The Gentleman Saxons?

“Gentleman Saxons Win Thriller over Fisher.” That headline seems odd, doesn’t it? Not the beating of Fisher, of course, but the use of the phrase “Gentleman Saxons.” Just “Saxons” should suffice. If you are referring to one of our women’s teams, though, “Saxons” does not cut it. We call our female athletes “Lady Saxons,” apparently so no one will confuse them with the real “Saxons”—our male athletes. We are not alone in doing this, incidentally. Women’s teams at Winston Salem State are the Lady Rams. Johnson C. Smith University fields the Lady Bull’s. The “Lady” seems an afterthought in all of these nicknames. Our school, though, has a history of inclusiveness that argues against relegating women’s teams to adjunct status. “Adjunct” is a good college word meaning “something joined or added to another thing but not essentially a part of it” (according to Merriam-Webster’s). Having the nickname “Saxons” but not bestowing that name on our women’s team without a qualifier indicates to me that we consider those teams “not essentially a part of” our sports program. This despite the fact that we had women’s baseball in 1890.

Part of the problem is that sports continue to be a male bastion in our society. Associating sports with men facilitates our associating many admirable characteristics with men, and makes it difficult to imagine those characteristics in women. Some of the characteristics that we think sports foster in young people—courage, mental and physical toughness, integrity—are commonly referred to in gendered language. “Take it like a man.” “Man up.” “That takes balls.” These are expressions that have no equivalent for women. “I know you are disappointed, but take it like a woman.” “C’mon. You have to woman up and tell the truth.”

The linguistic implication that these character attributes belong to men, not to women, runs so deep in society that when we are confronted with counter-examples, we tend to dismiss the example rather than the assumption. When former Prime Minister of England Margaret Thatcher showed such toughness the Soviet Union dubbed her the “Iron Lady,” political cartoonists regularly portrayed her as a man. When Hillary Clinton proved to be a powerful woman, we re-described her as a man, saying that she “wears the pants in the family.” The same expression is popping up again in descriptions of another powerful woman, Michele Obama. And the flip-side of that claim is that Barack Obama does not wear the pants—in other words, he is weak. Since that weakness is a charge that many of the president’s political opponents want to level at him, expect to see more of this kind of gender imagery as the 2010 campaign heats up.

In the face of so much social pressure to associate courage, integrity and toughness with men, questioning those assumptions is not always easy. Working on changing our way of describing things can help us change our way of thinking of things, even if it “takes some ovaries” to do so. One place to start would be to drop “Lady” from the nickname of our women’s teams. That would also honor our history of inclusiveness by sending the message that we value all of our student athletes at AU.