6 What’s wrong with women?
I
t was ironic that Suzanne Lenglen, a woman, should have become the first international tennis celebrity, given the controversy surrounding women’s very presence on the court. Long before she stepped into the spotlight the men in charge of the game had thoroughly objected to a new generation of young women who had rebelled against the lives of passivity led by their mothers and were bent on a different existence. Lottie Dod wrote forcefully of the difficulties that faced women in the early years. She pointed to the curious inconsistency whereby tennis was regarded at one and the same time as ‘only a lady’s game’, a ‘pat ball’ pastime unworthy of sporting men, yet equally ‘quite beyond their powers’ either to play it or to understand the scoring system. There was ‘at one time a real danger’, said Lottie Dod, ‘lest men’s and women’s lawn tennis should be entirely separated, with different grounds, balls, and laws.’ 1 True, a women’s tournament was organised in Dublin in 1879, but it was not played on the usual courts in Fitzwilliam Square, as this was considered too public a venue. Nor were ladies admitted as members to the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club. When women’s tournaments were initiated at Wimbledon in 1884, the doubles were played away from the main grounds. It is difficult to understand these objections until one becomes fully aware of just how restricted the lives and movements of
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middle-class women were in the 1870s and 1880s. Many people, and not just men, felt it was not respectable for women to be seen playing actively in public at all. Women violated their own femininity in making violent movements, and seeming to perspire or be out of breath was unthinkable and even indecent, so strongly was femininity equated with passivity. This was one of the most inhibiting factors for female players: the convention that prevented young women from any vigorous display of movement. Lord Curzon, one-time viceroy of India and a government minister at this period, is notoriously said to have said of sexual intercourse that ‘ladies don’t move’ and this prohibition on lively activity extended much more generally. Anything else was damaging to their femininity. There was also the question of fashionable dress, for, asked Lottie Dod in exasperation, how could women ‘ever hope to play a sound game when their dresses impede the free movement of every limb? In many cases their very breathing is rendered difficult.’ She herself wore a white flannel cap on her dark, cropped hair, a skirt that stopped short of the ankles and showed black woollen stockings and black shoes. Her shirt was high collared, its sleeves long. This was for the period a radical outfit, especially the short hair, but she was able to get away with it because, being under sixteen, she was still regarded as a child. Women’s daywear became simplified in the 1890s with the introduction of the tailored coat and skirt outfit suitable for working women in the fast growing cities. The middle-class craze for the bicycle led to further attempts to promote practical women’s clothing. Tennis wear followed suit. Women’s tennis dresses were simplified and more suitable for active play, with unboned collars, deeper than normal armholes and pleats stitched only at the top. By this time special shoes were also worn, with rubber soles and often canvas tops. Even so, when May Sutton became the first American woman to win Wimbledon at the age of seventeen in 1905, her outfit marked a further stage in informality as she daringly rolled up her sleeves,
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A satirical look at sporting fashions from Punch in 1891, one of many comments on the bicycling and sports playing young women of the time
revealing a bare forearm, and shortened her skirts – but was refused permission to play until she had lowered the hems again. Reminiscing in the early 1970s, her older sister, Violet, also a tennis player, recalled that in their playing days they had worn: ‘a long undershirt, pair of drawers, two petticoats, white linen corset cover, duck shirt, shirtwaist, long white silk stockings and a floppy hat.’ She nevertheless believed that they had managed to run faster than the girls she was still teaching in 1972.2 Mrs Sterry, another female champion from this period, articulated the very thing about women playing tennis that annoyed
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the many correspondents to The Field magazine who wrote in to thunder their hostility to the idea of women playing. ‘I am sure that the tournaments would not possess half their present attractions if men alone competed,’ she wrote in 1903. Ladies, she added, must ensure that they went on court looking their best as ‘all eyes are on them’.3 It was precisely to this, of course, that the male opponents objected; they did not want their wives and daughters subjected to public gaze. Wallis Myers, however, an early aficionado of the game, agreed with her: The man who would attempt to divide the two forces and banish the fair sex from the chief arena into fields of their own can know little of the joy which their presence at tournaments gives to looker-on and player alike; he must know that most meetings only flourish by virtue of their social charms and that ladies are as essential to the well-being of a large open tournament as the committee or the muchabused umpires.4
