Inside the AIAW: the philosophy, people, and power of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW)

The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics (AIAW) created formalized women’s college sports in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s. Developed by women physical education professionals, the AIAW created an educational model of athletic governance that was highly competitive, financially sound, and focused on the well-being of student-athletes. The AIAW hosted its first season during the 1972-3 school years and supported the explosive growth of women’s intercollegiate athletics nation-wide in the decade that followed, facilitating competitions and national championships for over 970 institutions at its peak. With a focus on cultivating women as leaders in athletics, it operated democratically, including coaches, administrators, and student-athletes in governance. During the 1970s, the AIAW ensured that Title IX applied to athletics, and all sports were included under the law, challenging the dominance of commercial governance model of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) which privileged men’s sports, especially football.

This premature ending of a thriving organization has been the main focus of recent research on the AIAW, casting it as part of a path of progress towards NCAA oversight of women’s athletics. My approach is different: I focus on the of sex-separate physical education programs for women that shaped the educational model, exploring the philosophy, policies, and practices of this model and the opportunities it provided for women’s athletic leadership and civic engagement. Using archival collections and oral histories, I explore the AIAW on its own terms, not as a secondary organization, a failed experiment. Rather, I situate it as an important moment of challenge and rupture in the history of sport with lasting impacts on the educational interpretation of intercollegiate athletics under Title IX, women’s athletic leadership, and national and international sport governance.