Icons of Liberty or Objects of Desire? American Women Olympians and the Politics of Consumption

Abstract

The 1920s witnessed both an explosion in sporting opportunities and the first exercise of national suffrage for women in the USA. Some commentators, including several women athletes, claimed that women's incursions into the formerly male domains of highly-competitive athletics were even more important than their hard-fought victory which won them the right to vote. Female athletes were hailed as symbols of the `new woman's' political and social liberties. For the first time in American history, women's athletic performances became part of the struggle to define national identity in international sporting arenas. At the same time the media treated women athletes as sexually-appealing commodities and marketed them to mass audiences. In the burgeoning American consumer culture of the early twentieth century, female athletic stars served paradoxically as emblems of new political freedoms and traditional objects of male desires.