This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shimita Bassu. Today, how the Dallas Cowboys

cheerleaders fit into the history of American feminism.

1978 was around the time when the Dallas Cowboys earned a nickname that stopped.

They are the Dallas Cowboys. America's team.

America's team.

That same year they won their second Super Bowl. 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. But there are

hundreds of women who've been literally sidelined in the history of the cowboy's success.

The cheerleaders were such a part of this brand of glamour and sexiness that Dallas had become.

Sarah Heppola 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.

They were like princesses that came from your city.

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 hot pants, the same blue

crop top.

And I was like, whoa, so much in life has changed, like so much has changed in women's lives and then like these

women are still here. I think I was just aware that these women were everywhere

and yet we knew nothing about their stories.

Sarah unearths the history of these women and the role they played in the rise of the Cowboys franchise

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