Finding it impossible to exclude them entirely, the tennis authorities attempted to impose separate rules. For example, it was suggested that women might be allowed to hit the ball after it had bounced twice, might serve from the middle of the court and refuse any service they missed. In any case no gentleman should ever hit them a ball they couldn’t reach. By the turn of the twentieth century, nonetheless, women had won the day. Herbert Chipp, the first secretary of the Lawn Tennis Association, was no advocate of the emancipation of women and yet in his Recollections, published in 1898, he recognised a fait accompli when he saw one: Among the manifold changes and consequent uprooting of prejudices which the latter half of the century has witnessed, nothing has been more characteristic of the new order of things than the active participation of women in its sports and pastimes … the unblushing young women of the
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day were daily joining in pursuits that their grandmothers would have regarded as unalloyed heathenism.5
He conceded however that times had changed and ‘lawn tennis must claim a large share of the responsibility for the introduction of the new regime’. And although ‘the athleticism of the fin de siècle woman appears sometimes too pronounced’, he conceded that the changes ‘must ultimately prove beneficial to the race at large – at all events physically. Whether the benefits will be as great morally is a question which only time can settle.’ But he recognised that the new generation of women would not be ‘worse mothers because, instead of leading sedentary lives, a great portion of their young years has been spent on the river, the tennis lawn, the hockey field and the golf links – ay, even on the now ubiquitous bicycle itself.’ Yet commentators and players alike continued to pour scorn on the women’s game. A. L. Laney, writing after the First World War, had no time for it whatsoever. ‘Few games played by women seem worth recalling,’ he wrote. ‘The dears are, on the whole, comparatively dull performers in sport and nearly always it is clashing personalities rather than skill or outstanding performance that make the occasion memorable. Unless something other than actual tennis has intervened to grace the occasion, you will search long through the history of the game to find matches suitable for embalming in the hackneyed superlatives of the sportswriter.’ He described interminable matches characterised by purposeless hitting up and down the court by two girls, ‘neither able to win when the chance comes, both forced to go on and on until one or the other finally loses.’ 6 Helen Jacobs, a rising star and later to become US Champion, writing of her final in the Riviera Beaulieu tournament in 1931 against a player of the old school, Mrs Satterthwaite,7 described the latter as just such a player. Mrs Satterthwaite ‘serves underhand, hits her forehand drive in the same manner in which she serves, and merely reverses the process for her backhand and … seemed
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to take pride in creating records for the unbroken flight of the ball over the net. One of our rallies passed well beyond the hundred mark.’ Jacobs was so discombobulated by her opponent’s awful play that after the match had gone on for two and a half hours Mrs Satterthwaite won. ‘For sheer endurance alone, she deserved the victory.’ 8 Yet this was not the only way women played tennis even before the First World War. Dorothea Lambert Chambers, who won Wimbledon seven times in the decade before 1914, wrote her own tennis manual, Lawn Tennis for Ladies and was no advocate for conventional ‘ladylike’ behaviour on court. On the contrary she insisted that women players should not remain ‘absolutely immobile’. She advocated regular practice at tennis, movement about the court and an attention to the mental game as a way of developing confidence. Like later women players such as Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills, she developed her own game by playing against the best men at her tennis club and all the successful women players of these early years rejected the female ‘pat ball’ efforts of less committed and ambitious women.9 Mrs Larcombe, a contemporary of Dorothea Lambert Chambers, made similar observations: The chief error among ladies is the tendency to develop one particular stroke at the expense of all others. This stroke as a rule is the forehand drive from the right corner across diagonally to the opposite corner … But … one stroke cannot be made to serve for all occasions. This cultivation of the forehand leads inevitably to a corresponding weakness in the backhand, a fault very hard to eradicate. In a doubles an active base-liner can ‘run round’ most balls that would otherwise come to the backhand, but in a singles it is practically impossible to defend a weak backhand.10
