Girls’ Basketball
I grew up in Iowa during the 1950s and 1960s. This was the great era of “six-on-six” girls’ basketball. Only rural schools fielded teams, but Iowa still had one or two thousand of them. The game involved teams of six: three girls played offense; three played defense. Neither group could physically cross the center line. Only three dribbles were allowed before a shot or a pass.
The annual Girls’ State Basketball Tournament in Des Moines was a huge deal—a big parade, sold-out crowds at Vets Auditorium, etc. It even overshadowed the boys’ tournament.
In the mid-1960s, my favorite team was the Everly Cattlefeeders, from a small town in northwest Iowa. They won the 1966 tournament. The very name evoked an image of muscular farm girls lifting 50-pound bags of alfalfa pellets before heading off to practice. (I must have liked the type, for I eventually married an Illinois “cattlefeeder.”)
Of course, that last remark pinpoints the difference. The girls’ teams were expressions of rural culture. These were not lesbian recruiting grounds. I am sure that over 95 percent of the players went on to marry and have children. And the rules had clearly been modified to account for the distinctive bodies of girls.
One historian has described Iowa girls’ basketball as an example of that state’s distinctive politics and culture: progressive and conservative at the same time. The game was crushed by feminist lawsuits in the 1970s and 1980s, which demanded “equality” in girls’ sports with the boys.
Allan C. Carlson is the John Howard Distinguished Senior Fellow at the International Organization for the Family. His most recent book is Family Cycles: Strength, Decline & Renewal in American Domestic Life, 1630-2000 (Transaction, 2016). He and his wife have four grown children and nine grandchildren. A "cradle Lutheran," he worships in a congregation of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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