Women's sports has always hung on by the thinnest of threads. They are not mentioned even once in the law that created them, and once the powers that be realized what that law had done, they went all the way up to the presidency to try and undo it. The NCAA objected to supporting women's sports, and searched for years to find a way out of that obligation. Even President Gerald R. Ford's office seemed concerned about those "women's organizations." Our country's perch atop global women's sports happened not because our leadership desired it, or even cared all that much about it, or held strong feelings about the place of women in society in general. It happened due to a collection of random factors all happening in a specific time and space.
That matters now because one of the many aspects of our federal government currently being torn apart includes the department that oversaw the law that made women's sports possible. Title IX, which once forced schools and universities to do everything from provide a girl's soccer team to investigate reports of sexual harassment to provide fair pay, is being revised before our eyes, most prominently in the form of legislation endorsing state surveillance of women's bodies under the guise of "protecting" women from men in sports.
The reactionary movement behind this might be coming for vulnerable pieces of women's sports at the moment. But because of the tenuous foundation upon which officially sanctioned scholastic sports for women and girls was created, and because there is nothing in Title IX's original language that says women's sports specifically must exist, nothing is protecting women's sports as a whole from dismantling or destruction. What was created by accident can absolutely be undone by fiat.
There is an entire history of women's sports that stretches back well over 100 years, and it intertwines with the creation and rise of modern sports itself. There's Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C. There's Babe Didrikson Zaharias. There's Alice Milliat. There's Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett. How so many women were so systemically erased from popular history is another discussion for another day. What matters in our present moment is that, for most people, recent women's sports history begins in the 1970s when Congress passed Title IX. The law is just 37 words: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
You will notice that this says nothing about sports.