My current WIP (one of them) is a mystery/adventure set in 1964 where a young woman (28) is the MC. I'm imagining her to be stout and athletic and quite a ways from the ideals of femininity at the time. I was thinking she would have been an athlete in high school. I asked my stepfather what kind of sports offerings there were for women at his high school in Omaha in 1950s. Answer: None. Looking at yearbooks supported what he said, at least for high schools in Nebraska (where the MC is from). The University of Nebraska did have very limited offerings: a basketball team, tennis team and a PE club.
My stepdad also noted that offerings were very limited for women when he attended Carlton College in Minnesota. However, he said when his mother was attending the same school in the 20s, there were several different women's sports teams. That seems to have been the case for Nebraska as well. I haven't done any real research but it appears the women's sports in schools suffered a decline between between the 20s and the 50s. Was it economic factors (Great Depression)? World War II? Some kind of traditionalist backlash?
Anyway, I was wondering if anybody around here had knowledge or thoughts on the matter.
You may want to ask some women about girls' sports in the 60s. I suspect the boys and men of the time didn't pay much attention to girls' sports, but that doesn't mean there were absolutely none. It could be a bit like all those guys who post in SFF forums who can't name any female SF writers (when there are tons of women who write in that genre). Many men seem to be blind to the lives, accomplishments, and activities of women, and I'll imagine this was worse in the 60s. Sometimes girls' sports were club sports or intramural instead of between schools, and it wasn't unusual to treat them as primarily a social thing, or something that could help them maintain their figures. There were intercollegiate sports for women in colleges by 60s, though, and women competed in track and field events in the Olympics. They had to come from somewhere.
It was during the 60s that many colleges first started to have a variety of women's varsity sports teams.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07303084.1993.10606727?journalCode=ujrd20
http://www.ohio5.org/woosterwomeninsport/exhibits/show/eras/1960s
http://thesportjournal.org/article/a-history-of-women-in-sport-prior-to-title-ix/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women's_sports_in_the_United_States
My mom was a high school student in the midwest in the 50s. She was athletic and interested in sports, and there were some opportunities at her school, but they were pretty limited. She did track, swimming and field hockey. The girl athletes were treated like second-class citizens too, always doing their sports in the "off seasons" to give the boy's best access to facilities during the best time of year. She remembers having to run track in the winter, when the track was frozen, and not being able to get pool time to do her red cross lifesaving test, because the boys always had priority access. That's how it was back then.
Title IX had a big effect, but that wasn't until the 70s.
By the time I was an elementary schoolkid in CA in the 70s, there were a lot more girls' sports in schools, and a variety of after-school sports leagues for girls. There were (and are) still discrepancies, and the coaching for girls was still very inferior (and unlike today, after-school leagues for both genders tended to be recreational, not about getting kids an edge for college scholarships) but Title IX was beginning to have an effect by then. The most popular girls were the ones who did sports and were good at them, much as with the boys. Not every woman my age says this was the case with her schools, though, so maybe CA was ahead of the curve with regards to girls' sports. There was still some second-class citizenship back then, though. For instance, when the high school built a new gym, it became the "boys' gym" and the older gym was labeled the "girls' gym."
I'm guessing it was far worse in the sixties.
I do remember a friend who is about ten years older than I am showing me a picture of herself in tackle football gear, however. There was evidently a women's semi-pro tackle football league of some kind in the south back then, but I think it was probably in the 70s, not the 60s.