Anyone for equality? How tennis served women’s causes
FOR female tennis players and their fans, the road to true equality may seem long and hard.
Go back a century, though, and the seeds of parity between the sexes had already been sown, according to an unseen archive of films.
A treasure trove of tennis films, due to be made available to the public for the first time, shows how the enlightened tennis establishment pushed the sport as “the most democratic game for both sexes” as far back as 1924.
Players in corsets were lauded on film, with girls encouraged to pick up a racket to emulate their role models.
More than 70 films, from 1903 onwards, are to be released by the British Film Institute. They include famous faces such as British star Fred Perry, Australia’s multi-grand slam winner Ken Rosewall and a 15-year-old Sue Barker playing in 1971.
One of the most remarkable, from 1926, shows George VI – then the Duke of York – playing at Wimbledon – the only member of the Royal family to compete in the tournament.
Playing in the men’s doubles with Louis Greig he lost in the first round.
A film from the same year sees King George V and Queen Mary present trophies to Wimbledon winners, including the rather portly Maud Watson, by then the oldest female competitor. The hugely successful player had first entered the tournament in 1884, wearing a white corset and petticoats.
Similar outfits can be seen in the earliest film taken from a collection of home movies by Alfred Ernest Passmore.
Showing his family in holiday spirits, Edwardian women are seen attempting – not always successfully – to hop over a low tennis net in full skirts and hats.
In the 1920s, the films appear determined to convince women to pick up their rackets. A 1926 newsreel entitled Detachable Dress for Sportswomen details a fetching new fashion, for a pair of baggy shorts hidden behind a loose skirt to protect players’ modesty.
The 1922 film Tennis and How to Play It shows a glamorous Suzanne Lenglen greeting autograph hunters whilst draped in a fur coat.
Decades later, a film shows the former French Open winner Ann Jones speaking in 1968 about equal pay, arguing women should receive two thirds of the men’s salary.
Gosta Johansson, a curatorial consultant from the BFI, said: “What surprised me with many of these films is how equally they seem to treat the men’s and women’s games. There’s very little feeling of women’s tennis being inferior to men’s at any point.”
The collection, Tennis on Film, is available to watch for free on the BFI Player from today.