I’ve been doing this long enough now to notice some patterns. Among them, women’s sports were GIANT. The coverage each day represented at least half of all coverage. And some days, it was all women’s sports. Today was one of those days.

Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen are about to meet in the French Championships. The papers treat it like the event of the year… and it is. Gertrude Ederle is preparing for her second attempt at swimming the English Channel. They’ve been covering that story for months. Glenna Collett, reigning US Women's Golf Champion, has just returned from England where a general strike prevented her from competing for the British title. The papers are sympathetic. They expect her back.

Meanwhile the George Washington University women's tennis team has gone unbeaten. The Fall River Herald gives them a full photo spread. Elizabeth Garber in full tilt. Marie Didden reaching for a hot shot. Miriam Davis serving with skill and grace. Frances Walker applying, in the paper's own words, a wicked English.

These aren’t novelties, or curiosities. They are simply the daily sports pages.

It is not one newspaper. It is not one city. Open any major paper the same morning and you find the same thing. Women's athletics covered as a matter of course, as something the reading public expects and wants. Firsts happening every other week. Records. Championships. Names.

And then there is this. A full page on what women were wearing while doing all of it. Not what they wore to watch sports. What they wore to play. Practical. Built for movement. A writer named Edith M. Burtis making the case that sports clothes represent, in her words, “the attainment of women's long-desired privilege of direction.”

The fashion page and the sports page are the same page.

This was the norm. Nobody was treating it as remarkable because it wasn't. It was just sport. Just women. Just the news.

Title IX didn't exist until 1972. Women's professional sports leagues were systematically dissolved through the 1930s and 40s. The governing bodies that controlled women's athletics kept them deliberately limited. Television money in the 1950s and 60s went entirely to men's leagues. It took fifty years of institutional decisions to get from this to what came next.

Imagine if this had been the base for the next hundred years, rather than what actually happened to them.

See you tomorrow.

— Chris

Sources