The Female Revolution in Sports

Briskly performed housework was considered an acceptable form of exercise for women in the 19th century.  Matt Andrews lays out the journey for women in sports, including the bicycle craze of the 1890s, the mother of women's basketball, and the other Babe in American sport history: Mildred "Babe" Didrikson.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university
Welcome and we're back on the untold history of sports
in America. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Last time, we

(00:33):
discussed the nineteen twenties, the era that made the first
American sports stars who were larger than life like Babe
Ruth and Jack Dempsey. Today will be discussing sports and
the American woman, the figureheads who led the way in
normalizing female participation in athletic contests, and what society thought
about women who chose to play sports around the turn

(00:54):
of the century. Believe it or not, it wasn't positive.
Here's Matt. The absence of women and most of our
discussions about sports so far is instructive. I think it's
an indication of the larger attitudes in America about women
in sport for many Americans, and it doesn't really matter

(01:17):
when we were talking about but for many Americans, the
notion of women's sport was an oxymorn. You know, throughout
American history, many Americans believe that women and competitive athletics
were incompatible, antithetical, and so women were not encouraged to
play sports. I mean more than that, they were actively discouraged.

(01:41):
So during the nineteenth century, though there was more and
more evidence every day of American boys and men playing sports,
you had to look pretty hard to find evidence of
girls and women engaged in these same pastimes. The ideas
behind this, these assumptions and discouragements. They finally begin to

(02:01):
erode in the nineteen seventies, but for most of Americ
Amrican history, the female athlete was considered by most Americans
to be a suspect character. Let's begin our discussion of
early female athletes by examining some of the dominant ideas
about women in the nineteenth century, and specifically, let's ask
the question in the minds of many Americans, what was

(02:24):
the ideal woman like? What traits did she possess? When
attempting to answer this question, I'd like to turn to
a novel from the middle of the nineteenth century. It's
an eighteen fifty two novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's called
the blithe Dale Romance. In this novel, a man named
Miles is trying to choose between two sisters to be

(02:46):
his wife. There is the frail and meek Priscilla and
the much stronger and robust Zenobia, which is an awesome name.
What Miles chooses the frail Priscilla. And he makes his
decision one day as he's watching her walk across the
lawn and Priscilla falls and she she sprawls weakly on

(03:09):
the grass and there she stays, exhausted. She has fallen
and she can't get up. And Miles finds this very
attractive for Miles, the weak Priscilla, she's the ideal woman.
So in this novel, Hawthorne is describing a mid nineteenth

(03:30):
century American culture that equated frailty with feminine beauty. Physical
weakness was considered feminine because weakness was seen as a
sign of a moral purity. A weak woman, a delicate
flower of a woman, was seen by many as being ideal.

(03:53):
Think of it this way. If American men were supposed
to be muscular Christians and lived the strenuous life, then
women thought of as being the opposite of men. They
were supposed to live their lives as unmuscularly and unstrenuously
as possible. Using the words of the day, women were
the weaker sex, and for men like Hawthorne, this weakness

(04:16):
was something to cherish. Okay now, having set that baseline.
Despite these widespread views, there were some early voices out
there calling for women to be more physically fit, to
to exercise their bodies. For example, in eighteen fifty five,
Catherine Beecher, she wrote Letters to the People on Health

(04:40):
and Happiness. This was an early essay on female physicality,
and in this essay she urged women to spend one
or two hours every day in vigorous exercise. Now, I
want to be very clear here, this was not a
call for women to engage in competitive sports. This was
a call for exercise, and for Beacher, the ideal exerci

(05:05):
eyes with either calisthenics or and wait for it, housework.
Housework briskly performed, and her reasons were interesting. The reason
women were to become fit was so they might be
better child producers, and there was actually a racial dynamic

(05:27):
to this. White women needed to be more fit so
they could bear a greater number of healthy children in
the name of furthering the white race. White women should
engage in vigorous housework in the name of strengthening their
bodies so they might be better baby producers. So, yes,
here we have a call for female physical fitness. But

