletes were women before Title IX. By 2019–20, that number had risen to 44 percent.
Title IX did not solve everything. Equity remained uneven, and access continued to depend on race, class and geography, but it changed the scale of what women in sports could pursue. It moved the conversation beyond whether girls should play at all and closer to whether they were being given the same chance to thrive.
Today, that Legacy Continues to Expand in New Ways
According to the NFL, flag football has become one of the fastest-growing sports globally, with women and girls driving much of that growth. The sport has gained more visibility as the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games approach. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) supported the inclusion of flag football in the Olympics in October 2023.
The NCAA added women’s flag football to its Emerging Sports for Women program in January after representatives from all three divisions approved the recommendation.
“Welcoming women’s flag football into the Emerging Sports for Women is a meaningful step toward expanding access, equity and opportunity,” said Jacqie McWilliams, commissioner of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association and chair of the NCAA Committee on Access, Opportunity and Impact, according to the NCAA news release.
That momentum matters. Flag football may be one of the newest doors opening for women, but it reflects a much older truth: progress in sports has always been about more than games. It’s not only about who gets to compete, but who gets to imagine themselves there in the first place.
From the women once limited to “grace and beauty” sports to the Black pioneers who pushed past exclusion, the story of women in sports is one of persistence, excellence and change and for Black women in particular, that history is not just about participation. It is about transforming the very meaning of opportunity.
