ABSTRACT

Virginia Slims cigarettes sponsored the women’s breakaway professional tour in the early 1970s. They promoted their sponsorship through commodity feminism, appearing to embrace the empowering liberal feminist movement of the time with what now seems a dated and patronizing slogan, “you’ve come a long way baby”. However, the implication of this slogan that female professional tennis players had arrived and were on their way to achieving equality with their male peers was premature. Indeed, ever since tennis was founded in Victorian-era England, it has been steeped in a patriarchal ideology that has served to promote traditional beliefs about gender identity (Lake 2015). Reflecting this, despite the global popularity of women’s professional tennis, a plethora of studies found that media coverage of female tennis players has mirrored traditional beliefs about gender (Quayle 2017).