🎾0️⃣0️⃣3️⃣ Helen Wills
Miss Helen Wills, 1924, CNews (Agence Rol. Agence photographique) Gallica
Meet Helen Wills, a groundbreaking tennis champion who famously “let my racquet do the talking” as she smashed records to become the first internationally-known American female sports celebrity in the 1920s.
Born in 1905, Wills first took up the racquet as a 14-year old teenager in Berkeley, California. Three years later, she won her first U.S. National Women’s Singles Championship, a feat she would repeat six more times during her career. Her accomplishments included five Wimbledon titles and four French championships (going 4-0), and gold medals in women’s singles and mixed doubles at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games.
The Context:
Women began to engage in select athletic activities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was an era in which Western societies adopted mandatory physical education in schools, programs that required girls to practice calisthenics and gymnastics as these disciplines built and maintained the era’s idealized feminine physical culture. Swimming and dancing were also viewed by (male) opinion makers and doctors as acceptable activities, but not the more rough-and-tumble team sports such as rugby, American football, or soccer. Bicycling was also contentious.
Tennis, on the other hand, was a sport that women played starting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, primarily by the upper and upper middle classes, and was viewed as culturally acceptable in many quarters.
The first women’s Olympic tennis events, the singles and mixed doubles tournaments, were included in the 1900 Paris Games, and as Dr Jean Williams argues, were important (alongside other international competitions) in driving more women to take up the game.[1] Thus it’s no surprise that some of the first international female sports stars of the twentieth century were tennis players.
Wills wasn’t the first tennis star, and one of her rivals, France’s Suzanne Lenglen, trail blazed a path across championship courts as early as 1919. But it was the two ace’s burgeoning rivalry that is often credited with driving public interest in women’s tennis as well as shaping fashions and culture. Author Larry Engelmann credits the two champions’ abilities to establish their voices and forge careers independent from male-dominated institutions of the era as paving the way for today’s athletes.[2]
The Sports Diplomacy Connection
The two stars symbolized the images and ideals associated with their respective countries; Lenglen the glamorous, worldly culture France while Wills was the young, vivacious American who introduced California’s sports culture to the wider masses. And, while they may have thought differently, Wills and Lenglen served as informal ambassadors who enabled publics on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to learn a bit more about each other as their tennis tales moved from the sports pages to the front page.
Despite being billed as rivals, Wills and Lenglen only competed against each other once, in a 1926 Cannes encounter dubbed “The Match of the Century.” Held at the Carlton Club, the event generated much fanfare as reporters jostled with royalty to watch the young 20-year old American take on her elder rival while the California public and press prepared to follow live coverage via radio. Lenglen won, 6-3, 8-6.
Mapping the Connections
From Berkeley, California to Cannes, France
Further Reading:
[E] “Helen Wills Moody Roark,” International Tennis Hall of Fame
[E] Jean Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport, Part One: Sporting Women, 1850-1960, (Routledge, 2014).
[E] Larry Engelmann, The Goddess and the American Girl, (Oxford University Press, 1988).
[1] Jean Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport, Part One: Sporting Women, 1850-1960, (Routledge, 2014), p147.
[2] Larry Engelmann, The Goddess and the American Girl, (Oxford University Press, 1988), p.16.