A Sporting Chance

Women at U-M fought to have athletic facilities where they could exercise and play sports, same as the men. The battle highlights the ways in which women had to carve out spaces for themselves on campus time and again.

By Madeleine Bradford

In 1894, an editorial in The Michigan Daily blamed women for bad ticket sales to sports events.

The editorial hit a raw nerve.

“How can you expect a woman to be personally interested in something from which she is shut out?” one anonymous alumna responded indignantly in the Daily.

“When I came here, I was told that it would not be proper for two or three women to go to anything unattended.”

If women could not even watch sports without a chaperone, she reasoned, how could anyone blame them for not buying tickets to the games?

Her response underscores just how excluded women were from campus athletics at the time.

That would soon change.

Nancy Fix Anderson, a professor emerita of history at Loyola University, describes in her book The Sporting Life: Victorian Sports and Games (Praeger, 2010) how women’s athletics underwent a dramatic shift in the 1880s and 1890s.

As women pushed back against restrictive norms of femininity at the time, Anderson notes, they joined a larger movement known as “the emancipation of women,” pushing for “not just legal, political, educational, and employment rights, but also physical freedom.”

This movement excluded Black women, and women from many other countries; it was an imperfect push for conditional equality. Still, even that imperfect push made a difference.

As women’s athletics expanded rapidly in the United States, so too did athletics for women at the University of Michigan. Women students took up tennis, archery, fencing, horseback riding, and more. The sidelines were not enough. Women were determined to be on the field.

The question now became: which field would that be?

Divisions of Time and Space

The very landscape of the University of Michigan was shaped, for years, by gender.

Waterman Gymnasium, the first structural gym at U-M, was built in 1894, the same year the editorial was published about women needing chaperones at sports events. The gymnasium before that had technically been little more than a tent, used for shelter while exercising. Women students were allowed to have limited, specific use of Waterman Gymnasium: they were permitted three hours of gym time in the morning for exercise and needed to apply for special permission to host dances there.

The majority of the time, however, Waterman Gymnasium was devoted to men, who already had plenty of space for exercise. Men also regularly competed out- doors, first on the Washtenaw County Fairgrounds, then on Regents Field, which was later called Ferry Field.

There was implicit social pressure to keep men and women divided in university spaces. Although early women on campus experienced a degree of freedom, they still faced obstacles such as professors frequently insisting that women all sit together in medical classrooms, and the division of the first General Library’s reading room by gender.

If women students hoped to have enough space and time for athletics, outside of just three hours in the morning, it was clear that they would need to carve out spaces for themselves.

So they did.

Women at U-M threw themselves into a fundraising effort, selling cakes and ice cream, convincing professors to share the proceeds of campus events, and petitioning people for funds. The Women’s League raised nearly $21,000, and U-M Regents provided the remainder of the funding. Their work resulted in Barbour Gymnasium, the first true space for women to exercise on campus, built near what is today the intersection of North University and Fletcher streets and the site of U-M’s current chemistry building.

The completed gymnasium became a space where women at U-M could participate in sports such as rope climbing, relay racing, high jumping, indoor baseball, indoor tennis, track, and gymnastics.

But there still weren’t outdoor spaces specific to women’s sports.

In 1903, a football game played on the wooden floor of the Barbour Gymnasium led to injuries for at least one woman athlete, and by 1908, The Michigan Daily wrote that gym instructor Ethel Perrin was pleading for a field where “University women” could “play basketball, field hockey, longball, tennis, and other outdoor games.”

By 1908, U-M women decided they would simply have to do what they always did when they faced barriers on campus: they would advocate and make space for themselves. That year, the U-M Women’s Athletics Association partnered with the U-M Women’s League to launch yet another massive campaign, to fund a field of their own.

A Question of Caps and Capitol

For the new field, U-M women students selected Sleepy Hollow, a space located near where the new Central Campus Recreation Building, or CCRB, is rising today.

The space was beloved by U-M’s students at the time. It was one of the spots that traditionally hosted “Cap Night,” a ceremonial gathering at which freshman burned their class “caps” in a massive bonfire that signaled their transition to the sophomore class.