(05:49):
I just want to ask rhetorically, how progressive is this. Well,
it's at the end of the nineteenth century that we
begin to see a challenge to many of the dominant
ideas out there. This is when more and more American
women start to engage in athleticism and they start to
play sports. So let's do this. Let's let's slow down

(06:10):
and take a tour of turn of the twentieth century America.
Let's see where in this era one might find sportswomen.
You know, where might we find women playing sports or
just being athletic. Well, one of the sources for increased
physical activity for American women was the bicycle craze of

(06:30):
the eighteen nineties, and we talked about the invention of
the safety bicycle a few lectures ago. The bicycle had
a profound effect on the lives of American women. The
bicycle was a source of amusement, it was a source
of exercise, and even more than that, it was a
source of mobility for American movie. The wheel, as it

(06:53):
was called, it enabled women to literally go places they
were not able to go before, away from the home.
Into town down a solitary country road. Well, men came
up with all sorts of reasons why women shouldn't ride bicycles.
There were doctors out there who announced that avid cycling

(07:14):
could lead to an affliction in women known as bicycle face,
where women developed a protruding jaw, wild staring eyes, a
strained expression. Bicycle face, doctors warned, could be permanent. Even
more serious, bicycling was perceived as a potential sexual threat.

(07:37):
Here's how one critic of women and the Wheel put
it back in. Cycling might lure young women away from
the home and its duties lead them to remote spots
alone with men, where they might succumb to seduction or
even stimulate the genitals, resulting in equally unimaginable horrors. He

(08:00):
gat sexual degradation with or without a male partner. I mean,
there were clearly anxieties out there over women and the wheel.
But again, though I mentioned these fears, I think the
bigger story here is how the bicycle helped transform the
idea of what a woman could do and where she
could go, you know, a little more specifically, how far

(08:23):
from the home she could travel. So liberating was the
bicycle that Susan B. Anthony, one of the prominent American
suffragists from this era. She called the bicycle very simply,
the freedom machine. Also transforming the female sport landscape at
this time was a small but growing number of elite

(08:45):
American sports women. These were women who played country club
sports like golf, tennis, archery, croquet. And there's a logic
to this. Actually, it was here in the country clubs,
these these private, gated off spaces that upper class women
men were able to experiment with sports because they were

(09:09):
they were sheltered, they were sheltered from society's condemnation, you know,
sheltered because of their great wealth. The most notable of
these upper class athletic women was Eleanora Sears, who I
think we need to know because I'm going to describe
her as the first great American female athlete, a sportswoman

(09:29):
who rose to some degree of prominence at the turn
of the twentieth century, you know, meaning there were occasional
newspaper articles written about this strange woman who played sports.
Eleanora Sears came from one of the wealthiest families in Boston,
and she first made a name for herself playing tennis

(09:50):
and squash, competing against a small pool of other women
also doing these things. But she also participated in quote
unquote men's activities. She raised sailboats, she raised automobiles, she
flew airplanes, she entered shooting competitions. She played polo. She

(10:11):
broke a gender barrier in Boston and played on a
men's polo team. You know, Eleanora Sears look for equality
of opportunity in sports. Now this is not sports, but
it speaks to her mindset. Eleanora Sears was once arrested
for smoking a cigarette in a hotel lobby in Boston.

(10:32):
It was illegal for women to smoke cigarettes in public
at that time. Sears was not a smoker, but when
she heard about the band that only applied to women,
she asked someone for a cigarette and lit up. You know,
Eleanor Sears reminds me to an extent of Jack Johnson.
She didn't care what others thought about her. She was

(10:54):
going to be who she wanted to be. And so
Eleanora Sears was at the forefront of the female revolution
in sports. But I think we need to place her
in the context of a larger movement at this time.
This is the rise of what was called the new woman.
The new woman burst onto the American scene in the

(11:15):
eighteen nineties and she has never left. The late nineteenth
century was a time when women were streaming into education,
into the paid workforce. They were getting involved in politics,
political reform movements. These were all arenas that before then
were entirely male dominated and considered masculine, you know, in politics.

