Basketball history book on target Evolution of women’s game documented

“Unless a game as exciting as basketball is carefully guided by such rules as will eliminate roughness, the great desire to win and the excitement of the game will make our women do sad, unwomanly things. A certain amount of roughness is deemed necessary to bring out manliness in our young men. Surely, rough play can have no possible excuse in our young women.”

When Senda Berenson penned these words in 1901, they echoed conventional wisdom. Today, crowds pack gymnasiums to watch women play basketball as skillfully and assertively as their male counterparts. What a difference a century makes! The evolution of the sport from a genteel adaptation of a male’s game with distinctively different rules to today’s Olympic-level competition has been beautifully documented in Joanne Lannin’s “A History of Basketball for Girls and Women: From Bloomers to Big Leagues.”

Believing that women couldn’t handle the rough nature of men’s basketball, Berenson, a physical education instructor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., added many restrictions as she adapted the game for her physical education classes. Women were not allowed to leave their own sections of the court or to snatch or bat the ball away from opponents. And they were not allowed to form permanent teams or play against other schools because that was believed to make the game too competitive.

In a phone interview, Lannin, a feature writer for the Portland Press Herald, said that she was really surprised at the way their mentors kept female students down. “Girls want to compete, to see how good they are, to go against the best. The physical education teachers squelched their competitive side, providing a social activity rather than a genuine sport.”

Not all teachers and coaches followed the restrictive rules. Battle lines were drawn between those who championed women’s rights to engage in wholesome athletic competition and those who feared that the experience would create an “evil influence upon the emotional and nervous female nature.” As the popularity of women’s basketball soared, its critics became more outspoken.

Lannin really enjoyed interviewing women who had played basketball in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. She felt a genuine connection to those women who loved the sport in those years before the women’s movement. She was particularly inspired by Stella Waterman, who led her New Gloucester, Maine, high school to victory in the 1940s. “I really felt like I was in the presence of greatness. She was so humble and yet so self-assured.”

Even recently, women’s basketball hasn’t been all smooth sailing. In 1978, the Women’s Professional Basketball League was created. Although some franchises were well run, expansion strained the finances of the league. And some teams were badly mismanaged. Paychecks of the New England Gulls bounced. Eventually they had to disband. Gulls captain Chris Critelli said, “The reason we are quitting is because we can’t go on. We can’t pay our rents, we can’t buy food. We’ve been taken advantage of because we love this game so much.”

Lannin grew up playing sports every day after school. She played basketball in high school and college. But she never realized that there were role models she could identify with. She wants to give this awareness to today’s young women.

“I don’t know of girls today appreciate the struggles people have gone through. I want them to have a sense of their own rich history. Women’s basketball didn’t just start yesterday. It’s been about a century.”

A History of Basketball for Girls and Women: From Bloomers to Big Leagues, by Joanne Lannin, Lerner Publications Company, 144 pages, $9.95.