Cinderpath Diplomacy: Gender, Race, and National Identity in Cold War Sport, 1945–65

Celebrating male veterans and men’s sport became a shared goal of U.S. sport agencies, the federal government, and the Armed Forces during the decade after World War II. Despite the lingering specter of American men’s 20% draft unfitness rate during the conflict, officials now argued that the nation’s material and patriotic potential was located in the body of the male athlete. Amid escalating U.S.-Soviet tensions, American state and athletic administrators prioritized male athletes’ importance to cultural diplomacy, while President Dwight Eisenhower codified the connection in 1955 with legislation allocating funds to elite athletes in the military. Track and field, because of its international popularity and its showcase for strength and speed—attributes that U.S. administrators saw as distinctively masculine and American—became the most important sport in international competition.

Before 1955, U.S. women athletes had found themselves excluded from this Cold War emphasis on patriotic masculinity. Female Soviet tracksters’ major contributions to postwar Olympic victories, however, forced American authorities to reconsider their understanding of national athletes as solely male. To compete with Soviet women, U.S. officials reluctantly increased support to American women’s track and field. These athletes found that officials’ insistence on portraying them as overtly feminine, in contrast to “mannish Soviet amazons,” dovetailed with their collective long-held goal of demonstrating gender conventionality at home. For black, working-class, and white ethnic women, international competition meant a chance to emphasize femininity and earn social acceptance after decades of being suspected of physiological maleness or “sexual deviance” for their participation in a supposedly masculine sport. American diplomats, meanwhile, framed these athletes abroad as bodily representations of democracy and equal opportunity. These contested interpretations of gender, race, and national identity in competition reveal that American athletes’ bodies held varied diplomatic meaning for the state, sport authorities, and tracksters themselves at home and abroad.