The Peerless Four

by Victoria Patterson

  1875—English teenager Agnes Beckwith swims a long-distance six miles in the Thames River.

  1876—Mary Marshal, twenty-six, shocks spectators by beating Peter Van Ness in the best-of-three walking matches (called Pedestrians) in New York City.

  1876—Maria Speltarini crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope, wearing thirty-eight-pound weights on each ankle.

  1876—Nell Saunders defeats Rose Harland in the first U.S. women’s boxing match, winning a silver butter dish.

  1878—Woman pedestrian Ada Anderson walks around the inside of New York’s Mozart Hall three thousand times in one month, accruing 750 miles total during this time and inspiring a series of “lady walker” matches.

  1880—Distance swimmer Agnes Beckwith treads water for thirty hours in the whale tank of the Royal Aquarium of Westminster to equal a previous mark set by Mathew Webb.

  1881—Edith Johnson of England sets the world’s endurance indoor swimming record at thirty-one hours. The record holds until 1928.

  1884—Women’s singles tennis competition is added to Wimbledon. Maud Watson wins.

  1885—The Association of Collegiate Alumnae publishes a study concluding that “it is sufficient to say that female graduates . . . do not seem to show . . . any marked difference in general health for the average health . . . of women engaged in other kinds of work, or in fact, of women generally,” refuting the widely held belief that college study impairs a woman’s physical health and ability to bear children.

  1885—Annie Oakley is the sharpshooting star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. She can hit a moving target while riding a galloping horse, hit a dime in midair, and regularly shoots a cigarette from her husband’s lips.

  1886—Mary Hawley Myers sets a world altitude record in a hot-air balloon, soaring four miles above Franklin, Pennsylvania, without benefit of oxygen equipment. Between 1800 and 1890, she completes more balloon ascents than any other living person.

  1887—Rose Coghlin competes in a mixed trapshooting match held at Philadelphia Gun Club. She and two men tie, each scoring seven.

  1888—Berta Benz becomes the first woman to drive on a sixty-mile cross-country trip in Germany in a “motor-wagon” (a three-horsepower car with solid rubber tires). Only her teenage sons accompany her.

  1889—Isobel Stanley is one of the first hockey players in Canada. Her Government House team plays the Rideau Ladies in what may be the first women’s hockey game in Ottawa.

  1890s—More than a million American women own and ride bicycles during this decade. For the first time in American history, an athletic activity for women becomes widely popular, with the development of the modern-style “safety bicycle.” The bike has two equal-sized wheels, coaster brakes, and pneumatic tires creating a comfortable, faster, and safer ride. A side effect is more commonsense dressing for women. Susan B. Anthony says, “The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world.”

  1890s—The Bloomer Girls baseball era lasts from the 1890s until 1934. Hundreds of teams—All Star Ranger Girls, Philadelphia Bobbies, New York Bloomer Girls, Baltimore Black Socks Colored Girls—offer employment, travel, and adventure for young women who can hit, field, slide, or catch.

  1890—As a reporter for the New York World, Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochran Seaman) becomes the first woman to travel around the world alone in 72 days, completing the fastest circumnavigation of the globe at that time, for anyone, male or female.

  1890—Fay Fuller climbs 14,410-foot Mount Rainier in Washington.

  1891—Zoe Gayton arrives in Castleton, New York, after walking cross-country in 213 days, averaging eighteen miles per day and winning a two-thousand-dollar wager.

  1891—Mary French Sheldon mounts her first expedition to East Africa. Her travel accounts break scientific and anthropological territory by focusing on women and children. She is one of only twenty-two women invited to join the Royal Geographic Society in 1892. The invitation is withdrawn after contentious debate about women’s presence within the society. She eventually makes four trips around the world.

  1892—The journal Physical Education (published by the YMCA) devotes an issue to women, claiming that women need physical strength and endurance and dismissing the popular idea that women are too weak to exercise.

  1892—While at the University of Nebraska, Louise Pound helps organize a girls’ military company and she sets a record at rifle practice. She is the first woman named to the Lincoln Journal Sports Hall of Fame. She participates in tennis, golf, cycling, and ice skating, and coaches girls’ basketball. She makes pioneering contributions to American philology and folklore.

  1892—Hessie Donahue dons a loose blouse, bloomers, and boxing gloves to spar a few rounds as part of a vaudeville act and knocks out legendary heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan for over a minute after he accidentally lands a real blow on her.

  1893—Sixteen-year-old Tessie Reynolds of Brighton rides her bicycle to London and back, a distance of 120 miles, in 8½ hours. She wears the shocking “rationale” dress—a long jacket over knickers, which outrages some observers as much as her feat does.

  1893—Inspired after climbing to the top of Pikes Peak, Katherine Lee Bates composes “America, the Beautiful.”

  1894—College girls at McGill University in Montreal begin weekly ice hockey games at an indoor rink with three male “guards” at the door.

  1894—Annie “Londonderry” Kopchovsky sets out to become the first woman to bicycle around the world, a journey that lasts fifteen months and earns her five thousand dollars.

  1895—Annie Smith Peck is the first woman to reach the peak of the Matterhorn. She climbs in a pair of knickerbockers, causing a sensation with the press.

  1895—The first organized athletics meeting is generally recognized as the “Field Day” at Vassar College. A group of “nimble, supple, and vivacious girls” engages in running and jumping despite bad weather.

  1896—The first women’s intercollegiate basketball championship is played between Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. Stanford wins, 2 to 1, on April 4 before a crowd of seven hundred women.

  1896—At the first modern Olympics in Athens, a woman, Melpomene, barred from the official race, runs the same course as the men’s, finishing in four hours, thirty minutes. Baron Pierre de Coubertin says, “It is indecent that the spectators should be exposed to the risk of seeing the body of a woman being smashed before their eyes. Besides, no matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks.”

  1897—Lena Jordan becomes the first person to successfully execute the triple somersault on the flying trapeze. The first man doesn’t do so until 1909.

  1898—Lizzie Arlington becomes the first woman to sign a professional baseball contract, appearing in her first professional game pitching for the Philadelphia Reserves.

  1900–1920—Physical education instructors strongly oppose competition among women, fearing it will make them less feminine.

  1900—The first nineteen women to compete in the modern Olympic Games in Paris play in three sports: tennis, golf, and croquet.

  1901—Annie Taylor, forty-three, becomes the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a custom-built barrel and lives, even though she can’t swim. On being retrieved, she says, “Nobody ever ought to do that again.”

  1901—Ambidextrous Mary Karlus, sixteen, performs a series of amazing billiard shots in New York City. Male experts try and fail to duplicate.

  1903—Eleanor Roosevelt enrolls in the Junior League of New York, where she teaches calisthenics and dancing to immigrants.

  1903—A women’s curling team from Quebec City defeats a men’s curling team from the Royal Caledonia in Scotland.

  1903—Cuban-born Aida de Acosta pilots a dirigible over Paris, just months before the Wright brothers fly at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

  1904—Amanda Clement, sixteen, becomes the first female umpire to officiate a men’s baseball game in Iowa
for pay.

  1904—Bertha Kapernick is the first woman to give bronco riding exhibitions at the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo.

  1906—Lula Olive Gill is the first woman jockey to win a horse race in California.

  1906—Ada Evans Dean rides her horse to victory twice in Liberty, New York, after learning that her jockey is ill. She has never ridden in a horse race before.

  1907—Annette Kellerman is the first underwater ballerina at the New York Hippodrome. The Australian native attracts attention when she appears at Boston’s Revere beach in a one-piece bathing suit.

  1908—In England, Muriel Matters, a suffragist and balloonist, flies over the British House of Parliament, dropping hundreds of flyers urging “votes for women.”

  1909—Annie Smith Peck, fifty-seven, becomes the first person to climb 21,000-foot Mount Huascaran, the highest peak in Peru. Her last climb is Mount Madison, New Hampshire, at age eighty-two.

  1910—Clelia Duel Mosher, a physician, debunks several popular myths of female health, including one claiming that women breathe differently than men and are thus unfit for strenuous exercise.

  1910—Baroness Raymonde de Laroche passes her qualifying tests to become the first woman in the world to be issued a pilot’s license.

  1910—Australia’s Annette Kellerman is arrested for swimming in Boston Harbor in an “indecent” one-piece swimsuit, exposing her legs.

  1911—Harriet Quimby makes her professional aviator debut with a moonlit flight over Staten Island before a crowd of twenty thousand spectators to become the first woman to make a night flight.

  1911—At sixty-one, Annie Smith Peck plants a “Votes for Women” banner on top of Mount Coropuna in Peru when she becomes the first woman to climb it.

  1911—Helene Britton becomes the first woman owner of a major league team, the St. Louis Cardinals, from 1911 to 1917.

  1912—Harriet Quimby is the first woman to pilot an airplane across the English Channel. For most of the flight, she flies through fog and depends on her compass.

  1912—Swimming and diving debut at the Stockholm Olympic Games, with fifty-seven women from eleven nations competing.

