Sunday March 21st, 2010 Women's Hockey

When I was growing up in the 1970s, I didn’t know any girls who played hockey. Today girls are common place in hockey. You may have noticed that Canada’s Women’s Hockey Team won the Gold Medal at the Olympics last month! During the coverage there was a lot of discussion around the inequality in skill levels between some of the teams. The main reason that Canada is a women’s hockey powerhouse is the fact that there are about 80,000 girls and women playing organized hockey in Canada (www.hockeycanada.ca). Thunder Bay has its own women’s hockey league, and has produced several national and international level competitors – including Katie Weatherston and Haley Irwin, our newest Gold Medalist!

I was curious to learn how women started playing hockey. Is the current popularity of women’s hockey a natural development of gender equality, or is there something more?

Lord Stanley, who is well known as the founder of the Stanley Cup, also had an important role in the beginnings of women’s hockey in Canada. Brian McFarlane tells the story in his book, “Proud Past, Bright Future: One Hundred Years of Canadian Women’s Hockey.” Lord Stanley was imported from England as Canada’s sixth governor general. He caught the hockey bug during his years in Ottawa, and was a big fan of local teams. Lord Stanley had an outdoor rink made at Rideau Hall, where his seven sons and two daughters played hockey with their friends. This rink became a tradition, and is still maintained today. The fact that the elegant Stanley girls were encouraged to play hockey is significant in the history of the sport. Other girls were inspired by this winter activity of the celebrities of the day, and also took up hockey. In his book McFarlane includes the earliest known photograph of women playing hockey at Rideau Hall, from about 1890.

At that time women’s hockey gear wasn’t much different from their regular every day “gear” – apart from the skates and sticks! In the book “Too Many Men on the Ice: Women’s Hockey in North America”, Joanna Avery and Julie Stevens, an article from the 1948 Charlottetown Journal Pioneer about women’s hockey equipment is referenced. The ingenuity of Maritime mothers is credited for the invention of goalie chest pads. They sewed together several layers of cotton to make several long pockets. They then filled the pockets with sawdust until they were an inch or two thick. The pockets were then sewn tight to keep the pads as firm as possible.

The Hockey Hall of Fame’s website (www.hhof.com) includes a section called “The Spirit of Women’s Hockey”. Their timeline of women’s hockey history starts in the 1890s – around the same time the Stanley girls were playing in their back yard. The University of Toronto and Queen’s University both had women’s hockey teams during this period. In 1956 a young woman named Abby Hoffman challenged hockey’s gender barrier by pretending to be a boy and playing in a boy’s league. After that there were several legal challenges, and girls won the right to play on “boys” teams, and women’s hockey associations started to develop.

The first ever Women’s World Championships took place in Toronto in 1987 (Canada won), but it wasn’t recognized by the International Ice Hockey Federation. The first official IIHF sanctioned World Championships were in 1990 in Ottawa, where Canada won, again. In 1998 women’s hockey became a full medal sport at the Olympic Winter Games. The United States won that year, but Canada won Gold in 2002, 2006 and 2010.

The Thunder Bay Women’s Hockey Association (www.tbwha.ca) was founded in 1982, with two teams. I spoke with Tammy Reynolds, President of the TBWHA, and she told me that today there are 680 girls and women playing hockey with the local association, and they range in age from 4 to 58. They have over 50 teams today. If you’re a woman and have always wanted to play hockey, I highly recommend TBWHA’s “Skills and Drills” program.

Women’s hockey has a colourful history, an active present, and is promised a bright future. The babes on blades and chicks with sticks are here to stay!

Joanna Aegard, Head of Virtual Library Services