“When I Was Competing There Was No Title IX": Women Athletes, Retirement, and Alternative Professionalization, 1948–80

In 1952, Olympic champion Alice Coachman signed a contract with The Coca-Cola Company allowing them use of her image in a nationwide advertising campaign. This agreement made her the first commercially sponsored black woman athlete in the United States. Her coup was bittersweet, however, because Coachman had been forced, for want of professional options, to retire from amateur sport—and Olympic eligibility—in order to accept this corporate engagement. After World War II ended, arcane gentlemen’s codes and cultural gender constraints prohibited women from earning a living as athletes. Two decades later, little had changed; noted 1960s Olympian Wyomia Tyus, “I went to the Olympics and I won back-to-back gold medals… did I get asked to be a part of any company or be a part of a commercial? No.” Like Coachman, Tyus retired from running to accept professional commitments that were, ironically, based on the athletic achievements from which she was barred thereafter.

In the 1970s, Title IX and the dissolution of amateurism greatly enhanced women athletes’ long-term career opportunities. These changes arrived too late for early postwar competitors. Yet by the seventies, these retirees had collectively embraced a different professionalization model—advanced degrees and high-level positions in education, sports administration, or social work. Numerous women track and field athletes of the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s became educators of women and girls, basing their careers on their own experiences in team-oriented, competitive, female-dominant environments. In so doing, they created fulfilling, financially viable careers while forming connections with women activists outside of sport. Though their “veteran” athletic experience saw them become the first generation of administrators to implement Title IX and negotiate professional contracts en masse, they encountered in their students a younger generation that challenged their ideas about the opportunities and limitations of women and work.