on women's sports

What they have done and are doing

snip

...

Jenkins: What’s going on underneath all of these games is the question of performance under pressure. There’s a credibility that you earn in performing on the playing field that you really can’t earn in any other arena, particularly women. There is something that happens in the way that men view women when women are seen to perform under pressure at a really high level physically.

I’ve always argued that Title IX is the closest thing to an Equal Rights Amendment that ever passed in this country. Women’s sports is the real secret history of the women’s movement. Women athletes have done more than any intellectual feminist has for establishing the new normal for women. I think that women’s sports, the proof of that physical competency and emotional competency under pressure, it makes it easier for men to envision women driving aircraft carriers on a midnight shift. It really does.

...