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Over the last fifty years, women's sports have developed substantially and made significant progress.

In the early 1800's women romped,skated, played ball games and some even boxed. It wasn't until the late 1900's when women started participating in organized sports. After the civil war wealthy women started playing country club sports such as golf.

Tennis was a popular professional female sport from the 1970's onward, and it provided the occasion for a symbolic "battle of the sexes" between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, which King won, thus enhancing the profile of female athletics.

Despite the success of women's professional tennis in the 1970's, women's professional team sports did not achieve prominence until the 1990's, particularly in basketball and football (soccer), when the WNBA was formed and the first Women's World Cups and women's Olympic soccer matches were held.

The United States Women's National Soccer Team celebrating their 2012 CONCACAF Olympic Qualifiers Tournament championship.

In 1999, at the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup Final in Pasadena, California, after scoring the fifth kick in the penalty shootout to give the United States the win over China in the final game, Brandi Chastain celebrated by spontaneously taking off her jersey and falling to her knees in a sports bra. While removing a jersey in celebration of a goal was common in men's soccer, it was highly unusual in women's football at the international level. The image of her celebration has been considered one of the more famous and controversial photographs of a woman celebrating an athletic victory. In 2019, it was announced that a statue of Chastain's celebration would be displayed at the Rose Bowl to commemorate the twenty-year anniversary of the team's win.

Today, women and girls compete professionally and as amateurs in virtually every major sport, though girls' participation in sports may be higher in the United States than in other places like Western Europe and Latin America. Additionally, the level of girls' participation typically decreases when it comes to the more violent contact sports in which boys overwhelmingly outnumber girls, particularly football, wrestling, and boxing. (Some leagues for girls do exist, however, such as the Utah Girls Football League and Professional Girl Wrestling Association.) These typical non-participation habits may slowly be evolving as more women participate in stereotypical male sports; for example, Katie Hnida became the first woman ever to score points in a Division I NCAA American football game when she kicked two extra-points for the University of New Mexico in 2003.

Heather Watson and Fu Yuanhui broke one of the last taboos in women's sport when both openly admitted they were menstruating, Watson after a self-described poor performance in a tennis match in 2015, and Yuanhui at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.