Brazilian Heroines: The Conquest Of Social Recognition Through Sports
Parte de Inspirational Women in America: Making a Difference in Physical Education, Sport and Dancer . páginas 21
Resumo
In this paper, we intend to address the media views and treatment of women’s sports, as well as present the heroic efforts of some women who collaborated in bringing Brazilian sports to a new phase which most of the people are unaware of. It is crucial to retrace some of these histories, and in this sense we present here three cases: the swimmer Maria Lenk, the tennis player Maria Bueno and the high jumper Aida dos Santos. Their biographies bring interesting moments that show women’s resilience and overcoming of adversities through sports, the barriers imposed by an unjust society, and the pursuit of their social space and equality with men.
From birth, girls and boys are separated by colours, clothing, and manners in acting, talking and playing. The girls are dressed in pink and boys in blue; they are supposed to wear dresses and play with dolls; the boys, on the other hand, play and act out adult life with cars and trucks. Toys, by their typology, are strictly divided into masculine and feminine universes, in the same way they are segregated in the games. When they involve fight and strength, they are ruled out for girls, who must remain within a limited circle of subtle and delicate amusement. As future women or men who have roles to play in society, children are encouraged to behave in stereotypical ways. The experience of these roles involves losses in social traits, with the transformation of the difference into inequality, as well as in psychological traits, with damage to the harmonious integration of being.
The segregation into two genders – male and female – that is based on the sexual organ of the child from birth creates a socially polarizing barrier between men and women. Manners, specific places and characteristics associated within each set the being and the role that each one must play in society, a mere reflection of their roles in reproduction. This conception is far from being able to deal with the complexity of each individual and with how fluid these barriers that insist on being imposed and generating inequality are. 24 As analysed by Henrietta Moore (1997), the very category of gender is socially constructed within disciplines such as biology and biomedicine. When we take, for example, an anthropological exercise, in other cultures, it is noted that the association between the physiological and the social role is not universal. It is, therefore, socially and culturally constructed, as well as the inequality that arises and that places one of the two sides - the male - in a position of superiority over their female counterpart, who is confined, as Simone de Beauvoir said (1970), simply to the restricted space of the other.
