Rights For Women

There is no doubt that the emergence of a women’s rugby team at Trinity was related to the civil rights movement that carried over from the sixties.  Women were beginning to challenge stereotypes on grander scales as feminist groups such as NOW (National Organization for Women) began to spring up (1966).  In 1972 Title IX was enacted which granted women more opportunity to compete in athletics at the high school and college levels.  With women competing in a sport that is so stereotypical of “manliness,” you could say that the Trinity ladies were doing their part to carry on the movement.  A comment made by Tony Collins in his book The Oval World, sums up one of the United States’ greatest contributions to the game of rugby, “…perhaps the biggest breakthrough made in the United States and Canada was the emergence of women’s rugby in the 1970’s, a development that no doubt had the founders of the game spinning in their tombs” (Collins, 2015).