A Hop, Skip, and a Jump

BRIAN: In the early 1920s, American women were coming into their own. They won their long battle for the right to vote, and more women were going to college. A booming economy meant new employment opportunities.

Flappers were pushing the boundaries of female sexuality. American women were making great strides, but not in sports.

ED: In 1922, a small group of female track and field athletes set out to change that. Despite inadequate training and a lack of national support, a team of 15 women sailed to France to participate in the first international track meet for women. Former Backstory producer Kelly Jones has the story.

KELLY JONES: At 21, Lucille 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. Lucille Godbold wasn’t especially beautiful by 1920s 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 shotput. 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.

At home the American Physical Education Association, the APEA, discouraged women from track and field because they believed 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 felt 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 it was not something that you needed 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. On August 1, 1922, Lucille Godbold and 14 other women set sail for Paris.

JANE TUTTLE: This is Lucille 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. 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, Lucille Godbold earned six medals in seven events, and set a new world record in shotput, 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 reckon it was all OK. I can see those Americans yelling now. They open their mouths so wide I was scared to death for fear 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 could handle competition.

JANE TUTTLE: But actually, it went in the opposite direction. The physical education directors dug in their heels even more. A lot of high schools and colleges suspended their track and field programs. And they set out to put an end to track and field.

KELLY JONES: The team’s successes in Paris did prove their point to the AAU, the group that governs 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.

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.

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.

BRIAN: That’s former Backstory producer Kelly Jones. We also heard from Jane Tuttle, a librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina