The girl and the game

With Dr M. Ann Hall about the history and the future of women's sports in Canada

When I was in Edmonton last month, I got to meet one of the very few scholars of female sports in Canada and a veritable pioneer of the discipline, M. Ann Hall, a retired U of Alberta professor and researcher. I wanted to talk to her about her book The Girl and the Game: A History of Women’s Sports in Canada, which is a concise encyclopaedia of Canadian women’s sports. I also wanted to ask her about some of the more current issues in female sports here and around the world. Ann invited me to her home in Strathcona (“Since you’ve come all this way, why not come for lunch?”) so after we finished our meandering interview we sat down for an even more informal chinwag and had boscht that Hall’s partner Jane Haslett had prepared. Afterwards Jane led me through the ravines around the frozen North Saskatchewan river to the bridge that crosses straight into the back yard of my hotel. It was a cozy and pleasant day, even though the air temp outside kept at -20C.

LP: There aren’t a lot of people in your field of research, I don’t think? The history of women’s sports in Canada?

AH: I would be the leading person, yes, though keep in mind I’m not a historian by training. I taught at a university for 30 years and I retired in 1997 – I was 50 I think. Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, was called then, now Faculty of Kinesiology and Sport Recreation. I took that book into retirement. I had a huge grant and was able to hire grad students etc. If I hadn’t retired I don’t think The Girl and the Game would have been done.

This early sentence struck me: “The history of women in sport is a history of cultural resistance.” And in some periods it was the working class women who advocated for and developed women’s sports, and in others it was women in universities, the wealthy women.

That’s right. And sometimes they were in conflict!

Would this be accurate: till the beginning of First World War it was mostly upper class women, and during the Great War and after, it was women who had to work who pushed for more sports?

That would be pretty accurate, yes. A lot of this was down east, so much of it was happening in Toronto. Many of the athletes who belonged to the athletic clubs in Toronto did come from working class backgrounds because the kind of sports that they were involved with -- mostly track and field, little bit of basketball, certainly not tennis and golf – were perceived as not high class. We are talking 20s and 30s. I think that the war, from the perspective of white women anyway, was a time when many were released from the confines and structures that limited them. And they saw sport as an opportunity for freedom, as the ability to do things that they haven’t done before.

Was snow shoeing acceptable for ladies, or was that too rough and working class?

In Quebec the long tramps were mostly male, women were not allowed. The women were there as part of the social club. But of course Native women did it much earlier but not for sports or fun, but because they had to.  

Can you tell me more about the craze for watching women race on penny farthings in late 1800s? How did that happen?

Did you get a chance to see my book Muscle on Wheels? I’ll bring you a copy. [goes to another room, returns] Louise Armaindo was among Canada’s first women professional athletes. I’ve been concerned that we were not really paying much attention to working class sport and women who actually earned their living as professional athletes.

Did they really wear those mini skirts?

Yes, she made those herself. 

And Victorians weren’t shocked?

No, and probably because these are working class women and they were earning their living doing this. So this would all be happening indoors, sometimes on the racetracks.

I call this a high wheel, in Britain they call it penny farthing. There was a period when both bikes were available, the current model of the bike that we ride and the high wheel. The high wheel usually has no brake and back wheel is for stability only, and as you move the pedals the wheel went around. I first find her around 1880-84-5. Women are starting to race the safety bicycles in 1890s, and by that time many more women are able to buy these bicycles and ride them recreationally.

Men were racing high wheels before women, early 1880s. Armaindo had to race men initially. Much of this comes from what is called pedestrianism: fast walking. Louise herself had been a pedestrienne. This sport begins for many women around 1870s. They had these tracks set up in artillery halls or rec halls, and the object was for you to make so many circuits in a specific period of time. There wasn’t a lot of cheap entertainment then. Some of these races were going for 12 hours, or 24 hours, there was betting going on… it was public entertainment.

The actual track races really don’t start until you get the Olympics starting in 1896, after which there is no reason for these kinds of races.

