What a joy to see a national hockey team for women! How they fought to get there and how, in all sports, their journey was strewn with pitfalls and discriminatory analyses.
The story of their access to bicycles is a good example. Seeing women on two wheels was, at the beginning of the 20the century, an aberration. Joséphine Marchand Dandurand, who defended the practice of this sport, wrote that she wanted to “put man and woman on the same footing, or even on the same wheels”. It was claimed that women did not have the required physical strength or that physical activity would be a danger to their reproductive abilities. At one time, women going down the ski slopes had to hold a man’s hand! The father of the Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, did not favor women in sports. For him, “at the Olympic Games, the role of women should be like in ancient tournaments: to crown the winners”.
Another reason given for why women were not suited to sport was that they could not run fast and thus risked their body temperature rising too quickly. Plus, bad muscles could jeopardize their chances of marriage. There was also the risk of an accident which could result in the loss of their virginity. In any case, their skeleton was not made for sport.
In Montreal, it is particularly McGill students who are opening the door to women’s hockey. You should read the very well-documented work by Lynda Baril Our glorious ones, more than a hundred years of women’s hockey in Quebec to understand the difficult access of French-speaking women to hockey. Bravely, inspired by the tricolor, the French Canadians formed a club in 1933, but it was short-lived. The famous hockey player Howie Morenz said that hockey “is too demanding a game for them.”
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