Columnist Kathy Hedberg of the Lewiston Tribune recounts how fear of hurting their innards prevented several female generations of her family from playing basketball:

When my grandmother was a girl she learned to play basketball and loved it. Her mother, great-grandma Pearson, however, found out about it and forbade my grandma and her sister to play the game. "She was afraid it would damage our female organs," my grandma explained to me years later. Although she always regretted that she was forced to give up basketball, when I was in junior high school and signed up for the basketball team, she and my mother both warned me against it. "It could hurt your female organs," they said, although they stopped short of an outright ban. I never fully understood what female organs they were talking about. I assumed they were the interior mechanics of a woman's body that allows her to have babies, but I still didn't get the connection between that and basketball. More here.

Question (for the women out there): Did preconceived notions hamper you from playing sports as girls?