A Hop, Skip, and a Jump

Brian Balogh: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment For The Humanities, and The Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers: From Virginia humanities, this is BackStory.

Ed Ayers: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. If you’re new to the podcast each week, my colleagues, Brian Balogh, Nathan Conley, Joanne Freeman, and I explore an aspect of American history that’s been in the news.

Ed Ayers: This month, the US women’s soccer team won the World Cup in France. At the championship game against the Netherlands, there were cheers of victory, but there was also protest, particularly regarding the issue of equal pay. Now, the US Women’s Team have won four, count them, four World Cups since the tournament started in 1991. During that time though, they’ve been paid significantly less than their male counterparts.

Ed Ayers: Now, the American women’s team is taking the issue of equal pay to federal court. They filed a complaint against the US Soccer Federation, what’s known as the USSF, alleging that they receive about a quarter of what their male counterparts are paid. No matter what happens in the lawsuit, the women’s victory in France has reignited a heated debate about how athletes use sports to protest inequality on and off the field.

Ed Ayers: So on this episode of BackStory, we’re revisiting segments that have explored the issue of sports and equality throughout American history. We’ll look at the famous Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, and revisit a story from 2018 on how sporting events have opened up discussions about Puerto Rican sovereignty.

Ed Ayers: But first, I want to take you back to the 1920s. Many American women could vote thanks to their long and determined campaign for suffrage. Women were going to college and a booming economy had opened up new and exciting opportunities for them outside of the home, except that is, when it came to sports.

Ed Ayers: And so in 1922, a group of female track and field athletes set out to change that. With limited training and a complete lack of national support, a team of 15 women sailed across the Atlantic to France to participate in the first-ever international track meet for women. Here’s former BackStory producer Kelly Jones with the story.

Kelly Jones: At 21, Lucile Godbold stood just over six feet tall.

Jane Tuttle: I think she probably looked more like her father than she looked like her mother.

Kelly Jones: This is Jane Tuttle, a Librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina. Lucile Godbold wasn’t especially beautiful by 1920 standards, but that didn’t matter; she had a wicked arm.

Jane Tuttle: At a track meet in her senior year, she broke the American record for the shot put, and so she was invited in May to take part in the tryouts for the first international track meet for women that was going to Paris in August.

Kelly Jones: That track meet was a scheme designed by the French to establish women’s track and field as an official Olympic event. In the early ’20s, there were no standard Olympic sports for women. Some years, there would be golf or tennis, others there might be swimming or archery. There weren’t any track and field events.

Kelly Jones: At home, the American Physical Education Association, the APEA, discouraged women from track and field because they believe that lots of running and jumping could knock women’s reproductive systems out of whack, making them unable to fulfill their primary social role as mothers. Competitive sports were thought to be too intense for educated ladies.

Jane Tuttle: They thought emotionally, it was very tough on women to lose, and if you were in the elite of society who were actually going to college, track and field was not something that you needed to to get involved in.

Kelly Jones: But Dr. Harry Eaton Stewart, an American physiotherapist, didn’t buy those claims. He wanted to prove the APEA wrong. He asked for help from a group called the Amateur Athletic Union who governed sports outside of schools, but they refused him. So, he held his own tryouts and his athletes organized bake sales to fund the trip.

Kelly Jones: On August 1, 1922 Lucile Godbold and 14 other women set sail for Paris

Jane Tuttle: This is Lucile talking about the meet: “Just before it began, each team marched around the field with one member carrying her nation’s flag. I was chosen to carry old glory, and believe me, I was proud to lead that American team around the track.”

Kelly Jones: Five teams competed that day: Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and the American underdogs.

Kelly Jones: Though the other teams had all competed internationally before, the women on the US team had hardly any practice competing at home. In front of a crowd of 20,000 people, Lucile Godbold earned six medals in seven events, and set a new world record in shot put, unseating the French champion.

Jane Tuttle: She says, “The announcer took me around and introduced me to all those thousands of people in French. He might’ve been cussing me out for all I know, but as everybody clapped, I reckoned it was all okay. I can see those Americans yelling now. They open their mouths so wide, I was scared to death; I feared the sun would warp their ribs or blister their tonsils.”

Kelly Jones: The US team came in second overall, losing only to Great Britain. The team’s successes should have convinced the APEA that women could achieve more than society had planned for them, and that women handle competition.

Jane Tuttle: But actually, it went in the opposite direction.

Jane Tuttle: The fiscal education directors sort of dug in their heels even more. A lot of high schools and colleges suspended their track and field programs, and they sort of set out to put and end to track and field.

Kelly Jones: The team’s successes in Paris did prove their point to the AAU, the group that governed sports outside of schools, who began to fund women’s track and field teams the very next year. That paved the way for athletic superstars like Babe Didrikson and Stella Walsh in the ’30s and ’40s to rise to fame without the help of college programs.

Kelly Jones: And the French scheme eventually worked. Six years after the meet in Paris, five track and field events for women were included in the Olympics in Amsterdam.

Kelly Jones: But what should have been a no-brainer was a struggle. Instead of catapulting American women into the international sports arena, participating in the first international track meet for women was a small hop, step, and jump on the road to equal play.

Ed Ayers: That was former BackStory producer Kelly Jones. You also heard from Jane Tuttle, a librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina.