There was good news a while back for the 20,000 followers of the Instagram account @TheUnsungHeroines when Molly Schiot, the American filmmaker who started the project in 2014, announced that it was being turned in to a book. And now
Game Changers: The Unsung Heroines of Sports History has just been published.
For two years, Schiot has posted a random photo every day featuring sportswomen dating back to the 19th century, from icons like tennis champion Althea Gibson to a host of women whose stories were never told.
Schiot explained to the New York Times last week that what drove her to start the account and then produce the book was the lack of interest from a "major TV sports network" in a documentary she proposed on female athletes, after they had invited her to submit some ideas. She started @TheUnsungHeroines as a "personal protest", intent on showing how fascinating some of these stories are.
But the limited enough information that accompanies many of the photos, especially the older ones, helps make Schiot’s point. There is so little known or written about the women. You can then lose half a day on Google trying to find out more about them.
Not unreasonable
Like
Esther Stace
from Yarrowitch in New South Wales, whose photo prompted a not unreasonable response from one of Schiot’s followers: “Holy shit.”
Competing in the outstandingly named ‘Leaping Lady’ contest at the 1915 Sydney Royal Agricultural Show, Stace managed to clear a record height of 6ft 6in – riding side-saddle. Holy beep indeed.
But the Google doesn't tell you much more about Stace. There's just a brief notice in the bottom right corner of page seven in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1918 announcing her death after a long illness. She had been widowed 20 years before, when she was just 27, left with two young sons, both of whom were off fighting in the first World War when she died.
“Mrs Stace,” read the notice, “had been riding at most of the leading show grounds in the State for about 20 years. For Mr HD Morton, she rode the champion Desmond in many of his high jumps. For Mr Judd, she made a ladies’ record – 6ft 6in on Emu Plains, at the Sydney Show Ground. Though seemingly of frail physique, Mrs Stace had surprising control over refractory and runaway mounts. She used the now old-fashioned side-saddle.”
Young widows
And that’s it. Damn it, there’s a book in Esther Stace alone. History can’t have produced too many young widows who side-saddle show-jumped in the early 1900s to provide for their kids. Her record survived a remarkable 98 years, finally broken at, of all places, the National Horse Sport Arena in Blanchardstown by Irish rider
Susan Oakes
, who added two inches to the mark.
Game Changers, which features many of the same beautiful vintage photos that appear on @TheUnsungHeroines, is Schiot's attempt at telling the stories of trailblazers like Stace. And the formidable and spectacularly monikered Fanny Bullock Workman (1859-1925), one of the first female professional mountaineers; Jackie Tonawanda (1933-2009), "the female Ali" and the first woman to box in Madison Square Garden; and bullfighter Conchita Cintrón (1922-2009). Most of the bulls who crossed her path would have wished she was chained to the kitchen sink – she slayed 750 of them.
“They were opening up huge historical steps that were paving the way for so many women,” said Schiot. “I wonder if they had any idea that people would start sharing their stories.”
You’d have to think they never even imagined the day.