This affected their volleying, as ‘one cannot have a weak backhand and be a volleyer’. Lack of initiative was another female fault. They were ‘so
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content with the same old strokes, the same degree of proficiency’. The upshot was that ladies’ tennis as a rule ‘gives the spectator a sensation of dullness’. There was ‘an absence of “headwork”, of intention’. Women seemed unable and unwilling to change their game whereas Mrs Larcombe would have liked them to play an all-court game and try to improve their results. Given that this was the dominant perception of the game, it should be no surprise that the appearance of Suzanne Lenglen at the first post-war Wimbledon caused a sensation. When she walked onto the Centre Court on 5 July 1919, she was more than just a new sporting figure. The French finalist wore a startlingly brief costume. Described as ‘indecent’ in parts of the press, it was a simple frock with short sleeves and a skirt reaching only to the calves, to reveal white stockings. On her head was a floppy hat. Yet, hailed as a revolutionary change in tennis dress for women, it was actually the result of a long and much slower process. The way in which the women of the western world gradually shed their clothes between 1914 and the 1920s was hastened by the war, but was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. She nevertheless presented a startling contrast to her opponent, Dorothea Lambert Chambers, a seven-times champion and, at forty, twice Lenglen’s age. She was dressed in an anklelength Edwardian skirt, a shirt fastened at the neck and wrists and, although these of course were not visible, corsets. An epic struggle ensued, enthralling to the sell-out crowd of 8,000. They had queued for hours to get in – and as they waited had sung an old war song adapted for the occasion: ‘It’s a Lenglen trail awinding’. King George V and Queen Mary, a keen follower of the game, were among the audience who watched a match that lasted for over two hours. Mrs Chambers twice held match point, but Lenglen won the third and deciding set 9–7. With her victory, she became symbolic of the new time. The two women athletes who faced each other were at once cast as personifications of youth versus age, new versus old. It was the passage from the pre- to the post-war world. Dorothea
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French star Mlle Broquedis, who anticipated Suzanne Lenglen, playing in the 1912 Olympics
Chambers represented the Edwardian stuffiness of suburban vicarage tennis. Suzanne, the ‘goddess of tennis’, said The Times, was ‘the player for the Jazz age, gay, brittle and brilliant’. David Gilbert has defended the older woman as a thoroughly modern and forward-looking sportswoman. As we saw, she wrote her own book on tennis, which advocated an active playing style. She won Wimbledon seven times, both before and after having children. She nearly defeated Lenglen, although she was twice her age.11 The growing popularity of sport generally, the craze for the bicycle, the rise of the lower-middle class and the struggle for women’s emancipation, had all emerged before 1914. In their various ways the Belle Epoque in France, the Progressive Era in the United States and the Edwardian Indian summer in Britain had carried within them the seeds of the ‘Jazz Age’. Indeed,
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within tennis itself, it was another Frenchwoman who took the first steps towards the modernisation of women’s tennis: Marguerite Broquedis, who had already abandoned corsets. ‘The first published tennis fashion columns in magazines, the first … special hairstyles for tennis, the first Olympic Gold Medal won for France by a woman, even the first suggestion that women’s tennis should be beautiful, all derived from her,’ wrote Teddy Tinling. Broquedis moreover, was much better-looking than Lenglen.12 Yet the 1919 Wimbledon final sent a message – about social change and about women’s emancipation, about a new and different future in which fun would trump duty. Suzanne Lenglen benefited from changes that had been developing for over a decade; but like other players subsequently, she could be projected as a symbol. She was the 1920s goddess of modernity. She was brilliantly fixed – whether accurately or not – pinned like a butterfly to the gay and garish poster of the années folles.13 Change did not, however, necessarily mean straightforward progress. The bodily freedom Lenglen represented and expressed brought new problems for young women. Short skirts and short hair seemed radical, but in France and elsewhere the new, bobbed hairstyle, or, even more daring, the Eton crop, was controversial. The greater importance attached to looks and, already, the growing influence of Hollywood and the movies, meant that women had to spend more effort – and money – to achieve the new standards. Their bodies were more objectified; they were subject to greater scrutiny.14 Suzanne Lenglen attracted the sort of fervid admiration usually reserved for actresses and music-hall stars. Her fame seemed to bring to tennis the new consciousness of glamour and eroticism that by 1920 Hollywood was spreading across Europe and beyond. To this moment Lenglen was perfectly attuned, as if born to be the first international celebrity tennis star in the most international of all sports. Her career also exemplified a life devoted to excess. Teddy Tinling recalls that years after Suzanne’s 1919 triumph at
