Women, Sport, and Democracy in the Dominican Republic, 1966-1978

Dominican President Joaquín Balaguer extended access to sport during the period known as the doce años (twelve years) by defining sport as a means for civic education, increasing funding for the Dominican Olympic Committee, and constructing sports installations across the country. Elsewhere I described how these policies and an emphasis on amateur sport combined with renewed sporting relations with Cuba to contribute to a Third Way development model that combined the individual freedoms of the capitalist system with the protections of the socialist sports system. The development model reinforced traditional gender roles for women, especially as mothers, wives, and girlfriends supporting sons, husbands, and partners who aspired to professional baseball greatness.

For the Berkshire Conference, I propose to dig further into the policies around amateur sport developed by the Balaguer and subsequent governments to examine how they impacted women’s participation in sport and in discourses around democracy in the Dominican Republic. Building on previous work on women’s participation in discourses of democracy around professional baseball, I hypothesize that their increased participation in sport, especially in international competition, normalized women’s contributions to the Dominican nation. Though still constrained by gendered expectations, women as athletes “raising the flag on high” in international competition increased pressure on the Dominican Government to increase women’s access to sport in line with international discourses about political and social participation coming from revolutionary Cuba as well as from democratic strongholds in Western Europe and the Americas.