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Title
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'Equal Rights for Women Athletes' Letter to the Editor
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Description
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A letter to the editor of Pacific University's student newspaper, The Index, titled: "Equal Rights for Women Athletes," dated January 7, 1938. The author was Anne Wagner, a student athlete from the Class of 1940, who was a member of Pacific's Women's Athletic Association (WAA).
Wagner describes the difficult standards that an individual woman needed to meet in order to earn a letterman (or as she writes, "letter-women's") sweater. The qualifications included: passing knowledge and practical skills tests in 3 team sports, 4 individual sports, and 1 "rhythmical activity"; participation in at least 2/3 of those sports' class activities and intramural games; maintaining an average of 85% in all academic classes; and being confirmed by the WAA Board as having acceptable "sportsmanship in all university affairs, and personal appearance and good posture." Wagner complains that while men at Pacific were publicly celebrated "amidst much adulation and general applause" for their achievements in sports, women's achievements were never publicly acknowledged. "Because of the highness of the honor there are few letterwomen on the campus, but to those who have achieved it, the general recognition of the student body should be due."
While Wagner does not state this explicitly, it is likely that one reason women received no such public announcements of their achievements, was that women's sports were not considered to be varsity sports, but were instead "just" intramurals.
A copy of this article can also be found pasted into a a scrapbook created by the W.A.A. during 1937-1938.
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Creator
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Wagner, Anne
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Date
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1938
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Identifier
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PUA_WH_101
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Rights
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Copyright Not Evaluated
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/
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Type
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Text
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Date Created
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Jan. 7, 1938
