The Year of the Horses by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Tin House Books

19

THESE VIOLENT EXERCISES

In polo, as in all other aspects of life, women have had to fight like hell to play equal with the boys. Despite the fact that ancient Persian and Chinese works of art and literature refer to women excelling at the sport (a painted pottery figure from the Tang dynasty shows a mounted female polo player reaching across her galloping horse for the infamous “nearside” shot 1,500 years ago), when polo was brought to the West from India in the early 1900s, motivated female players had to make great strides to break into the sport.

Regardless of whether women had the strength and mindset for contact sport, the question floated as to whether women should be seen exercising at all. “The prettiest woman in the world loses her beauty when at these violent exercises,” the journalist Eliza Lynn Linton wrote in an article called “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents” in 1891. “Hot and damp, mopping her flushed and streaming face with her handkerchief, she has lost that sense of repose, that delicate self-restraint, which belongs to the ideal woman.” It is worth noting here that Linton was the first female paid journalist in all of Britain. A groundbreaking feminist anti-feminist, it would seem.

And if one agreed to let them sweat, it boggled the mind to consider how female polo players should be clothed. Women were still riding sidesaddle, and it was out of the question that they appear in pants. Photographs from one of Europe’s first women-only polo matches at the London Ranelagh Club in the summer of 1905 show the female players in high-necked, long-sleeved blouses, full skirts, and boater hats instead of helmets. It took over ten years until a particularly wild woman known to the press only as “Mrs. Hitchcock” shirked tradition, put pants under a skirted pinafore, donned an actual helmet, and mounted her horse astride for a saucy match in Narragansett, Rhode Island, in 1913.

The suffragette movement allowed women to get the vote and go about in trousers, but for would-be polo players, it was nearly impossible to find a way to play. At the turn of the century, some American colleges had started to adopt polo programs, but these were run by the US Army, and seeing that women were barred entrance to military service academies until 1976, you can imagine how eager the army was to teach ladies polo in the 1920s. The governing male bodies of the United States Polo Association (USPA) weren’t keen on mentoring women players, either. When a certain Dorothy Wheeler (who would go on to become the chair of the Pacific coast’s Women’s Polo Association in 1934) wrote to USPA secretary treasurer F. S. O’Reiley in 1932 for assistance forming a women’s league, his response was curt: “Polo is not a women’s game.”

Although there were a handful of intrepid women playing in the early twentieth century (the brilliant sportswoman and real estate developer Marion Hollins was tearing up polo fields around the country as early as

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