Women’s Basketball and the Death of Femininity

Tuesday night’s WNBA contest between the Indiana Fever and the Connecticut Sun deteriorated into a shoving, punching and poking match that resulted in three ejections and countless hard feelings.

Indiana’s Caitlin Clark, who had returned to the lineup after time on the disabled list, was the target of much of the aggression. 

In the third quarter, the Sun’s Jacy Sheldon poked Clark in the eye, and Marina Mabry shoved her to the floor. The Fever’s Sophie Cunningham came to Clark’s defense. In the fourth quarter, Sheldon was then fouled hard by Cunningham. 

Cunningham, Sheldon and Linsay Allen, another player for the Sun, were all ejected.

Fever head coach Stephanie White told reporters the referees failed to properly deal with the unhealthy aggression.

“I started talking to the officials in the first quarter and we knew this was going to happen,” she said. “You could tell it was going to happen. So they’ve got to get control of it, they’ve got to be better.”

Fans of Clark, the former Iowa All-American, have lamented that the Fever phenom has been bullied and targeted since arriving in the WNBA. Many feel like she hasn’t been properly or adequately defended by her teammates – until Cunningham’s performance on Tuesday night.

As video of Cunningham’s defense went viral, the 28-year-old Fever guard began to trend on social media. Since Tuesday night, she’s gained over 530,000 new followers on Tik Tok.

Women have been playing basketball since 1892, just a year after the sport was invented. The women may have looked very different back in the beginning, but the aggression was still present. Female basketball players wore floor length dresses. According to basketball historians, hair pins and handkerchiefs were often strewn about on the court after a game.

Women who played those early games of basketball often pulled hair and shoved and pushed one another. In fact, the Los Angeles Times once wrote a story about the behavior and titled the story, “Sweet Things Have Scrap.”

Enter Agnes Rebecca Wayman in the early 1900s.

A pioneer in women’s physical education, Agnes Wayman expressed concern that the sport was becoming too masculine. To address these issues, the educator proposed and pushed for the passage of several new rules:

Female players were required to 1) have neatly combed hair, 2) not chew gum, 3) never use profanity or slang, 4) never call each other by their last name and 5) not lie or sit on the ground.

Scripture is silent on women in sports, but it has a lot to say about femininity in a broader scope. We read in Genesis that women were created because God said it wasn’t good for man to be alone (Gen. 2:18).  By no means does this mean women are weak. In fact, the Bible highlights many strong females who God used in might ways. There was Deborah (Judges 4:4), Esther, Ruth – and of course, Jesus’ mother Mary. 

Women’s basketball isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the WNBA would be wise to recruit another woman like Agnes Wayman to help reform and reimagine an increasingly hostile and aggressive sport. 

As a mother or father, would you want your daughter being targeted and slammed to the ground while playing a basketball game? Of course not. Wayman once wrote, “Many a mother objects to having her girl play basketball or enter into athletic competition of any kind because she claims it makes her daughter unladylike, careless in dress and habits and speech.”

The physical education and women’s basketball reformer concluded that changes were necessary because “Girls are more delicately adjusted than boys.” She also correctly stated, “The athletic girl has come to stay. Athletics for women are no longer a fad but a well-recognized factor in the better development of women and, incidentally, of the race.”

This is still the case, which is why the WNBA better get their act together – and quickly.