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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from "Apple News." I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders fit into the history of American feminism.
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Basu, Narrating: 1978 was around the time when the Dallas Cowboys earned a nickname that stuck.
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Broadcaster 1: They are the Dallas Cowboys, "America's Team."
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Basu, Narrating: "America's Team." That same year, they won their second Superbowl. They were in a solid streak of consecutive winning seasons that ended up stretching over two decades. The team, and the athletes, were making lucrative deals and setting the stage to become the most profitable franchise in the league.
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Basu, Narrating: But there are hundreds of women who've been literally side-lined in the history of the Cowboys' success.
Sarah Hepola: The cheerleaders were such a part of this brand of glamour and sexiness that Dallas had become.
Basu, Narrating: Sarah Hepola is a reporter. And she knows firsthand what it was like to grow up in Texas with Cowboys fever. She says the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were a huge part of the hype.
Hepola: They were like princesses that came from your city.
Basu, Narrating: Sarah says, at some point, as an adult, she remembers being somewhere in Dallas, staring up at this huge billboard of a Cowboys cheerleader. And she thinks to herself, this looks exactly the same as the cheerleaders from my childhood. The same white hotpants, the same blue crop-top.
Hepola: And I was like, whoa, so much in life has changed. So much has changed in women's lives. And then these women are still here. I think I was just aware that these women were everywhere and yet we knew nothing about their stories.
Basu, Narrating: Sarah unearths the history of these women and the role they played in the rise of the Cowboys franchise in an article for "Texas Monthly," called "Sex, Scandal, and Sisterhood: Fifty Years of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders." She also spoke to lots of women who were key to the squad in her podcast, called "America's Girls."
Hepola: It just seemed to me like this was a story about women that had survived and thrived inside one of the biggest boys’ clubs that exists. And again, whether you hate them, love them, wanna dismantle them, you gotta give them props for this.
Basu, Narrating: In my conversation with Sarah, she lays out how the Cowboys Cheerleaders have changed, and been changed, by American society over the past half a century. The story of the cheerleaders rides alongside the story of feminism in this country, the tension between being objectified and empowered, controlled by the narrative and in control.
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Hepola: So 1972 is the year that Title IX was passed in women's sports. And it absolutely changes the landscape of girls participating in sports. It's also the year that Roe v. Wade is making its way through the court system. That court decision is gonna be decided in 1973. And it comes out of Dallas. And it's also the year that deep throat begins a sort of "Vogue" for porno chic. So you have these both sides of the world, like opportunities opening up for women and also what I think of as sort of the pop sexualization of women happening. I see the cheerleaders as kind of sitting in the middle of that.
Basu: So let's go back to the beginning of the team. It's commonly believed that the general manager of the Cowboys in the '60s, Tex Schramm, created the cheerleaders, but you say that the credit really belongs to someone else. So tell us about her.
Hepola: Yeah, absolutely. Tex Schramm is a visionary general manager. And because of that and because he so powerfully shaped how football was seen both on television and just in the culture, I think there was a tendency to kind of give him credit for everything. What he did, to his credit, is that he hired an incredibly smart, enterprising woman named Dee Brock who was put in charge of finding something that worked. You know, you have to go back to this time when football is an experimental sport. Baseball was the number one American pastime; college football was big. But professional football wasn't really a thing, and they didn't have cheerleaders. And as they started to have cheerleaders, they had cheerleaders that looked more like college sports. So they had the pleated skirts and they had the sweater. And what Dee Brock had found was that nobody in the stands really cared much about it. And Dee was somebody that had a pretty eclectic life. She was a model. She went on to get her PhD. And one of the things she had known from her modelling days - she she'd taken a job where she wore a racy bikini in the '50s and everybody knew her - and she knew what it was to punch through the conformity of that time. And so she comes up with this idea that we're gonna have these sexy costumes. We're gonna have them dancing. They're not gonna be cheering. And she hires a local dance instructor, and they come up with this enterprising idea, which debuts in 1972.