(11:39):
These demands for reform paid off for American women in
nineteen twenty, when the Nineteenth Amendment finally resulted in women
being given the constitutional right to vote. And so playing
sports was just one manifestation of this new woman. Though,
as we're going to see, the opposition to female athleticism

(12:00):
is going to be even more stubborn than the opposition
to female polityical participation. It will take at least another
half century for society to accept the idea of girls
and women playing competitive sports. I'm just one individual with
his own humble opinion. But if you ask me, if

(12:22):
you want to gauge societal views towards women, look at
how society views the female athletes. So it was the
action of Seers and other elite women who started to
lay the groundwork for the idea of female competitiveness. But
also doing this were the actions of the women who

(12:43):
played sports in college at this time. It was the
young women at Vassar College in New York who led
the way. At Vassar School, educators stress that in order
for women to have a healthy mind, they needed also
to have healthy bodies. So here's that idea that we've
discussed with regard to men being transferred to women. Among

(13:06):
the sports the Vasser women played was the national pastime baseball.
Vasser students in the eighteen seventies they that they formed
baseball clubs. They started playing games against each other. They
called themselves the Vasser Resolutes. You know, the emphasis on
healthy body, healthy mind. It spread to other women's colleges,

(13:27):
and by the start of the twentieth century women's college
sports you know, in these elite all female schools, that
it was on the rise, especially basketball. Basketball seems to
have been the sport of choice in the women's colleges,
but it was a different brand of basketball than what

(13:48):
the men played. And I think this next story is
especially instructive and important. The center of early women's college
basketball was Smith College in Massachusetts, not that far from Springfield,
where basketball had been invented. The game there was being
promoted by Senda Barrenson, a female physical educator. James Naysmith

(14:14):
is the father of basketball. Clearly well, I think of
Senda Barrenson as the mother of women's basketball. Senda Barrenson
took the game that Nai Smith had invented and she
changed the rules. She changed the structure to create a
game that she thought was more appropriate for women. You know,

(14:35):
as much as Barrenson loved basketball, she feared that the
game might be a little too strenuous, a little too
hyper competitive for women, and so she amended the game
that Nate Smith had created, and her amendments to women
basketball were known as the Smith Rules. Berenson thought there
should be less running, less movement in women's basketball. So

(14:59):
first she decided that her students would play six on six,
not not five on five as the men played. But
more than that, she divided the basketball court into thirds,
and she assigned two players from each team to each
third of the court, and they had to stay in
that designated area, so they were not allowed to run

(15:21):
the whole court. And because Barrenson liked the antagonistic aspects
of the game and thought that women were more emotional
than men. Her words. According to the Smith rules, it
was illegal to grab the ball out of an opponent's hands.
No snatching of the ball. So let's think about what's

(15:42):
going on here. Berenson loves basketball. She believes in female athleticism,
but in order to fit ideas about women's physical abilities
and the so called female temperament, she has altered the game.
These Smith rules will dominate the women's game for decades.

(16:04):
That the threes own division of the court that will
be part of women's basketball. For almost half a century,
and in most of the country, when women played basketball,
they played six on six all the way until the
nineteen seventies. Our cultural assumptions about gender difference are embedded
in our sports six on six basketball for women, or

(16:27):
the ladies teas on the golf course, or the rules
prohibiting contact in women's lacrosse. For much of American history,
the assumption has been that if women are going to
play sports, these sports need to somehow be less strenuous
versions of the sports that men play. After the break,

(16:50):
meet the first two female American sports superstars. But let
me end with the stories of a couple female athletes

(17:13):
whose exploits demonstrated that women could do remarkable things in sports.
You know, last time we discussed the rise of the
sports heroes from this era, Well, female athletes were unable
to attain heroic status among the majority of Americans, but
there were a few female athletes who became household names

(17:34):
across the United States. And I want to end by
focusing on the stories of two female athletes in per particular.
And I want to highlight these two athletic women because
they were two women who fascinated the American public, but
they were women who worried the American public as well.
The most celebrated American female athlete of the nineteen twenties

