“Title IX? We Started at Title I”: Black Women Runners and Feminism, 1955–65

Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph is seldom considered a feminist, but this essay challenges that perception. Historical scholarship on second wave feminism has largely seen the movement as a white, middle-class phenomenon. In contrast, this paper explores African-American track and field athletes' impact on U.S. cultural politics during 1955-1965 and argues that they played an important role in the postwar struggle for women's agency. In the ten years before second wave feminism fully developed, black women runners represented the U.S. at home and abroad as its fastest, strongest female athletes. Their victories in the Olympics and other global competitions contributed to Americans' international image of power during the early Cold War, in which perceptions of superiority over the U.S.S.R. were critical to U.S. government and media. These runners also sought to portray themselves as paragons of femininity in popular culture in an effort to ward off race-based criticism of their positions as national representatives on the world stage. Yet this emphasis on gendered appearance and behavior also masked unconventional life choices these women made in order to prioritize running. Because of their celebrity, their personal lives were increasingly publicized by the national media and evaluated in popular culture by the early sixties. As their private lives became public, black women tracksters influenced Americans' perceptions of race and gender. Already unusual as women athletes in a ‘traditionally masculine' sport, these runners made choices that starkly opposed 1950s gender mores to ascend to their top of their field. Investigating their lives complicates historians' views of the feminist movement, African-American history, and U.S. political and cultural history. Black women runners of 1955-1965 approached women's empowerment from the margins, but they nevertheless need to be considered forerunners of, and historical actors in, second wave feminism.