 Women in Sports: Suzanne Lenglen and Others
 Women in sport in the interwar period, the sport of lawn tennis proved to be a platform for female achievement. Between 1923 and 1938 Helen Wills dominated women’s sports, winning eight Wimbledon singles titles, seven U.S. singles championships, and four French open singles crowns, not to mention scores of doubles matches and lesser tournaments and gold medals in the women’s singles and doubles competition at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games.
She was born in California in 1905, and although she did not take up tennis until she was thirteen, her natural talent along with a careful training regimen provided by her coach, William “Pop” Fuller, and her father, Dr. C. A. Wills, at the Berkely Tennis Club, brought her to national prominence before she reached the age of eighteen.
Wills’ tennis game, which included powerful ground strokes and superb baseline play, was most noted for the intense on-court concentration and imperturbability that she was able to maintain while playing. While this concentration led to the nickname “Little Miss Poker Face,” her off-court manner was altogether different.
Suzanne Lenglen dominated the game from 1919 to 1926, and redefined what could be achieved by women. One historian said of her: "Her gifts were supreme. Her biting accuracy, coupled with divine balletic grace, dominated the game for so long without real challenge, that her immortality is unquestioned."
Lenglen was unbeaten in seven years of tournament play: she won six Wimbledon Championships, six French Championships and two Olympic gold medals at Antwerp in 1920. The combination of her tennis-playing abiIity and radically different clothing on court attracted considerable comment.
In her last Wimbledon triumph Lenglen won the 1925 Championships, losing only five games in the process. A year later she withdrew from Wimbledon after a disagreement over playing schedules and turned professional, for a reported sum of $100,000. In February 1926, Wills met Suzanne Lenglen, the French champion who was then the reigning queen of women’s international tennis, in the finals of a tournament on the Riviera. The match became a media event of incredible proportions, due in part to the marvelous contrast between the flashy, mercurial Lenglen and the calm, innocent Wills. Lenglen won narrowly, but when she turned professional later that year and Wills won her first Wimbledon title the following year, the young American was acknowledged to be the best amateur woman tennis player in the world and had become a popular heroine as well.
In the 1920s American players were preeminent in men's tennis. "Big Bill" Tilden treated the game as a science, and developed theories of stroke-play, the power-game, tactics, and the crowd-puller. The enormous public appeal of Lenglen and Tilden helped tennis to develop a mass following.
Tennis was becoming a more active game for women, if only in a form that implicitly accepted that women were physically weaker and therefore played a "ladylike" version of the men's game, though to same extent players like Lenglen threatened such assumptions.
In most sports women continued to suffer opposition and discrimination. Women' s athletics was one of the last sports to be organized, and throughout the 1920s antagonists of women's sports viewed athletics as indecent, unsuited to women's physiques and in danger of producing "an unnatural race of Amazons".
The struggle over the inclusion of women' s athletics in the Olympic Games came to a head when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) refused to include them in the Games of 1920 and 1924. In defiance of IOC policy Alice Milliat organized the first Women's Olympics in 1922, which were also held in 1926, 1930 and 1934 under the new title of the Women's World Games. These events were unexpectedly successful, attracting large numbers of competitors and spectators from western Europe, the British Empire and North America, and athletics became a growth sport for women.
 More Content
|
1914 - 1929
Periods
