On the surface, the women's movement in the United States appears to be in the ascendant. The U.S. women's soccer team is having an incredible year, with Mo'ne Davis on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a Little Leaguer and Serena Williams seemingly unstoppable --The number of girls participating in high school sports is now 2 in 5, for a total of 2 in 5 3.27 million girls. But ongoing struggles around pay inequality, lack of media coverage and generally rising sexism persist. The unconscious (or conscious) belief that women's sports are less exciting, less athletic, and less impressive due to biological disadvantages than men's sports is more common than you might think. universal. "Throw like a girl" is still an insult. That’s why it’s so important to focus on the women who have contributed to American sports.
Arguably the pinnacle of sports, the Olympics have technically allowed women to compete since 1900, but it took quite a while for women to truly penetrate the top professional sports. Although the photos on Instagram and Pinterest feature inspiring muscular women, the idea of an athletic woman is very modern and only 70 or 80 years old.
If you want to truly understand how far we have come, and how far we still have to go, you have to put it into perspective. Here are six women who started the American women's sports tradition in style.
1. Babe Didrickson
It is no exaggeration to say that Babe Didrickson was one of the greatest all-around athletes in sports history, at a time when women were not even encouraged to be amateur female athletes, let alone dominate the field. You name it, Didrikson was a record-breaking champion.
golf? She won a Grand Slam in 1950, won every major tournament at least once, and became the highest-paid player on the U.S. Tour two years in a row. sports? She once set four world records in one afternoon - javelin throw, 80-meter hurdles, high jump and baseball throw. ( Oh, and she also won two Olympic gold medals, plus a silver because her high jump skills were considered too weird to win.) Bowling? She is a champion at this too.
Didrikson battled some extraordinary sexism in her day: One sportswriter once wrote, "If she and her ilk had stayed at home, dressed themselves up, and waited for the call Ring, that would be better." But American sports will be poorer for it.
2. Althea Gibson
Gibson is a legend for many reasons—one of which is that, before the Williams sisters came along, she was probably the best American female tennis player in the world. She was the first woman of color to win a Grand Slam (1956 French Open) singles and doubles titles. She went on to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals, and went on to win 11 Grand Slam titles in total.
She broke huge barriers for women and people of color in tennis, then quietly entered golf as a pro after retiring. Despite having to change cars during tournaments due to frequent quarantines at golf clubs, Gibson became one of the 50 highest-paid players in American golf.
3. Anne Smith Peck
Peck may not be a medal-winning female athlete in the traditional sense, but she's certainly an incredible physical adventurer—and has the mountaineering expertise to prove it. Peck was one of the world's first professional mountaineers, starting her search for the Peaks in the 1880s (to give you context, it was still popular for women in Europe to keep busy). Peck, who also worked her way up to a college degree and speaks four languages, doesn't care. She climbed the Matterhorn and in 1908 became the first person (male or female) in the world to climb the 6,768-meter-high Nevado Huascaran mountain range in Peru.
4. Alice Coachman
The 1948 Olympics were special for one fundamental reason: Alice Coachman became the first African-American woman in history to win an Olympic gold medal. Coachman, who grew up and trained on segregated sports teams in the American South, was a high jump specialist, but she was also a national champion in the 50m, 100m and 400m relays as a teenager. This is a woman on a mission.
Had the 1940 and 1944 Olympics not been canceled due to war, she might have dominated the competition much earlier. When her time came, she jumped 5 feet 6 1/8 inches to capture the gold medal and set a new Olympic record. She also set another precedent: In 1952, she became the first female athlete of color to receive an international endorsement deal with Coca-Cola.
5. Wayne Mitchell
Virne Jackie Mitchell was a pitcher who couldn't fool and was one of the world's first female professional baseball players. In 1931, at age 17, she even struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game between the New York Yankees and the Chattanooga Lookouts.
Ruth didn't handle the strikeouts well. "I don't know what would happen if they started allowing women to play baseball," he later told the media. "Of course, they were never going to do well. Why? Because they were too fragile. Playing every day would kill them." Unfortunately for Verne's later career - she and all other female baseball players were banned , and that she toured as a carnival performer rather than an actual athlete—so bitter that she did not rejoin baseball even when the Women's League was formed in 1943.
6. Gertrude Edel
In 1926, American swimming champion Gertrude Ederle dealt a real blow to the British sense of superiority when she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Before that, however, she was not a timid person. In 1917, at the age of 12, she set her first world record and went on to set a total of 29 American and world records, as well as one gold and one bronze Olympic medal, becoming the first woman in history to win. Six people who successfully crossed the English Channel.
Not only did her English Channel swim (which she completed while covered in lanolin to protect herself from jellyfish stings) set a new world record of 14 hours and 43 minutes, a record that would not be broken for 26 years - And it made her a superstar, triggering tape marches in the streets of New York and a small riot at City Hall.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
