WFPP Guest Post: Running as Feminist Pursuit

Today's entry to the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer comes from a dear friend and occasional reader (if not regular commenter, *ahem*), Courtney Wilder, PhD.

This is a long entry, but well worth it. In it, Courtney first explores the ways that running serves to reify patriarchal gender norms. She then places it in an historically misogynistic context in which women were actively discouraged and often outright barred from and drummed out of athletics and physical pursuits. She ultimately reveals how it is an "ultra-feminist" activity and helps teach her children progressive, feminist values, by showing that women can be strong, by modeling bodily autonomy, and by demonstrating that physical activity is well worth pursuing regardless of whether one meets the patriarchy's sexist standards.

Running as Feminist Pursuit

A couple of years ago, I took up running. It did not feel, at the time, like an activity with particular feminist (or un-feminist) overtones; it did not feel subversive, or especially important to my parenting. It felt like a way to get out of the house, like a way to do something other than slowly go nuts writing the last few chapters of my doctoral dissertation, like a way to breathe some fresh air while my kids were in preschool and first grade, respectively. It was cheaper than the gym, more soothing than using an exercise bike in front of the TV, and I got to know the streets of my neighborhood from a perspective that was different from the ones afforded me by car or bicycle transportation.

Of course, nothing – especially nothing involving women and their bodies – can remain neutral for very long. And nothing, I found, that a mother chooses to engage in can fail to impact her children in some way. I started to run more, and I started to read about running, and I entered longer and longer road races (aiming for a marathon this fall!), and slowly I found my perspective shifting. Running is subversive, it can be ultra-feminist, and my running teaches my children a wealth of things about women, and bodies, and how to be healthy, and what so-called limits they might transcend rather easily.

First, the aspects of running that seem to reify sexist gender stereotypes: I have a range of running clothes now, mostly in shades you’d find in a box of Necco Wafers. I have pink and blue and white tech shirts, and lavender and pink and black running bras, and shorts and running skirts that range from black (with a pink waistband) to blue to gray (with a pink stripe). When I run, I look super, super girly. Sweaty, but girly. Despite the skepticism with which seasoned athletes regard running skirts, I wear them almost exclusively – they’re comfy, they often provide more coverage of leg and ass than running shorts, and I like them. Moreover, I finally found an activity where it’s very likely that you can solve your problems with a new pair of shoes, and since this has long been my practice – to soothe my ego or perk myself up or provide a carrot for myself as the reward for some grueling or dull task – I enjoy having a real reason to choose new shoes.

A more serious overlap between running and traditional, repressive, sexist strictures for women involves the size and shape of my body. As I started to run more, I started to weigh less. I went from a perfectly nice size 8 to 10 body (this, after having given birth twice and breastfed continuously for – drum roll please! – more than seven consecutive years) to a size 4. My parents describe me as “lean,” my husband is somewhat taken aback, the most overtly feminine of my female coworkers talk to me frequently in approving tones about my waist and hips. My sister-in-law, a few months post-partum, sized me up when I came to visit and observed simply, “You’re really thin.” I am. I am really thin. But when I look at my daughter, I can see that she’s also lean; I eat well (and frequently, and in good quantities), and I’m inclined to think this is just what my body looks like when I take care of myself. I am really thin, which pings my feminist anxieties in all kinds of ways, but I am also really damned strong. I am in better shape than I ever was as a teenager, or a college student, or a mother of very young children (mine are now eight and five.)

So: while dressing in a cute pink and gray skirt and dashing along the local running trails in my size four body seems very much in keeping with the sexist stereotypes I deplore as a feminist, I’m convinced that running is actually something very different. While some women no doubt run only to govern their bodies into more socially acceptable forms, this practice pales in comparison to those women who fought for the right to engage in physical activity alongside their brothers and male classmates. Although when I began running, I knew vaguely about Title IX, the 1972 law [in the USA] prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in educational settings, I had no idea – none – about how hard aspiring female athletes fought for the simple right to compete in organized events. Early female entrants to marathons disguised their gender on their entry forms, were sometimes chased during the race by angry men, were denied official record of their accomplishments. Although in the United States alone, working class women and farm or pioneer women, not to mention enslaved women, engaged in significant physical labor all their lives, somehow twentieth century women who wanted to engage in athletics were seen as too delicate. With the exception of the 1928 Olympics, where there was a women’s 800 meter event, no woman’s footrace was longer than 200 meters until 1960. Women couldn’t officially run the Boston Marathon until 1972. It was a shock to me that women’s bodies were so tightly, so successfully, controlled in this sphere; I had thought of women’s choices regarding their bodies to be largely a matter of reproductive care – access to birth control and abortion. It had never occurred to me that there was public discourse (in the United States, within the last sixty years) about whether women were biologically fit to run distances further than a mile and a half.

Trust me, my children will never take that discussion seriously. My daughter will never, ever have reason to think she can’t be athletic because of her gender; it will, I hope, never even occur to my son to regard girls and women as fragile little things. My kids have grown used to seeing me head out the door in my running clothes, or slog back in, sweaty and disheveled. They’ll happily make conversation at church potlucks about my latest half-marathon; they ask about how my runs go. Occasionally my daughter will come with me on her bike, although she’s a little fast for me. This is the other interesting wrinkle about running for me, and one reason it has such an impact on my kids. Like my grandfather, my dad, and both of my children, I have asthma. While the kids seem to be growing out of it, I have not. So when I run, I run pretty slowly. I can do comfortable 9:30 miles for a long time, but in the running world, that’s slow.

There are a slew of articles – mostly, I’ve noticed, by men – about how disgraceful the current state of things is in the running world, how the marathon is now just open to any fool with shoes, how slow runners should just get some other hobby. I know my kids will encounter this attitude – possibly about their very bodies, possibly about people in general – and I remain hopeful, and confident, that I have provided them with a counter-example to that argument. Because I run, despite the asthma, despite the fraught history of women and their bodies, because I’m confident and strong even in the absence of innate talent or great physical skill – I’m a great feminist role model for my kids. They’ve stopped asking me after races whether I’ve won – the answer will always be no – but they remain proud of my effort. Even in the face of utterly objective measure that tells me I am bad at this, I am slow, I lack talent – I am happily persisting. I hope this is what they learn, my daughter and my son: your body is your body, and you can make it strong, and healthy. No one can tell you what to do with your own body, or that you’re not good enough to do what you enjoy. Your body, however imperfect it might seem by the wildly unattainable standards of our culture, is yours, and it is good.


Courtney Wilder did finish that dissertation, earning a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Chicago, and now teaches in the Religion and Philosophy Department at Midland Lutheran College. She runs and, with her spouse, raises her kids in Omaha, Nebraska.