Fights For Rights of Professional and Women Players
Despite her victories on the courts, Casals continued to fight tennis traditions on several fronts. Amateur tennis players (those who are unpaid) had always been favored over professionals (those who were paid). Because many tennis players came from non-wealthy backgrounds, they were forced to accept money in order to continue playing. This, in turn, made them professionals and prevented them from entering major tournaments that allowed only amateurs to play, such as Wimbledon. Fighting against this discrimination, Casals worked for an arrangement that allowed both amateur and professional tennis players to compete in the same tournaments.
Casals's next challenge was to overcome the vast difference in prize monies awarded to male and female players. Even though they worked just as hard and played just as often as men, women earned much smaller prizes. In 1970 Casals and other women threatened to boycott traditional tournaments if they were not paid higher prize money and not given more media attention. The ruling body of U.S. tennis, the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), refused to listen to their demands. In response, the women established their own tournament, the Virginia Slims Invitational. The attention generated by this successful tournament quickly brought about the formation of other women's tournaments and greater prize monies for women.
Read more about this topic: Rosemary Casals
Famous quotes containing the words fights for, fights, rights, professional, women and/or players:
“And do you count for nothing God who fights for us?”
—Jean Racine (16391699)
“Very early in our childrens lives we will be forced to realize that the perfect untroubled life wed like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we dont want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“Resolved, There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established. Resolved, that the women of the Revolution were not wanting in heroism and self-sacrifice, and we, their daughters, are ready, in this War, to pledge our time, our means, our talents, and our lives, if need be, to secure the final and complete consecration of America to freedom.”
—Womans Loyal League (founded May 1861)
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to mans yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (18031844)
“I am not a suffragist, nor do I believe in careers for women, especially a career in factory and mill where most working women have their careers. A great responsibility rests upon womanthe training of children. This is her most beautiful task.”
—Mother Jones (18301930)
“Will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them
be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)