Louise was an unbelievable athlete. The way I wrote this book was to trace her through local newspapers. In the US they have done a much better job of digitizing newspapers. I could plunk that name in a database and a lot would come up. I could track her every year. She was a celebrity. What was interesting was there were no sexist comments in the reporting; reporters treated them as professional athletes.

And meanwhile you have upper class women playing tennis in these long skirts, all buttoned up. And I saw those early images in your book of women playing hockey – long dresses again.

That’s why I did this. When I do lectures on this, I say to the students, think about women’s sport before First World War. Then I drop some images and say This is probably what you’re thinking about, and I’m going to tell you something completely different.

Women’s hockey started somewhere around 1900?

I think before that. Because we in Canada haven’t done as much digitization of local papers, it’s hard to find these things. People contact me – at least once a week about something. It’s usually someone who’s decided they want to research something more carefully, or locally. Soccer is a good example. There’s far more examples of women playing soccer much earlier than I’ve written about here, but we can’t find about it unless someone goes to a local newspaper archive.

Another thing I didn’t know about is, all those large companies that employed huge numbers of young women -- they created sports leagues for them.

Yes. The Hudson’s Bay Company for ex had them all over the country. It was important to make your workers happy. The magazine called The Beaver, the official magazine of the HBC, was an amazing source. They had basketball leagues, hockey leagues, and they would send reporters to write about them.  

You also show that a recurring issue around women in sports was whether the strenuous activity would affect their ability to procreate.

Oh yeah. There were some crazy theories. People besides me have done much better work on that whole era looking at medical professionals… the views were very archaic and completely wrong. I think its safe to say that really today none of that exists. What does exist still is the fact that the high level women athletes who wish to have children are still discriminated against because of pregnancy – pregnancy is treated as a medical condition in carding.

Another thing that comes and goes – and I think this is still happening today – is that women who play sports are seen as super masculine.

I think that has changed. It certainly changed from my days. I watch the two grand children who live just around the corner, one is a really good soccer player; I don’t think they have to deal with that kind of stuff now. It’s such a normal thing. Maybe I’m being too optimistic. I see hockey teams and soccer teams and they all got long hair, and present themselves as attractive young girls. Your style can go either way today.

You write about the period in which the “graceful, feminine” sports like synchronized swimming and figure skating were celebrated as the right place for women’s sporting excellence.

To this day I remember figure skater Barbara Ann Scott who was the epitome of female athleticism in Canada immediately after Second World War. She won the gold medal at the 1948 Olympics, and came back to great fanfares. I’m six years old in ‘48, we’re in Ottawa, and my mother takes me down to watch her come back. She’s in an open car. I remember everything.  

Wow. And I keep Katarina Witt in a similar memory vault. She was stunning.

[laughs] Yes well that was some time later. I too watched Witt, she was an amazing athlete.

II.

Are female sports forever gonna have less money? Well except maybe tennis.

Yes tennis, and golf I think are pretty much equal. Well. It’s a lot better now than it was. There is an issue with women’s professional hockey in North America, for example. We have no professional league. My view is that of course there should be women’s professional hockey. And they themselves have to figure this out. It will never be at the level that is the NHS level, and the question is whether they should try to convince some of the NHL teams to sponsor a women’s team. They are all kinds of possibilities.

I used to play street hockey with the boys. I had no opportunities to play hockey. When I was an undergrad at Queen’s in ‘60-64, a fellow student who is now a lawyer said we gotta start women’s hockey at university. And I said ok, let’s try and do that. None of us had proper skates, we used figure skates etc. But that’s the 60s, and you look at where hockey has come since then. Abby Hoffman is a friend; in order for her to play hockey when she was 8 or 9 she had to disguise herself as a boy. And so you have that whole era of girls wishing to play hockey and there were no teams. So they needed to play with boys. But look where we are now.

I was going to ask you about this! In your book you write about Justine Blainey, the girl who filed a human rights complaint against Ontario Hockey Association in order to question sex segregation in amateur hockey. So this was happening because girls had absolutely nowhere else to play?

