Читать книгу Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy - Robyn Ryle - Страница 8

It wasn’t until the 1930s that some women began to show up on cheerleading squads. When women did start cheering, their presence was often met with hostility. They still weren’t eligible for election to the All-American squad, and some universities, like the University of Pittsburgh, outright banned girls from cheerleading. The University of Pittsburgh didn’t lift their ban on women as cheerleaders until 1954.^[4]

The arguments against women as cheerleaders at places like the University of Pittsburgh rested on two assumptions: that women lacked the necessary skills to be cheerleaders, and that participating in cheerleading would make girls “too masculine for their own good.”^[5] Experts of the time argued that girls clearly couldn’t perform the gymnastic stunts required to be on a squad. Women and girls weren’t athletic enough to go flipping through the air like the men and boys. Additionally, all the yelling required of cheerleaders would lead to “hog-calleritis,” or “loud, raucous voices” that were clearly not appropriate for young ladies. It was also argued that cheerleading would cause girls to become “overly conceited.”^[6] In sum, cheerleading was too hard for women, in addition to running the risk of making them too full of themselves and giving them voices that sounded too much like men.