when forty-one-year-old American swimmer Dara Torres, mother of a two-year-old, competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, people were surprised. They did not disapprove. They just thought that it would be difficult for an older athlete and a new mother to compete against younger athletes. Why, then, did people disapprove when runner Fanny Blankers-Koen, a thirty-year-old Dutch mother with two young children, competed in the Olympics? The year was 1948, and things were very different for women at that time.