There was nowhere else to play. Exactly. Justine Blainey was a famous case. I remember all the arguments pro and con. But look where we are now. So it’s a progression, it’s moving in the right direction. Women’s soccer in North America, for example -- the opportunity for women to play professional soccer is absolutely amazing.

You have to take a long view. I’m always optimistic. There are issues and things that need corrections; and the SafeSport is one. The pandemic I must admit has set women’s sport back. Questions are being raised now will girls go back to sport if they have paused for two years… but overall I think I’m really optimistic.

Where do you stand on transwomen in female sports? Swimmer Lia Thomas for ex who is leaving closest competitors 38 seconds behind.

Those are still exceptional cases. Let me put it this way. Sport and certainly at a high level is built on the fact that there are only two genders. There are not. There is a continuum.

Wellllll… There’s a small percentage of people with DSD genetic disorders, but…

It’s actually 1-2 percent of people.

It’s even less than that. But do finish please.

We’re dealing with a small proportion. You’ve read this, someone like Alexandrine Gibb was speaking out about masculine women athletes certainly in track & field long before anyone understood the issue. And we have to differentiate intersex and trans.

Agreed!

Most of the issues were intersex.

Yes absolutely, until recently. It was interesting to read about ‘gender verification’ procedures in your book for women over the many decades.

Yeah, women’s sport organizations fought against that for years. What has happened to some women who have come from some African countries is absolutely deplorable, what happened to Semenya… and that’s what I mean, that sport can’t accept anything other than a complete division between males and females.

That’s fine, but now you have middle aged men who decide they are transwomen… like Laurel Hubbard, a weight lifter in their 40s, who qualified for the 2020 Olympics.

She is the first and to my knowledge only male to female to make it that far in the Olympics. I guess I look at it from two points of view. First, the cases are really small.

But what if we open the door?

We have. The door is open. Certainly at the level of adolescence or young girls, with girls who are non-binary.

That’s all fine. What I mean is – males playing in women’s sports.

You have to look at it I guess from the human rights perspective. I think what’s happening at the moment in the US I think is horrible in terms of the numbers of states which are actually making laws against this… our society has to accept that there are some people who wish to change their biological sex or their gender, so we have to create the possibility for them to live lives free of discrimination.

While also not destroying women’s sports in the process?

I looked at these arguments. I was reading a book that somebody lent me, there is somebody in Edmonton who is absolutely against this and presents a case in this book. I’ve read the book; what I find so difficult with this is this lack of compassion. In many ways it’s a human rights issue as far as I’m willing to look at it. I mean, one day I was out watching a woman’s full tackle football team and there was a trans person there and I could pretty well identify who that person was. I understand all this. But are we going to do what they’re doing in the US, even at a very young level, create laws for anyone who identifies as trans? And nobody cares at all if a female-to-male trans person wants to participate in sports.

Of course! We’re not a danger to men’s sports. We will not break their records. No, I think it’s gotten little weird lately. Essentially all you have to do is lower your testosterone for a period of time, and hop, come compete as a woman. I agree with you about some of this Red State legislation in the US. Some of those bills are crazy. And of course we should be against discrimination in housing and employment and any other kind. But perhaps we need a couple of exceptions for keeping some things single sex? Keep sports and prisons single sex?

Yeah, I appreciate those arguments. From the perspective of sports, it’s still being worked out.

Can we create a category that’s called OPEN, that would be open to anybody no matter their identification? OR make the male one open?

As far as I can see, the Olympics would never do that. What I also find interesting is that it becomes an issue when you can see the body. I didn’t hear one case, we have no idea in the Winter Olympics if there were trans women in women’s teams. Do we know if anybody was? You can’t see the bodies.

I suspect it would have made the news? Or we’d see a discrepancy in results?

We don’t really know anything about the Winter Olympics in that regard.

Knowing how difficult it was to build female sports from zero, I worry that this will kinda screw them up? But maybe your optimism is more warranted?

[laughs] I think there are still very few cases where there’s an extreme difference in results that a transwoman athlete brings. If they multiply, that’s when I’d look into it. For now, they’re very rare and will probably remain that. 

Edmonton, February 2022