Play Like a Girl: Basketball at Misericordia, 1950-1959

The sport of basketball emerged in the United States during the country’s pre-occupation with sports and health toward the end of the nineteenth century. Industrialization led to more leisure time for the growing middle class, and physical fitness took on a greater role in the Victorian conception of moral and mental well-being.

Women’s sports developed at this time too, but they were set around rules that aimed to protect female fragility and gentility. In the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, societal conceptions about women as frail and reliant on men for protection affected all aspects of women’s lives. Couched inexorably in sexism, the rules of women’s basketball before Title IX were designed to protect women from injury and the physical and mental demands of competition, which was considered unfeminine and unattractive. Basketball was popular among college women who were already progressive and steadily moving toward more modern notions of gender in the United States.

Pre-Title IX rules in basketball, restrictive as they were, did demand that women learn and develop strategy through cooperation and teamwork. Despite rigid rules and societal misconceptions about female biology in the interest of keeping the game "dainty," the women who played basketball at this time sweated, got injured, and competed. They defied convention and broke gender norms. 

College Misericordia had a well-appointed athletics program during this time, under the auspices of Director of Athletics Marie Morris (Class of 1944), who expected her athletes to embody the spirit of Mulier Fortis (“valiant women”) through sportsmanship, teamwork, and effort. Early physical educators like Morris and her predecessors played a significant role in bolstering young women’s self-esteem in the face of societal pressures and expectations.