Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, signed into law in Washington, D.C. in June 1972, prohibited sex-based discrimination in any educational program receiving federal funding, including sports. The legislation had a profound impact on American women's physical culture, mandating equal access to athletic programmes and, implicitly, validating the athletic, physically active female body over the corseted or decorative ideal. American women's participation in sport grew dramatically in the years following the act's passage.

Title IX contributed to a cultural shift in how women's bodies were understood — as capable of athletic strength and competitive achievement rather than primarily as sites of decorative femininity — and this shift permeated feminist poetry of the 1970s and 1980s. Poets including Lucille Clifton celebrated Black women's physical power and presence in verse that would have been inconceivable in an earlier era of enforced bodily delicacy. The athletic body replaced the corseted body as one of feminist poetry's recurring images.