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Wimbledon Mrs Lambert Chambers confided to him that she considered the outcome of the match to have been a tragedy – obviously for her, since it snatched from her the chance of an eighth Wimbledon championship; but even more seriously for Suzanne, because it gave her ‘the taste of invincibility and a subsequent compulsion for it, which brought endless sacrifices and unnatural unhappiness, out of all proportion to the rewards of her fame’.15
Suzanne Lenglen and Henri Lacoste playing mixed doubles in 1925
Suzanne was not beautiful. Her face was heavy, with a prominent nose. She had dark, Mediterranean colouring and, often, deep rings beneath her eyes. It was her astonishing athletic, indeed balletic grace that held her audience entranced. And despite her lack of conventional good looks, she perfected a style of dressing that was copied everywhere, modelling outfits designed by the leading Paris couturier, Jean Patou, both on and off court. In particular, from 1920 onwards she replaced her linen hat with a length of silk georgette bound tightly round her newly bobbed hair in a bandeau and fastened with a diamond pin. Each bandeau in a different vivid colour – lemon, heliotrope, coral – matched
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the cardigan worn over her white dress, which soon was falling only to the knee, in line with the rapidly shortening fashionable skirts. She came onto court in a white ermine coat and fortified herself with nips of cognac or coffee between games. She participated fully in the social life of the Riviera, where tennis slotted seamlessly into the daily round of pleasure. She was an international celebrity sought by hostesses all over Europe and lived the luxurious lifestyle appropriate to her stardom. From 1919 to 1926 Lenglen reigned as supreme tennis star and indeed supreme female athlete. Yet this life took its toll. Like a number of later female tennis stars, she was not only coached by her father, but was dominated by him. Theirs was a close bond, unhealthy perhaps insofar as it was predicated on Charles Lenglen’s need to live out his own failed aspirations as an athlete through his daughter (a story that would be repeated many times in the tennis world). He bent her to his will with the threat of withdrawal of love. Both he and her mother were quick to criticise, and even success was greeted with admonitions to do more. After Suzanne won her first two major tournaments at the age of fifteen, her father simply said: ‘Now you must win them all.’ And it was reported that once when, rarely, Suzanne lost a set, Charles shouted, ‘If you lose another game I’ll disinherit you.’ (Coco Gentien disputed these stories, attributing the last to the spite of Bill Tilden, who hated Lenglen.) Suzanne herself was consumed by the fear of being unable to maintain her place at the summit. Illness became one method whereby she could escape when the strain became intolerable. It is not surprising in a sport so physical and so demanding on the player that the state of the body would become a preoccupation, even a neurotic one, but illness was also a psychological bolthole. On the occasions when Lenglen retired from a match the cause was more usually illness than injury. She was plagued by chest infections, contracted jaundice and was prone to other illnesses, but the strain was also a mental one. By 1926 the pressure was beginning to tell.
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Her friend and admirer, Teddy Tinling, commented: ‘Some say the tremendous exertions and the constant invincibility demanded of her by Papa Lenglen eventually reduced her to a frail, nervous wreck. Others think that early repressions by both her parents, who felt any normal life might impair her performance, were the real cause of her decline.’ Certainly Tinling felt that when he knew her she ‘seemed to spend her whole life on her toes, unable ever to relax’.16 She had become temperamental and autocratic. In 1924 she had withdrawn from Wimbledon with the aftereffects of jaundice. In 1925 she won again and after a triumphant season undertook a ‘Grand Tour’, staying with European monarchs and heads of state. But in 1926 her career as an amateur player was to come to an abrupt and startling end.
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