Basu, Narrating: When these punched-up Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders debuted that year, there was nothing else like them in professional sports. And while maybe a bit controversial, they were a hit. Not just for the fans in the stands, but also for the people sitting at home. Because, you see, at around this same time, TV ownership in the United States was exploding. In 1975, about 97% of American households had a television, up from just 65% two decades earlier. The NFL capitalized on this new phenomenon and Monday Night Football took off.
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Broadcaster 2: A near capacity crowd at Texas stadium, just outside of Dallas, Texas. It's the Dallas Cowboys and the Kansas City Chiefs.
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Basu, Narrating: And along with showing the game, the cameras also started focusing in on the cheerleaders.
Hepola: The producers keep cutting away to the women on the side-lines, and this was what was called, at the time, "honey shots."
Basu, Narrating: "Honey shots." It was a term coined by a guy named Andy Sidaris. He worked in Dallas TV and eventually became "ABC" sports director. Here he is talking about coming up with the idea of honey shots for the documentary "Seconds to Play."
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Andy Sidaris: I got the idea for honey shots because I am a dirty old man, okay? Because I turned 17. I remember it was terrifying. Every time I'd look at a girl, I just trembled. And I thought, "If I'm like that, maybe other people are like that." And you know what? They are. They sure as hell are.
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Hepola: He understands that if he lets the camera linger on beautiful women, that's going to allow men in their armchairs, sitting at home, to ogle them in a way that they normally never would. I think of this as sort of the creation of armchair voyeurism, which becomes very common in the American television experience.
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Basu, Narrating: It was during one of these so-called "honey shots" that something happened that would go on to become part of Cowboys Cheerleaders’ mythology: the wink. This was in 1975. The Cowboys are playing the Kansas City Chiefs. And the camera keeps cutting over to the cheerleaders.
Hepola: This one cheerleader, whose name is Gwenda Swearingen. She was a beauty pageant winner in a little town called Corsicana. She's got long, Farrah Fawcett-type hair and blue eye shadow. And she's shaking her pompoms. And she looks at the camera and she winks.
Basu, Narrating: That was new. And the TV commentators noticed.
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Commentator 1: I think she was doing that for you, Frank.
Commentator 2: I don't know, but she was very effective.
Commentator 1: Did you like that, Frank?
Commentator 2: I did like that. A little wink.
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Hepola: It's one of these moments. It only happens for like a split second, but it's this bold breaking of the fourth wall. It means that these cheerleaders that you were watching, maybe they're watching you back.
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Basu: They know they're being watched and by you at home.
Hepola: Exactly. And the wink is such the perfect flirt, right? It's such the perfect tease. It's sort of like, "I’m a beautiful young woman, but I'm not a dirty young woman." It's a coy gesture. The wink is one of the stories that the cheerleaders later tell to describe their enormous rocket rise to fame over the next years. I think it was a central moment. And I think also one of the things that the wink obscures is the extent to which the Cowboys were orchestrating their rise. I mean, Tex Schramm, one of the things that he did do was he was a master of publicity. You know, he may not have started the cheerleaders, but he was very, very good about making sure they stayed in the center of a frame because he knew that that was distinguishing them. So the Dallas Cowboys like to tell the story that fame sort of happened to them, but the truth is, is that it was a combination of luck, but also some very deliberate and hard work to get those cheerleaders into the frame.
Basu: Yeah. Yeah. So, as the squad experiences this transformation, going from an experiment happening on the side-lines to this globally recognized phenomenon, what did it mean for the women on the squad?
Hepola: It was wild. They all describe it as getting on a roller coaster. I mean, in some ways, it's this incredible burst of fame, right? Some of these women are working as checking girls at Tom Thumb, they're working at a bank. And all of a sudden, they're on "The Love Boat."
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[CHEERLEADERS CHEERING]
Actor: Hi!
Cheerleader: Hi, you one the new cheerleaders now?
Actor: No, they said I don't have the legs for it.
