Long gone are the days when hockey pucks get lost under players’ skirts and a basketball court boasts a six-foot high ceiling. Unimaginable to us now, there once was a time when these were the lived realities of female athletes at U of T.
“We have to struggle at everything,” said sport historian Helen Gurney, “it’s true at every campus, including this one.” Last week, as the university celebrated 120 years of Great Women on campus, the Faculty of Physical Education and Health (FPEH) bestowed its own accolades on the sporty female in a series of lectures and activities entitled “Active Women’s Week.”
Gurney, described as a “pioneering expert on women in sport on campus,” and a “quiet giant of activism and leadership,” wrapped the celebratory week up with her talk on the evolution of women’s athletics right here at U of T.
Beginning in 1883, Gurney sketched a slap dash history of U of T women in sport, dipping into the post-war periods and winding up in 1959-the year that a separate facility for female athletics on campus was first commissioned. The Clara Benson building, now a wing of the larger Athletic Centre in the heart of U of T’s St. George campus, was the first building constructed for the sole purpose of accommodating the growing number of university women’s leagues and intercollegiate sports teams.
Demand for the women’s building snowballed over what Gurney calls a “40 year struggle.” During this time, women’s athletics evolved at U of T from the occasional tennis and skating club into a full-fledged intercollegiate program. As early as the 1890’s, back when St. Hilda’s College [the women’s branch of Trinity college] was located on Queen Street West, a women’s basketball league had begun to flourish at U of T. And much to the University College team’s chagrin, St. Hilda’s wanted to get in on the action. “Imagine going to Queen St. W. in a horse and buggy,” chuckled Gurney. “That was like going out of town. So, they went out of town to play.”
The lack of proper facility space, however, cramped female athletic development at the university for a long while. With no building to call their own, and entry to Hart House denied to women until 1972, female campus leaders were forced to put up a fight. “We didn’t want to take away from something the men had,” said Gurney, “we just wanted to be up to where they were.” As a result, female athletes bounced around campus using whatever gymnasium, pool, and field space they could get their hands on until the Benson building came along.
Borrowing heavily from her own experiences as an athlete at U of T in the 1930’s, Gurney delighted her audience with anecdotes of a bygone era. For certain championship matches, such as basketball or swimming, Gurney recalls that Hart House would make an exception to the gender rule and play host to women’s teams from across the country.
“It was rather an insult to U of T that other campuses came here and were subjected to this kind of treatment,” said Gurney of the inadequate spaces available to female athletes pre-1959. “It was only after I left university that I realized what a rotten deal we had in those days. There were ups and downs, but once we got a building, things just kept sailing from there.”
This is the reason that the university and the FPEH decided to take a week for a special celebration of women in sports. The struggle for equity in athletics, between all men and all women, has been a long one-and one that is far from over. As Margaret MacNeill, director for the Centre for Girls’ and Women’s Health and Physical Activity, points out, there continue to be a variety of barriers to equity in athletics. Generational and cultural barriers are two of the most common. “Barriers for all the diverse groups are quite different,” says MacNeill. “We need to make sure that women come in here [the AC] and think ‘this is a place where I want to belong and can belong.'”
To the current and future generations of equity-rights activists who continue the struggle for athletic diversification, Gurney has only this advice: “When you run into a brick wall, don’t try to bash through it. Just try to find another way around it. That way you’ll get there faster and you won’t kill yourself.”
