Frailty Myth

Introduction Not long after I began work on this book, my daughter Rachel came home from the office one night to discover that her boyfriend's father, a thug in disguise, had rented a truck with the intention of removing her belongings from his son's New York apartment and taking them to a small studio I keep in the city. His son was too young for this relationship, Dad believed. He felt he was losing control over his son and he needed someone to blame. Recognizing that something out of control was going on, Rachel phoned up a place that rents storage units and asked the meddlesome father to deliver her furniture there. He refused. "There's no room in my mother's apartment," she told him. Too bad. Rachel was waiting in front of the building with a couple of girlfriends when the truck arrived. The father opened up the back doors and flagrantly dropped her television on the sidewalk. His turncoat son was with him. Rachel told the doorman to call the police. Then she jumped an the back of the truck with her arms outspread to prevent the man from destroying any more of her possessions. She held her stance until she heard the police car's siren. For me, the image was powerful. The bold physicality of Rachel's moves implied a belief in both her strength and her rights. But the belief in her body was crucial. Her strength allowed her to not only defend her rights, but to experience them in the first place. Within minutes the NYPD Blue arrived, and they escorted the truck, driving Rachel in the car with them, to the storage place and waited while father and son, oh so carefully, removed her furniture from the van. What does it take to jump on the back of a truck and prevent two angry men from entering it and dumping out your furniture? What, physically and mentally, is being accomplished here? I have no doubt that a connection exists between Rachel's leap to defend herself against aggression and her experience, beginning in childhood, with competitive sports. Rachel was one of the millions of girls who began breaking new ground after Title IX, a section of the Educational Amendment Act of 1972, mandated equal funding for girls' sports. They didn't get equal funding for years (and often still don't), but change was in the air. Billie Jean King, after all, had accomplished the presumably impossible at Wimbledon, in 1971, when she beat Bobby Riggs. As female athletic stars gained in visibility, girls around the country began pioneering the breakdown of the frailty myth-the belief that women are physically incompetent--on a grassroots level. The first broke into heretofore "boys" sports: soccer, track and field, wrestling, and even football. The very first did it by becoming the only girls on the team, as Rachel had done in high school soccer. The payoff for breaking the cultural mold would be big. By the time Rachel jumped on the back of the truck to defend her belongings, she'd grown into a woman who had internalized a belief in her strength and her ability to defend herself. Because of her physical competence, she has a sense of her body's power that eludes most women of my generation. For us, the greatest physical boldness had been walking down the middle of a city street if we got caught in a dicey neighborhood at night. We had swallowed whole the halfbaked syllogism of our generation and that of many generations of females before us: Men have strength, agility, and endurance; women don't, and therefore women need men for protection. It took years of watching my daughters develop strong, agile, competent bodies before I began recognizing that something new was happening: a further stage in the emancipation of women was under way. At seventeen Rachel took a semester-long trip, sleeping in snow caves, rappelling, telemarking, learning how to avoid "boxcar" whirlpools (so named for their size) while piloting a kayak aloneDowling, Colette is the author of 'Frailty Myth' with ISBN 9780375502354 and ISBN 0375502351.