Cheerleader: [CHUCKLES]
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Hepola: Which was a very popular, very silly, but variety show television show at the time. And they're meeting celebrities. It was incredible. But there was also this sort of uncontrolled fire aspect to it as well, which is that they had a lot of unwanted attention. There is a story that one of the cheerleaders tells about this event in Wichita, Kansas. And as they're getting up to go on the bus, people start running, and then they start running, and then more people start running. And then they get into their car, and there's people pounding on the doors. And it's like, they don't have security yet. They don't know that they need to do this. And then the other really difficult thing is that there are stalkers. There are people that are sending them gifts. Somebody got a set of butcher knives in the mail. There is one woman that woke up and found a strange man in her house. And so the cheerleaders are starting to realize, "Oh, wow, there is a level of vulnerability here that we didn't really anticipate, and we don't really know how to handle that." And that was a real challenge of the first years. And it's one of the reasons why the cheerleader's rules get incredibly strict.
Basu, Narrating: That brings us to 1976, the year Dee Brock left the cheerleaders and Suzanne Mitchell stepped in. She took the squad to a new level.
Hepola: One of the things she realizes is, "All right, we need to make this like a bootcamp. We're gonna totally turn this squad around. We're gonna make it a machine."
Basu, Narrating: And, in the making of this machine, Suzanne introduced a lot of new rules.
Hepola: We get things like scales moving into the studio and you're gonna get weighed regularly. You can't wear blue jeans in public because a lady doesn't wear blue jeans. You have to get an unlisted number. Now, this is one of these things that's done for protection. But at the same time, oh, you have to have a manicure because you don't wanna be signing autographs and your nails look nasty. So it's this combination of sort of protection and image management.
Basu, Narrating: In Sarah's podcast, "America's Girls," one of the cheerleaders, Tami Barber, remembers a day when Suzanne asked to speak with her.
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Tami Barber: And Suzanne said, "Texie and I have decided that you're gonna wear your hair up in pigtails from now on, for the games and for anything we do." And I was like, "Okay. Uh, why?" And then, what she said to me, I will never, ever forget. Because I was, what, 19, 20 years old? And she said, "You're not pretty enough, and you need a gimmick."
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Basu, Narrating: Tami said this experience shattered her. She hated the pigtails. But she knew that if she didn't do what she was told, she would probably lose her spot on the squad. So she followed orders. And as it turns out, the fans loved her new hairstyle. She became one of the most recognizable and popular cheerleaders of that era.
Another cheerleader told Sarah that, despite Suzanne's harshness, they really loved and respected her. They saw her as brave. She was able stand up to, and even joke around with, the men in charge.
Hepola: Suzanne is one of these complicated figures that I find myself admiring. She's one of the first female executives in the NFL. And I think one of the things about her story is that you see how tough women had to be. She ran that team the way that a male coach would've run a football team.
Basu: It sounds like a lot of the rules that she was imposing, like you said, they were sort of image-based, but also this sort of, I guess in big quotes, "clean," like a clean image for these women.
Hepola: Hundred percent. Hundred percent.
Basu: Right, like you're not allowed at events where alcohol is being served.
Hepola: You are not allowed to be around alcohol in that uniform. And there were things like, if you show up to an event and another player comes in, you're supposed to leave, you're not supposed to be doing anything untoward. You know, she's very intense. She's also got this whole, like, "Don't question the rules. If you don't like the rules, we've got a thousand girls that can replace you."
Basu: And they literally did, right?
Hepola: And they literally did.
Basu: Right, right. There was a lot of competition.
Hepola: There are all these women that are starting to line up for what are basically 36 spots. I mean, it changes every year. And by the way, you have to try out every year for the cheerleaders. So anytime you get your spot, it's not like you're there for life. You know, you're still gonna be going up against another thousand women. And so, she had this incentive to kind of push back against anybody that wanted to say, "Hey, these rules aren't fair." As far as she was concerned, of course the rules aren't fair. The rules weren't meant to be fair. This is not about that.