(17:58):
was Gertrude Etterly. Etterly was a swimmer from New York
City and she grew up swimming in the waters off
of Brooklyn, and she became the nation's top female swimmer.
She won an Olympic medal in Paris in four But
what won her national recognition and more than that, global fame,

(18:19):
was what she did on August six n On that day,
Gertrude Etterly she lathered herself up in Greece and jelly
to protect her body from the elements, she walked into
the ocean off the coast of France, and then she
became the first woman to swim across the English Channel,

(18:39):
the twenty one miles of open water that divides England
from mainland Europe. She was in the water for over
fourteen and a half hours, but she beat the previous record,
a record set by a man, by over two hours.
So this was an incredible feat. You know who's the
weaker sex now? Bub and Gertrude Etterly returned home an

(19:03):
American hero. She reached even a mammoth ticker tape parade,
but it was fleeting, As was often the case with
female athletes at this time, a celebration of her accomplishment
soon took a back seat to a discussion about her
body and her behavior. The press openly discussed with with

(19:25):
a little bit of horror. I might add Gertrude Etterly's body.
Etterly wade onty pounds, she was broad shouldered, she had
muscular thighs. I mean, she swammed the English Channel. But
there were almost as many articles suggesting that Etterly had
transgressed the boundaries of femininity as there were articles reveling

(19:47):
in what she had accomplished. The discussion about Gertrude Etterly,
it very much reminds me of contemporary discussions of Serena
Williams body, though of course with Serena you have the
added factor of race. That's The anxieties over Gertrude Etterly

(20:08):
were nothing compared to the anxieties provoked by another athlete
from this era, the female athlete of the early twentieth century,
Mildred Babe did Rickson. So we end today with the
other Babe in American sport history. You can make the

(20:28):
case the Babe Didrickson is the greatest all around athlete
in American history. She could do it all. She was
called Babe because of the home runs she hit growing
up playing baseball with the boys, so she was nicknamed
after Babe Ruth. All her life, people told Babe did
Rickson what a lady was supposed to be and do,

(20:49):
and for most of her life, Babe did Rickson said,
I don't give a ship and I use that language
purposefully because that's how Babe did Rickson talked, and and
that bothered a lot of people. That's unladylike, they said.
Mildred Didrickson was born in nineteen eleven, and she grew

(21:09):
up on a farm in rural Texas. So she grew
up in a working class culture that valued female strength.
You know, on the Texas family farm, everyone pitched in,
so female strength was seen as an asset, not something
to be suspicious of. No Priscilla's on the Texas farm,
right Zenobia's only Babe love sports. In high school, she

(21:36):
played and excelled at every sport available two girls. She
played volleyball, tennis, basketball, she swam. She wanted to play football,
which caused a lot of laughter in her Texas town
inoct Trying to mock Babe's toughness. One member of her
high school football team challenge Babe, he said, hit me
on the chin. So she did. She knocked him unconscious.

(22:01):
Score one for the Babe. While excelling in sports in
high school, did Rickson caught the eye of someone from
the employer's casualty company. This was an insurance company in Dallas,
and in nineteen thirty Babe was hired as a secretary,
but she did not type letters or open the mail.

(22:21):
Her real job was company athlete. She was hired to
represent the employer's casualty company in sports all right. Between
nineteen twenty and nineteen sixty, most of the athletic opportunities
available to young women did not come in college. They
came playing sports for companies like this. You know, these companies.

(22:44):
They recruited players, they put them in flashy satin uniforms
decorated with the company name and logo, and then they
sent them out to compete. As far as team sports go,
this was the absolute pinnacle of women's sports in the
nineteen thirties, nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. There were very

(23:06):
few college sports opportunities, and certainly there were no women's
professional sports leagues like the the w n b A
or the National Women's Soccer League. I mean, those things
were far far off in the future. These industrial leagues,
as they were called, they were the APEX and this
is where Babe made a name for herself. Representing the

(23:28):
employer's casualty company and competing in the A a U.
Babe was the star of the company's basketball team. She
led her team to the A a U national championship
in nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty one. Babe was the
only member of her company's track and field team in
other words, it was a team of one, but no matter.