Together, the Women’s Athletic Association and the League brought a proposal to the Board of Regents for the purchase of Sleepy Hollow. They wanted to transform it from a grassy space into an athletic field for women.

Their initial proposal was accepted by the Regents but was met with skepticism from the community as a whole.

“There was a great deal of head-shaking when the Regents turned over the deed for the women’s athletic field over to the women of the University last spring,” The Michigan Daily noted in 1908.

Although they promised to raise enough money to pay U-M back for the field, not many believed they could actually do it.

“But this fundraising didn’t discourage the co-eds; as a matter of fact, it instilled a grim determination in them, and—well, now they are $5,000 richer than they were a year ago,” the Daily concluded.

“To Miss Myrtle White belongs a great portion of this success.”

Enter Myrtle

Who was Myrtle White? A junior at the time, working toward her Bachelor of Arts degree; a painter; a photographer whose Kodachrome photos later found a home in the Bentley’s archives; and a deeply determined woman with a passion for community improvement.

During White’s time as the treasurer for the Women’s League, her fundraising efforts changed the shape of U-M’s campus.

When the Women’s League first began fundraising for the new athletic field, donations trickled in: $295 here, $100 there. They would have to raise thousands of dollars to fully fund the field, but White met the challenge with optimism.

“It seems impossible to give any very large amounts, but the small ones will amount up if I can get enough of them,” White wrote to Frieda Kleinstuck, a fellow U-M student who served as president of the Women’s League, early in her efforts. “I feel real encouraged now, and am sure our undertaking is going to pay us well.”

She was right.

A letter in the archived Frieda Kleinstuck papers reveals how White spent her entire summer in 1909 working to raise more money for the field. In places like Detroit and Chicago, she used her free time to advocate for the women of U-M, asking businessmen, politicians, and alumni to help them achieve their goal.

She must have been remarkably persuasive in her arguments, because she finally got the result she hoped for: a large donation, thanks to Senator Thomas Witherell Palmer.

Senator Palmer was an ideal person to help. He had attended U-M for a year and he knew the university well. He was also a champion of women’s suffrage, so White may have suspected that he would be sympathetic to her work.

“After scheming and planning for five weeks, I finally got Senator Palmer’s subscription for $3,000. So according to our offer, the Field will be called ‘Palmer Recreation Grounds,’” White wrote to Kleinstuck.

Once they had fundraised thoroughly enough to pay off the land of Sleepy Hollow, the Women’s League turned it over to the university as Palmer Field, a dedicated space for women’s outdoors athletics.

Soon, the space was full of women practicing archery, tennis, field hockey, and more. It continued to host student traditions, such as Cap Night and Lantern Night, a rite of passage for U-M women when older classes symbolically passed the torch to younger classes by handing them paper lanterns.

White’s success propelled her to do even more fundraising for the women of the university. She raised money for future improvements to the field, and while she was at it, she also decided that she may as well start raising money for a women’s dormitory.

“The Field is paid for, and I have $500 toward a dormitory fund!! Doesn’t that sound good?” she wrote to Kleinstuck.

That dormitory would later be the Martha Cook Building. Myrtle White and the Women’s League created a proposal for the space that would ultimately convince William W. Cook, a U-M law graduate and successful corporate lawyer, to donate the funds to build it.

The residence hall officially opened in the fall of 1915 proving, once again, that White and the women of U-M could create space for themselves on campus.

Further Afield

Over the years, the area of Palmer Field slowly changed; the Women’s Athletic Building was built on one end in 1928, and the Margaret Bell Pool was added to that building in 1954. That pool, a favorite for synchronized swimmers, was kept as part of the building when the Women’s Athletic Building was transformed, 23 years later, into the first Central Campus Recreation Building, or CCRB.

In 2023, the CCRB was torn down to make way for a new recreation building. Until it is constructed, a 23,000-square-foot tent is serving as a temporary exercise facility on Palmer Field, perhaps reminiscent of U-M’s first gymnasium tent.

To learn more about women’s efforts to fundraise for their own spaces at U-M, see the Frieda Kleinstuck papers, the Myrtle White papers, and The Michigan
Daily Digital Archives.

[Lead image: Women athletes in front of the Martha Cook residence, HS10178]