Basu: You know, the thing about the aesthetic that was maintained through all of that rule making, obviously it popularized a pretty complicated image of what women's sexuality meant, of what beauty meant, of objectification. I think the question that's at the heart of this, the tension point, is how do you embody all of these womanly qualities without being objectified for them, or being defined by them? How did Suzanne think about this, and how did the women on the team think about this?
Hepola: Well, one of the things that Suzanne really, really worked hard to do was to push the message that these were more than just women dancing on a field. So, by the way, all the cheerleaders had to have a job outside of being a cheerleader. And so she's always pressing this thing about," They're flight attendants. They're teachers." So she's always trying to tell people that they're more than this. And I think one of the impossible needles that Suzanne had to thread, as somebody that was caretaking their image, was that she had to make them sexy but not too sexy. Now this is actually the line that I think American women have to walk all the time, which is that you want that tease without looking like "that kind of girl." And so she's always, like… The uniform is sexy. I think you can hear Suzanne say things on television shows like, "Hey, everybody wants to be sexy. I want to be sexy. What's wrong with being sexy?" So she doesn't like the implication that that on its face is a problem. What she doesn't like, or what she's trying to push back against, is the idea that they're only sexy.
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Basu, Narrating: Some of the cheerleaders' loudest critics were other women. In the 1980s, the feminist movement was pushing forward. They were advocating for equal pay, protesting against workplace discrimination, more women were getting into politics and getting elected. And some saw the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders as taking their cause for gender equality backward. In 1982, the cheerleaders went to Fresno University to help raise money for the school's athletic department. And when they showed up on campus, they were met with protestors. One cheerleader, Dana Presley Killmer, told Sarah that she remembers people holding up signs that read, "Hearts and minds, not bumps and grinds" and "Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, go home."
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Dana Presley Killmer: Evidently, there was a real strong movement in the female athletic department against anything that objectified women. And they felt like we were doing something to make that worse. There was no changing their mind that we weren't being manipulated or objectified and that we were doing what we wanted to do. But we really were doing what we wanted to do. No one forced me to be a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.
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Basu: Remember, a lot of these women became Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders because it was a rare opportunity to pursue their passion, dance, and to do it for a huge audience. Sarah told us about Shannon Baker Werthmann, a cheerleader who became a poster girl in the late '70s.
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Hepola: She was one of the main people that talked to the press. And the number one question she was asked during those years was, "How do you feel being a sex object?" And she was always sort of like, "I didn't really know that I was a sex ob… I don't feel anything about it."
Basu, Narrating: Times were changing in the country. And soon, they would be changing for the Cowboys too. Just a few years later, in 1989, Arkansas businessman Jerry Jones bought the team.
Hepola: One of the things that Jerry Jones does when he comes in is that he immediately says, "You know what? We're gonna do away with the rules." Like, why should players not be able to date the cheerleaders? Like, who cares? Let's just ditch this. This is kind of old school. He sees himself as part of a newer guard. These are old, sort of traditional, living-in-the-past women that are running the cheerleaders. Now, in a way, that's progressive. Great! He's gonna do away with the rules. But the question is, who's that going to serve? And so one of the things that starts happening is that there's all these stories of Jerry Jones and his business buddies starting to come by the cheerleader's rehearsals. They've got their drinks. The cheerleaders would describe it as it kind of felt like it was this strip club atmosphere, suddenly. And now this is uncomfortable.
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Basu, Narrating: Sarah has a rule book from the '90s. And one rule that's remained consistent throughout most of the cheerleaders' history is you have to be a certain weight.
Hepola: I mean, this is a big one, right? Their weight requirements are really wild. And this is really before we've got some of the awareness around eating disorders that are starting to become prevalent on the squad.
Basu, Narrating: Some of the cheerleaders told Sarah that, during this era, there was a piece of paper posted in the locker room that listed several cheerleaders' names, their current weight, their goal weight and areas of their body they needed to work on. Here's one of the cheerleaders during that time, Leslie Shaw Hatchard.
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Leslie Shaw Hatchard: It didn't matter how I felt about it because my thoughts and feelings weren't included. If they told me they needed me to lose weight, that meant I needed to be skinnier, period. End of story.
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Basu, Narrating: But some of old the rules were getting thrown out the window under Jerry Jones. The cheerleaders were now allowed to be around alcohol while in uniform, rules about dating the players were relaxed.
And the women were both excited for the new wave of fame that these changes could bring but also skeptical of how they were being positioned and used. One cheerleader, Cindy Villarreal, ended up quitting when she was asked to appear on Jerry Jones' private jet.
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Cindy Villarreal: I don't know what would've happened on the plane, but I do feel like it was not appropriate. It just felt outside of what our normal ambassadorship was. And I think what he was doing was he was showboating, "Look at all the girls. I just bought this team. I own these girls." And he didn't own me.
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Basu, Narrating: A spokesperson for the Cowboys disputed Villarreal's account.
Now, Hepola says this idea of "low-key voyeurism" was always the unstated part of the marketing plan for the cheerleaders. But recently, four cheerleaders sent a message with a lawsuit. The Cowboys paid over $2 million in a settlement last year, after the women accused a senior executive of voyeurism, trying to record them while they were changing in the locker room.
As Hepola put it, that kind of money is a "rounding error" for someone like Jerry Jones. He transformed the Cowboys into America's most profitable sports franchise. The team is now valued at more than 8 billion dollars. And yet, historically, the cheerleaders have always been paid extremely little.
Basu: I feel like we have to talk about pay. We have to talk about pay. You've mentioned now that many of the cheerleaders, if not all of the cheerleaders, had jobs, and that was mostly out of necessity. Back in 1972, the original seven members of the cheer squad were making $15 a game. Not including tax.
Hepola: Exactly. It was $14.12 after taxes, yeah.
Basu: Yeah. When and how did that start to change?
Hepola: Well, it's amazing. So it starts out at $15 a game because, again, this is an experiment and they're doing it in their side time. And one of the rules is that you have to have a job outside. And as this catches on, one of the things that they realize is they have no incentive to change the pay. And so, as they're on bestselling calendars, as they're on "The Love Boat," et cetera, they're still making $15 a game. And amazingly, this goes through the '80s. It doesn't change until the late '90s.
Basu: That is so many years, Sarah, I can't even believe it. You're telling me in like 1996, they were making $15 a game?
Hepola: Yeah. I think it's 1996 or '97 when they change the pay scale. And until that point, it's really fascinating to watch them rationalize this and the different ways that cheerleaders tried to push back over the years.
Basu: Yeah. What were the attempts to rationalize it?
Hepola: One of the things that they said was that they wanted women that were doing it for the love of the game and the love of the Cowboys.
Basu: Oh, come on. [CHUCKLES]
Hepola: I'm telling you. Somehow, this worked!
Basu: That is so absurd. That is so absurd.
Hepola: No, and it's really amazing. And in fact, in 1981 or '82, I'm pretty sure it's '82, the Cowboys go on strike, the players go on strike for more money. And the cheerleaders have to keep rehearsing because they don't know when the strike's gonna stop. And they only get paid for game days, so they're not even getting paid for rehearsing now.
Basu: Oh, my gosh.
Hepola: Now they're not even getting their $15 a game.
Basu: Well, shouldn't the football players just be doing it for the love of the sport of football?
Hepola: Shouldn't they? Shouldn't they?
Basu: It's so ridiculous.
Hepola: Shouldn't we all? It's one of these interesting things where, on one level, we get it, right? I mean, I work in the arts. I understand what it is to do things because you love it. But at the same time, you're asking someone to be an altruist in the context of a multimillion-dollar sport. I mean, this is a deeply capitalist enterprise that has asked women to do it out of the goodness of your heart. So those things don't jive. But again, one of the things that the cheerleaders will say is that "These experiences are things that I would've paid to be able to be a part of." You know, to be on the side of a game. To go to… eventually they start doing USO tours in Korea, in the Philippines, all over the world. And these are extremely eye-opening experiences. It's an education. So for a lot of these cheerleaders, it would almost sound like if I were talking to somebody else about going to college and I would say, "Why would you pay $80,000 for that?" You know? But it was, for them, a door opening that they felt like they couldn't get any other way. It was an exceptional experience.