  1913—American Alys McKey Bryant becomes the first woman to fly a plane in Canada. She performs an exhibition flight for Prince Albert, Duke of York. She learns to fly after winning a job to perform in flight demonstrations. She marries John Bryant, one of the pilots who hires her, and ends her flying career after his death.

  1914—Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick, demonstrating air-jumping techniques to the U.S. Army in San Diego, pulls her release manually, becoming the first person to make an intentional free-fall parachute jump from an airplane.

  1914—The American Olympic Committee formally opposes women’s athletic competition in the Olympics. The only exception is floor exercises, where women are required to wear long skirts.

  1915—The British government appoints Gertrude Bell as diplomat in Baghdad because of her knowledge of the territory. She is the first European woman to travel in remote parts of the Middle East. She travels, often alone, and writes about her journeys.

  1916—Sisters Adeline and Augusta Van Buren become the first women to ride motorcycles across the country. They also are the first women to conquer the 14,100-foot summit of Pikes Peak on motorcycles.

  1916—Ruth Law flies nonstop from Chicago to Hornell, New York, setting the American nonstop cross-country record for both men and women. She has installed auxiliary gas tanks, upping her fuel capacity from eight to fifty-three gallons, and adds a rubber gas line to her open “pusher” type Curtiss plane.

  1917—Charlotte “Eppie” Epstein, a court reporter, rents one of New York City’s only chlorinated pools (in the basement of Brooklyn’s Hotel Terrain) and founds the Women’s Swimming Association of New York, dedicated to competitive training for women.

  1917—Lucy Diggs Slowe wins the singles title at the first American Tennis Association national tournament, becoming the first female African American national champion in any sport.

  1918—Eleonora Sears (a great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson) takes up squash, after excelling at polo (she rides astride on the horse, shocking conventions of the day), baseball, golf, field, hockey, auto racing, swimming, tennis, yachting, and speedboat racing. She accumulates 240 trophies during her athletic career. Demonstrating that women can play men’s games, she is a prime role model for women in sports.

  1918—Lillian Leitzel, thirty-six, a ninety-pound acrobat and aerialist with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, beats the 1878 world’s record of twelve one-armed chin-ups. She performs twenty-seven such chin-ups with her right arm; switching to her left, she did nineteen more.

  1920s—The fashions of the time put a new emphasis on athletic bodies and narrow the gap between health and glamour. Advertisers like Grape Nuts say, “Grandmothers went bathing—girls like Molly go in to swim.”

  1920—Theresa Weld Blanchard wins the first U.S. medal in the Winter Olympics, a bronze for figure skating. She is scolded for putting a jump into her program.

  1920—The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies professional soccer team tours the United States, outscoring their male opponents.

  1920—At the Summer Olympics, France’s Suzanne Lenglen abandons the customary tennis garb for a short, pleated skirt, sleeveless silk blouse, and matching sweater. She wins two golds and a bronze, becoming the first female celebrity athlete.

  1921—Bessie Coleman becomes the first black licensed pilot in the world.

  1921—Adrienne Bolland becomes the first woman to fly over the Andes, taking off from Mendoza, Argentina, and landing ten hours later in Santiago de Chile. She flies at an altitude of 14,750 feet in bitter cold, avoiding mountain peaks that are higher than the altitude her plane can fly.

  1921—Phoebe Fairgrave becomes the first woman to do a double parachute jump, cutting away her first parachute and opening a second. In the 1930s, she organizes a group of women fliers to barnstorm the country urging communities to paint the name of their town or city in large white letters on rooftops to aid pilots in navigation. She is the first woman to hold a government aviation post, serving as technical advisor to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  1921—Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle, fourteen, wins an international three-mile swim in New York Bay against fifty of the best swimmers of England and the United States.

  1923—Of all U.S. colleges, 22 percent have varsity sports for women.

  1924—Alexandra David-Neel of England is the first European woman to travel to Lhasa, the forbidden city in Tibet.

  1924—Sybil Bauer becomes the first women to break an existing men’s world swimming record when she wins the 100-metre back-stroke at the Olympic Games.

  1926—Kinue Hitomi, Japan’s foremost woman athlete, wins two gold medals at the second World Women’s Games.

  1927—American Helen Wills wins her first of eight singles tennis titles at the All-England Club. She holds the number one world ranking for eight years. In her career, she captures a total of thirty-one career Grand Slam titles, including nineteen in singles.

  1928—Nellie Zabel Whillhite solos, becoming South Dakota’s first licensed woman pilot. She is probably the first pilot to be almost completely deaf. An outstanding air show performer, she excels at the tight, fast maneuvering necessary for balloon target racing, where pilots fly into balloons to burst them.

  * This is just a small sampling.