Mawson's Mission: Launching Women's Intercollegiate Athletics at the University of Kansas

A Kansas Notable Book

Before 1968, women’s athletics in higher education meant playdays and sports days. That spring, when the Division of Girls and Women in Sports announced that national collegiate sports championships for women would begin in 1969, Marlene Mawson, a new hire on the physical education faculty at the University of Kansas, was charged with establishing a women’s athletics program. “I was on my own,” Mawson recalls, “because there was no precedent for creating a women’s athle...