Correcting a Historical Error about Female Participation in Training Studies Before 1975

ABSTRACT

An influential journal in the history of kinesiology is Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (RQES). In 2005, RQES published a historical review in which the authors claimed the first training study in RQES to focus on women was by Wallace in 1975. In the current paper, the author corrects this historical inaccuracy. The electronic archives of RQES were downloaded and titles of papers published between 1930 and 1975 were screened to identify training studies. A training study was defined as an examination of the effects of a physical activity intervention of ≥1 week on any physical or mental health outcome. A total of 33 female-only training studies were published in RQES between 1930 and Wallace’s 1975 paper. The 33 studies included 4,960 female participants and consisted of various training modalities, durations, and outcomes. Also, the broader claim made in the historical review that women's health issues were not a focus of RQES until Title IX in the 1970s is challenged. A number of non-training studies in RQES between 1930–1975 focused on women’s health issues (e.g., dysmenorrhea), and sex-specific analyses were performed in early RQES studies. This information corrects the historical record about female participation in RQES studies and informs contemporary discussions about female research participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• sex
• Title IX
• women’s health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the author.

Notes

1. The following is Ainsworth and Tudor-Locke’s summary of female participation in physical activity studies published in RQES from 1930 to 2004. Italics has been added to emphasize the claims being questioned in the current paper:

“In 1975, Janet Wallace from San Diego State University published the first training study in RQES that focused on women (Wallace, 1975). The study examined changes in body composition with walking and running and concluded that apparent weight losses did not reflect fat losses due to gains in lean muscle mass. Edmund Burke in RQES (Burke & Brush, 1979) published some of the first physiological and anthropometric data representing female distance runners. The authors rationalized the importance of this study in part due to “the recent dramatic upsurge in the types of athletic competition available to women” (p. 180). The paucity of physiologic data on women at the time also led to a study in the early 1980s comparing middle-aged distance runners and sedentary women (Upton, Hagan, Rosentswieg, & Gettman, 1983). The runners had lower body weight and fat mass as well as a greater aerobic capacity compared to the sedentary women, whereas pulmonary function was unaffected and hemoglobin concentration was reduced.

A growing interest in women’s health issues was apparent in the 1990s, with articles focusing on physical activity and bone health. Roberta Rikli and Beth McManis published an original research article examining the effects of different types of training (aerobics vs. aerobics and upper body weight training) on bone mineral content in postmenopausal women (Rikli & McManis, 1990). Both types of training showed similarly positive effects relative to a sedentary control group. Because few training studies with women existed at the time, Roger Hughes and colleagues revisited the effects of exercise on serum cholesterol in a sample of women (Hughes, Housh, Hughes, & Johnson, 1991). More recently, Brown, Mishra, Lee, and Bauman (2000) showed that low-to-moderate levels of physical activity were associated with a range of health benefits for women of all ages. This growth in focus on women that began in the 1970s with the passage of Title IX led to the expansion of girls and women’s sports (see Table 1) and continues to be an important topic in RQES” (Ainsworth & Todor-Locke, 2005, p. S42).

Additional information

Funding

The author did not receive funding for this work.