(23:51):
In nineteen thirty two, at the a AU Women's Track
and Field Championship, Babe did Rickson won the team competition
all by herself. Babe could do much more than just
basketball and track. She was a great bowler. She could
punt a football more than fifty yards in short swim distances,

(24:12):
she had world class speed. You know. Babe was once
asked is there anything you don't play? And she said, yeah, dolls,
that's a good line. At another point for the Babe,
Babe Didrikson represented the United States at the ninety two
Olympic Games in Los Angeles, but she was frustrated to

(24:34):
learn that women could only compete in three events. That
was the maximum, so you know, there was no limit
for men. Well, at these Olympics she won gold medals
in the javelin and the eighty meter hurdles and a
silver medal in the high jump. And then after the Olympics,
Babe took up one of the few athletic opportunities available

(24:56):
to women in the nineteen forties and the nineteen fifties, golf,
a country club sport. Women's golf was relatively acceptable and
popular at this time because it was an upper class sport,
and Babe did Rickson tore through the golf world. Babe
Didrickson is arguably the greatest female golfer of all time.

(25:20):
In one two year span it was ninety six and
ninety seven, Babe did Rickson won seventeen consecutive women's golf tournaments.
It's incredible and just to add one more factive significance,
Babe Didrickson was the leading voice in the establishment of
a women's professional golf league, the Ladies Professional Golf Association

(25:43):
the LPGA, who was created in nineteen fifty. In nineteen
fifty three, Babe Diddrickson was diagnosed with cancer. And in
America in the nineteen fifties, when people had cancer, they
did not say they had cancer. Cancer was not a
word that Paul Light people uttered in public. But Babe

(26:08):
Diddrickson was not polite in that way. She publicly announced
that she had the disease, and she devoted herself to
raising money for research and treatments for all cancer patients.
Babe Didrickson died from cancer in nineteen fifty six. She
was forty five years old. You know, it's all amazing stuff.

(26:31):
But I want to end by raising this question, what
was her larger effect on women's sports? And I think
this is actually difficult to assess. On the one hand,
she won the respect in the admiration of millions of
Americans for her amazing athletic feats, so she certainly transformed
some of the dominant ideas out there about what women

(26:53):
could accomplish in the world of sport. But it was
the same successes, along with her colorful language and her
her her short hair and her her tanned muscles. These
caused a lot of Americans to see Babe Didrickson not
as a wondrous athlete, but really as well a freak,

(27:17):
and I think that's the word to use. The sportswriter
Paul Gallico called Babe Didrickson a muscle mall, and he
did not mean it as a compliment. Mall is short
for molly, which was a term for a prostitute in
that era. So when Paul Gallico called Babe Didrickson a
muscle mall, he was calling her a deviant, a gender deviant.

(27:43):
There's a wonderful biography of Babe Diddrickson by Susan Califf
and in it. She says that Babe Didrickson was an
American boogie woman. That is, she was a figure used
by mothers who wanted to warn their daughters of the
fate before them, of of what they would end up
like if they played sports. You keep playing baseball in

(28:05):
climbing trees, and you'll end up just like Babe did Drickson.
People will think you're a problem, Susan Caleb. She concludes
her biography with a very interesting thought. She says that
Babe Did Drickson's accomplishments could have redefined ideas in America
about womanhood. People could have said, Wow, women are awesome

(28:26):
at sports too, But instead, most Americans saw Babe and
her muscles and her salty language as evidence that competitive
sports and real womanhood were incompatible. They saw what they
wanted to see, but Babe reinforced their idea that a
true woman, a real woman, should not compete in sports.

(28:51):
In other words, as great as she was, Babe Did
Drickson may have closed doors rather than open doors for
other female athletes. That's all for now. Next time on
the Told History of Sports in America, presented by One
Day University, Save Me Joe Lewis h m HM