Throughout her career, Pat carefully avoided associations with “capital-F feminism,” as she called it. She did not identify with activists who had marched in the streets, joined women’s rights organizations, or called for revolution. She accepted as truth the prevailing caricatures of second-wave feminism: man-hating, too brash, and too Northern. Yet she obsessed about how to topple barriers to women’s full inclusion in athletic activities—one might even say women’s ability to fully live in their own bodies.
Even as she later distanced herself from feminist movements, feminist policy and social change formed the very backdrop to her life. As a young woman, she sang along to Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” the feminist anthem released in 1972. She cheered on tennis star Billie Jean King during the televised “Battle of the Sexes,” in which King beat former tennis champion and attention-seeking male chauvinist Bobby Riggs. In 1974, at twenty-two years old, Pat started coaching at the University of Tennessee and helped to institute the changes brought about by Title IX. In 1976, she played in the Olympics and served as the USA team co-captain. That same year, she testified on behalf of a Tennessee girl who sought access to full-court basketball. She publicly called for an end to sexism in youth athletics, and she used her platform to threaten Tennessee’s girls’ sports association that she would stop recruiting in the state until they allowed girls to play full-court basketball (they soon caved). Over the next decade, she devoted her career to building an elite women’s basketball program. But she was also adamant that her cause was about more than access to a sport. Basketball, she wrote, is “about life skills, and life stories, it’s about trading in old, narrow definitions of femininity for a more complete one. It’s about exploring all of the possibilities in yourself.”
By the 1990s, Pat walked a line: She supported women’s access to sports, but she also publicly embraced family values politics, separating herself from feminist movements. She spent the entirety of her career in the thick Bible Belt of East Tennessee, navigating white evangelical politics and preaching personal responsibility. But the bodies on the court suggested something else entirely; they suggested choices, access to birth control and abortion, and knowledge about women’s bodies.