The High School: An Analysis of Yearbooks
By Karen Sternheimer
Michael Messner’s new book, The High School: Sports, Spirit & Citizens, 1903-2024 is a great example of how artifacts of everyday life can become data for sociological analysis. As a scholar of gender and sports, Messner realized that yearbooks serve as a window to view past constructions of both sports and gender.
His own high school, Salinas High School, seemed like a natural fit, as he had about 30 years of books—not just his own, because his father served as a coach for nearly 30 years and other family members attended, he had decades of books. The book blends the author’s memories (and occasionally his niece’s reflections, who attended more recently) with content analysis of the number of pages spent on boys’ sports compared with girls’ sports.
Yearbook photos, with their captions and text, are a unique window into the ways that high schools in general, and sports in particular, have been key drivers of shifting gender, race, and class formations. Yearbooks, like all windows, can sometimes be clear, other times foggy. And windows are always bounded by frames that create vantage points that reveal some things while concealing others (p. 17).
Listen to a conversation between Michael Messner and Karen Sternheimer here:
Yearbooks have photographers, writers, editors, and advisors who choose what goes into the books in any given year. Past yearbooks also likely shape the contents of future yearbooks, influencing what seems to “naturally” belong in one.
My fuzzy high school memories of yearbook involvement highlight something that might be lost on twenty-first century yearbook production: the use of film. I briefly worked as a photographer on our high school yearbook and remember that due to its cost, we were limited to a small number of rolls of film (which then had to be developed, at an additional cost). Color film was even more expensive to purchase and develop, so its use was even rarer.
This meant we had to be much more decisive about what, who, and where to photograph than the digital photographer would need to be today. High-quality cameras that took high-resolution photos were also a rarity. The school-owned cameras were signed out to a handful of students at a time; only rarely did a student own their own 35mm camera. It was a big deal when I got my own for my sixteenth birthday.
Additionally, appearing in a yearbook might have less to do with one’s accomplishments than with who your friends are. I happened to be friends with the editor-in-chief of our senior class’s yearbook, so I appeared in many of the snapshots that ended up in our book. I got roped into dressing as a mime along with a few classmates for one of the thematic pages, which probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been an easy ask for my friend.
This is all to say that yearbooks are by nature imperfect reflections of high school, but they can provide information into who holds status at any given time.
And it should come as no surprise that at Salinas High, Messner found that male athletes had an outsized role in its yearbooks, with far fewer pages devoted to girls’ sports for most of its history. But in his examination of more than a century of yearbooks, Messner found that the trajectory of girls’ sports did not have a consistent upward trajectory since the passage of Title IX in 1972—which made “the failure to provide equal athletic opportunity” illegal— as one might assume.
Instead, girls’ sports participation had been presented more in the first few decades of the yearbooks, and all but disappeared the mid-twentieth century before a post Title IX revitalization. “A half century before my own high school years of 1966-70,” Messner recounts, “the girls at Salinas High School enjoyed a vibrant interscholastic sports program, and their teams were treated respectfully in the annual yearbooks” (p. 6).
As with his research on gendered sports coverage on ESPN and local news, he also includes a qualitative analysis component. Beyond the page count, he observed how sports participation was racialized, with more students of color participating during the lull in the middle of the twentieth century. However, yearbook photos suggest that sports participation among white girls ticked up in the post Title IX era of the 1970s and 1980s (p.8).
These shifts weren’t just “natural” reflections of reduced female interest in sports but reflected historical events. Messner observes how yearbooks he reviewed “evidenced many ways that the militarization of school life had fused with sports” as part of military readiness (pp. 45-46).
Yearbook coverage specifically and female sports participation in general declined at Salinas after World War II, reflecting the larger regressive shift in gender ideology. “Women were central targets for containment in the postwar years,” he notes, as “women’s supposed physical frailties and emotional nature” reduced the availability of interscholastic competition (p. 108).
Female athletes were often mocked as the butt of jokes when they were included in yearbook photos, with captions suggesting that they were incompetent, or highlighting their bodies as attractive or unattractive (pp.110-111).
At worst, sports sections [in the 1950s] were sites of scorn over girls’ humiliating lack of athletic knowledge, and mocking derision for their physical incompetence; at best, they offered the viewer a source of voyeuristic pleasure in the grace, poise, and beauty of girls’ bodies in motion (p. 115).
The shifts in coverage of girls’ sports that followed in the decades that followed were not inevitable, but the result of resistance to their near exclusion of girls from competitive sports. Title IX did not create itself; it was the result of activism and advocacy for equal opportunity in education.
Towards the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, female athletes received more recognition in the Salinas High School yearbooks. But as one female athlete interviewed for the book recounted: “we never got as big of crowds as the boys. And the girls’ teams, we would always go support the boys, but the boys would never come and support us” (p. 175). When Messner recently visited his old school, he noticed the Athletic Hall of Fame included just one female athlete.
The High School reminds us that change isn’t simple or linear, but complex and shifting. The book itself has the look and feel of an actual high school yearbook, filled with pictures and captions. This encourages the reader to reflect on their own high school experience, through lenses of both nostalgia and the sociological imagination.
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