Basu, Narrating: As much as the cheerleaders may have valued the experience, they could see how unfair it was. Here's Shannon Baker Werthmann, one of the former cheerleaders in the '70S you heard from earlier.
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Shannon Baker Werthmann: There were so many broke cheerleaders at that time that weren't able to pay their rent. It was all fine and good at the beginning, but then when you can't pay your rent for multiple months, and you're working so hard, and you're falling asleep at your desk at work because you've been working all night at rehearsal, and you're seeing all of this wonderful publicity coming around you, and you think, "For sure, I have a place in this mix, monetarily." That we're making all this money for the team, but where is it?
[END AMERICA’S GIRLS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: And at certain times, the cheerleaders did try to push back and demand better pay.
Hepola: And this is actually a really under-reported piece that I talk about in one of my "Texas Monthly" stories is that in 1981, they banded together and tried to get more pay, and they were just told the money didn't exist.
Basu: The past couple of years, we've now seen some pretty recent lawsuits brought against various NFL teams over wage issues, right, for cheerleading squads. What have we learned about cheerleaders and what they're being paid, relative to how their teams function?
Hepola: The low pay was pretty epidemic across the league. In fact, there were some that weren't even getting paid at all. In 2014, the Oakland Raiders bring a class action suit, meaning that several of the cheerleaders band together and they sue for back wages because they discover that their contracts are in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. And this starts a wave of lawsuits across the NFL. It does hit the Cowboys as well. In 2018, a cheerleader named Erica Wilkins files a suit. Now, that ends up settling. What happens is that the game-day pay, which had, at that point, been raised to 200…
Basu: $200 per game.
Hepola: $200 per game goes to $400. And by that time, they were also making minimum wage.
Basu: And this is 2018, you said?
Hepola: This is 2018.
Basu: You know, when you go back and you trace the story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, it sort of rides along in tandem with so many big cultural conversations in America, right? About women and sexuality, about empowerment, about pay disparity. And you said that you were initially curious to go back and try and figure out the history because in your mind, these women had stayed the same over all these decades. So I'm curious to know, after spending so much time going back and trying to learn their stories, do you still feel that way, that they managed to stay the same? And maybe, depending on the moment in American history, they were either seen as ahead of their time or behind the times?
Hepola: So, I think that they're a really interesting Rorschach test, that a lot of people see different things in those cheerleaders. I think that that squad has been incredibly smart about shape shifting along with the times. The squad has tracked along with certain changes in American culture that have allowed them to stay relevant. You know, when I think about how they had that sexual flare during the first years of the sexual revolution; in the '80, they kind of went into this deep patriotism with the USO tours and they sort of aligned themselves with traditional family values; and then in the '90s, they were sort of these swimsuit cover models when that was all the rage; and then in the aughts, they have this reality show. "Making the Team" is the name of the show. It was on for 16 seasons on "CMT." You know, it's kind of amazing that they managed to pivot accordingly. And one of the interesting stories about them is the way that, in the beginning, the people that had a problem with the cheerleaders were the Evangelical Christians, a lot of the more conservative cohorts. They really saw this as distasteful, a sort of degradation of American culture. And if you fast forward 50 years, you will find it completely flipped. The people that you find that have a problem with the cheerleaders tend to be progressives that see it as retrograde. They see it as something that we should be beyond and sort of offensive. And what you'll see is conservative groups saying this represents traditional America. So, in some ways, what they're doing is, since they're this Rorschach test, they're telling us a little bit about where we are in the culture and how we've changed.
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Basu, Narrating: You can read Sarah Hepola's article for "Texas Monthly" on "Apple News." And you can listen to the podcast, "America's Girls," on Apple Podcasts. We'll include a link to both on our show notes page.
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