Historian Mary Ellen Pethel’s latest project combines her twin passions for history and sports. In Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers, Pethel measures the impact of 50 years of Title IX legislation on Tennessee women’s athletics in higher education. By telling the stories of 50 Tennessee women, she makes a compelling case for the critical role they played in making the public policy meaningful and transforming the state’s image nationwide in the process.
Pethel, assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies and global education at Belmont University, is the author of several books, most notably Athens of the New South: College Life and the Making of Modern Nashville. She answered questions by email.
Could you say a few words about how you decided on the unique form this book ultimately took on, namely its stories and its various vignettes?
I was sitting in a coffee shop in March 2020, not knowing that the COVID-19 pandemic would soon shut down most of the world. A friend had sent me a link to a newspaper article about the first full-court women’s high school basketball game in the modern era here in Tennessee. It was much later than you might imagine — not until 1979 — seven years after the passage of Title IX.
I researched further and reached out to an editor at the University of Tennessee Press with whom I’d worked before and pitched an idea for a book about Tennessee women and athletics in the Title IX era.
Maybe among the most important things historians do is recover stories that most people would otherwise never have known or might have forgotten. To your mind, which figures in this group most merit remembering and recovery from relative obscurity?
I think about women like Lucia Jones. Lucia grew up in South Carolina and played boys’ baseball undercover as a boy until she hit 13 and people figured out the ruse. But along the way she began teaching swimming lessons and realized that she loved to teach. She later joined the PE faculty at the University of Tennessee at Martin and shaped the lives of generations of students.
Bettye Giles, a matriarch of women’s sports in Tennessee, also comes to mind. She turned 94 in January 2023. She was co-founder of the Tennessee College Women’s Sports Federation and a mentor to Pat Summitt. There are people like Joan Cronan, who spent 30 years as an athletics director at UT Knoxville and continues to be an ambassador for all women’s sports. Joan remains influential, charismatic and a class act from top to bottom. There’s Teresa Lawrence Phillips, the first Black female athlete to play at Vanderbilt. She eventually worked as an assistant coach at her alma mater before moving on to Fisk and then Tennessee State University, becoming athletics director at TSU in 2002, a position she held until her retirement in 2020.
This book combines a love of history and story with a genuine love of sports. How did you develop those passions?
I’ve thought, played and written about sports for a long time. As I came of age in the 1990s, I was fortunate that my parents fully supported my athletic endeavors. I was also fortunate to play on some really good teams in high school, specifically on the varsity basketball team as point guard.
Later, as an undergrad honors student at UT Knoxville, I wrote my senior thesis about the first generation of women athletes in Knoxville. So I’ve been interested in the intersection of gender and sports for some time. The story of women’s athletics in Tennessee worked in two stages. Women played sports in high schools and colleges in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, only for women’s athletics to go mostly dormant following a cultural backlash in the 1920s. Competitive intercollegiate women’s sports reemerged in the 1960s. Title IX was my chance to tell the second half of a larger story that had long interested me.
To read an uncut version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.
