Almost every fan of football history knows the game transitioned from rugby while being played by men at elite Eastern colleges. Less well-known was women playing the gridiron game in similar institutions before the century turned, particularly at Wellesley College. Wellesley has been a premier institution for women since its founding. It was second only to MIT introducing laboratory science courses into the undergraduate curriculum and was a pioneer in promoting women's athletics.
As football became a distinct sport in the late 1800s, society was increasingly concerned with the lack of exercise among the emerging managerial and office worker classes. While that focus largely fell on men, similar concerns about women and their need for physical pursuits were raised.
A small group of physical instructors helped push those ideas along, including Lucile Eaton Hill, the European-trained head of Wellesley's physical education. As Hill wrote in 1892:
Students and brain-workers generally, from the conditions of their lives, present a more or less passing congestion, or tendency to such congestion, or the brain and abdominal organs, decreased respiration, and the mind tired from prolonged concentration. The first object of the gymnastic drill must be to counteract these evils, to relieve the brain and oppressed organs, to reinstate a healthy respiration and circulation, to tone up the body generally.
'Physical Training,' The Wellesley Prelude, January 23., 1892.
Hill promoted women participating in bicycling, crew, basketball, tennis, and golf and got the school to require each student to participate in a sport for the entire season. Their games or matches typically involved competitions between the school's classes. Even during strenuous sports, their attire did not promote free body movements.
Hill also had the then-novel idea of Wellesley students playing football or, at least, a modified game version. The fall semester in 1893 saw students playing a version of gridiron football that used a round ball and did not allow tackling. How anyone stopped runners from scoring touchdowns on every carry is unknown. but they must have realized their error because they were playing tackle football by 1895.
The period accounts do not detail the events of the games. However, the rules they played by mirrored those of the men's game, and while game action photographs have not been found, an illustration or two is available. Like those participating in other sports, the women playing football wore jackets and skirts, with each team wearing distinct colors. One article noted that one team wore cherry red waistcoats and sky-blue skirts while the other wore Nile green skirts and crushed strawberry waistcoats.
However, once the game started, they got down to business, playing with the gusto one expects on the gridiron.
Despite being a pioneer in women's fitness, Hill became an opponent of the early 1900s trend of women's interscholastic and intercollegiate competition. In the case of basketball, he argued that women's basketball games will generally have poor coaches and tend toward the abuses that mar men's athletics.
The 1895 season appears to have been the last season of organized football for women at Wellesley. Women's football has yet to pick up steam, though flag football may lead to changes there. Basketball and other sports have grown to the point that over 3.2 million girls now participate in high school sports compared to 4.4 million for boys. One must wonder what Lucile Eaton Hill might think of today's sporting world.
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Tim,
Loved this one! My sister, Claire, was Wellesley Class of 1979. More interested in Art History than football, but a terrific sibling nevertheless.