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Haudenosaunee Women Lacrosse Players
Making Meaning through Rematriation
Sharity L. Bassett
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Since the 1970s lacrosse has become one of the fastest-growing sports in North America, and Haudenosaunee communities have worked at the international level to claim lacrosse as an important part of Haudenosaunee culture and tradition. Lacrosse is also known as the medicine game as it is part of a medicine ceremony named in creation narratives and the Great Law of Peace that binds the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Six Nations. The number of Haudenosaunee women and girls playing the sport has burgeoned since the 1980s. This book roots lacrosse as a Haudenosaunee sport both within and outside of these communities. It shows how the concept of rematriation—a culturally relevant framework that articulates the work Haudenosaunee peoples are doing to reconnect to the power imbued with matrilineal and matrifocal societies—situates Haudenosaunee women who play lacrosse within a complex understanding of contemporary, traditional, and medicinal lacrosse. Because they cannot seamlessly claim this as their medicine game, as the Haudenosaunee Nationals and other men’s teams do, Haudenosaunee women players must articulate some of the most nuanced understandings of tradition and medicine. These articulations connect to larger conversations within Haudenosaunee communities regarding the power that women hold and the rematriation of that power to define and uphold tradition. Haudenosaunee Women Lacrosse Players demonstrates how the cycle of action and articulation—with the intergenerational help of female leadership—firmly roots lacrosse within Haudenosaunee cultural fabric.
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front cover of Locker Room Talk
Locker Room Talk
A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside
Melissa Ludtke
Rutgers University Press, 2024

While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, 26-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge’s order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media.
 
Locker Room Talk is Ludtke’s gripping account of being at the core of this globally covered case that churned up ugly prejudices about the place of women in sports. Kuhn claimed that allowing women into locker rooms would violate his players’ “sexual privacy.” Late-night television comedy sketches mocked her as newspaper cartoonists portrayed her as a sexy, buxom looker who wanted to ogle the naked athletes’ bodies.  She weaves these public perspectives throughout her vivid depiction of the court drama overseen by Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve on the federal bench. She recounts how her lawyer, F.A.O. “Fritz” Schwarz employed an ingenious legal strategy that persuaded Judge Motley to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in giving Ludtke access identical to her male counterparts. Locker Room Talk is both an inspiring story of one woman’s determination to do a job dominated by men and an illuminating portrait of a defining moment for women’s rights.  

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