Hillside Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia

11. The Girls’ Turn To Play: From the First State Basketball Tournament in 1919 Through Title IX and Beyond

255 The Girls’ Turn To Play: From the First State Basketball Tournament in 1919 Through Title IX and Beyond THE 1920S WERE exciting years to be a woman in America. Congress had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, at the beginning of the decade. Even though the women’s suffrage movement itself disappeared after the success of what turned out to be its single issue, the types of “acceptable” roles for women continued to increase throughout the decade. With the expansion of the educational system , more women had opportunities to go to high school, to attend college, or to go to normal school to prepare for work as teachers. The expansion of health care provided jobs in nursing, and women were entering business as store clerks and in clerical jobs. A smaller number were able to enter professional fields like law and medicine. In addition, the “new woman” or “flapper” emerged, representing a young, independent female who wanted to embrace and explore the world that was opening for her gender. Opportunities for women also expanded in the sports that flourished in the 1920s. On the international level, the Olympic Games added swimming and diving events for women in 1920; a fourteen-year C H A P T E R 1 1 Chapter 11 256 old American diver, Aileen Riggin, won a gold medal that year. Female American divers won gold medals in 1924 and 1928, and Ethelda Bleibtrey won a gold medal in swimming in the 100-meter freestyle. In 1924, Gertrude Ederle finished third in an American sweep of the 100-meter and 400-meter freestyle events. Two years later, Ederle, the nineteenyear -old daughter of a New York City butcher, became the first woman to swim the English Channel between France and England. Her time of fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes was almost two hours faster than the men’s record. In 1928, track and field events for women were added to the Olympic Games. Elizabeth Robinson won the 100-meter dash, and American women placed in the 4 x 100-meter relay, the high jump, and the discus.1 Beyond the Olympics, Helen Willis captivated the tennis world as she won seven U.S. Women’s singles titles between 1923 and 1931, and eight Wimbledon singles championships between 1927 and 1938. Golfer Glenna Collett dominated women’s golf, winning six national championships in the 1920s. These successful, athletic women were featured in stories and images in newspapers and magazines across the country. Impressionable young girls did not have to look far for female athletic heroes in a country that had embraced sports almost as a national religion. However, running counter to this growing interest in women’s sports, strong opposition to girls and women competing in interscholastic and intercollegiate sports was voiced by female physical education teachers. The most powerful and well- organized of the groups that opposed women’s sports were the Committee on Women’s Athletics of the American Physical Education Association, formed in 1917, and the National Amateur Athletic Federation’s Women’s Division (NAAFW), founded in 1923. The NAAFW issued sixteen resolutions, which became the platform against athletic competition for girls and women. Their objections were based on beliefs that girls and women were physically and emotionally unsuited for intense athletic training and competition, and that these activities posed potential The Girls’ Turn to Play 257 health problems. Instead of competitive teams, the NAAFW favored less intense activities like intramural sports and play days, where more girls would have the opportunity to compete.2 A version of these beliefs was expressed in the popular press when Sarah Addington wrote in Ladies Home Journal that “the wild excitement of the meet itself, the girls’ loyalty to the college, the applause of the multitude , the intoxication of outstripping her competitors, all of these cause many a girl to sacrifice what seems a problematical future evil to the present hour of triumph. . . . The nervous strain in such contests is tremendous and uses up more vital energy than most girls have to give.”3 * * * Women’s college sports were of little consequence in West Virginia during the first third of the twentieth century. Marshall College fielded its first intramural basketball teams in 1902, but in 1905, the Marshall administration prohibited women’s basketball because it was played outof -doors in front of a mixed audience: the administration considered the spectacle...