Beyond Fun and Games: World's Leading Advocates for Women in Sports to Gather at Smith

Donna Lopiano, Benita Fitzgerald Mosley and Jill Ker Conway to Keynote

From July 7 to 10, Smith College will host a gathering both serious and celebratory of 100 of the world's most influential women in sports and physical education.

"Physical Education and Sport in a Global Context: Honoring the Legacy, Charting the Future" is the title of only the second American meeting of the International Association of Physical Education & Sport for Girls and Women (IAPESGW), an organization founded by Smith's own physical education pioneer Dorothy Ainsworth in 1949. The organization now has members in five continents and more than 40 countries.

Presenters from more than 30 countries--including Australia, Barbados, Brazil, China, Colombia, Croatia, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States--will take as their theme the role of sport and physical education in the global development of women. Their topics will range from "Sexual Harassment in Physical Training" to "The Role of Sport and Physical Education in the Rehabilitation of War-Traumatized Women" to "Women's Football in England: The Struggle to Imagine a Community."

The conference will open with a keynote address by Smith President Emerita Jill Ker Conway. She will be joined by Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, a three-time Olympian and the only African-American woman to win the Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter hurdles.

Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation and a leading advocate for gender equity and athletic opportunity for women, will address a plenary session discussing the challenges facing women athletes. Gertrud Pfister of Frei Universitat, Berlin, president of the International Sport History Association, will trace women's achievements in athletics. IAPESGW President Margaret Talbot of Leeds Metropolitan University, England, will discuss the organization's future direction.

A gala celebration will mark the 50th anniversary of the organization's founding at Smith.

"This is an exciting time to be advocating for girls and women in sports," notes Christine Shelton, associate professor of exercise and sports studies at Smith, conference organizer, and IAPESGW vice-president.

"Since the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, governments and non-governmental organizations in developing countries have shown greater recognition that physical activity and sports programs are not only fun and games but are critically linked to women's health and safety, to women's literacy and persistence in school, and even to their access to social and political rights," Shelton explains.

More information about the conference is available at www.smith.edu/collegerelations/athconf.

April 26, 1999