{"id":139428,"date":"2021-04-30T11:48:10","date_gmt":"2021-04-30T15:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=139428"},"modified":"2021-05-06T10:14:27","modified_gmt":"2021-05-06T14:14:27","slug":"recalling-a-1931-womens-archery-tourney-vs-unseen-opponents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2021\/04\/30\/recalling-a-1931-womens-archery-tourney-vs-unseen-opponents\/","title":{"rendered":"Recalling a 1931 women’s archery tourney vs. ‘unseen opponents’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ninety years ago this May, The Bates Student<\/em> reported on an intercollegiate athletic competition for Bates women: an archery tournament vs. \u201cunseen opponents….from many colleges and universities of the United States.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opponents were \u201cunseen\u201d because they didn\u2019t travel to the Bates campus to compete, nor did Bates archers travel to theirs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, the 1931 Bates women\u2019s archery team participated in a \u201ctelegraphic\u201d tournament, where teams shot their bows on their own campuses, tallied the points, and telegraphed, as in dot-dot-dash Morse code traveling through wires, their scores to an offsite host for tallying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

This brief film clip shows Bates archers on the old Rand Field in the 1930s. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)<\/em><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/lite-youtube>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\n

The 1931 Women\u2019s Intercollegiate Telegraphic Archery Tournament is thought to be the first intercollegiate competition joined by Bates women, according to Bates Through the Years<\/em>, by the late Charlie Clark \u201951. It was run by the University of Wisconsin under the auspices of the National Archery Association. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While today\u2019s virtual events, made possible by the marvels of the internet, feel distinctive, using telecommunications to bring people together, in this case for competition, could be considered old hat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the 1930s, telegraphic tournaments had been going on for nearly half a century. In the 1880s, U.S. newspapers began reporting on telegraphic chess and checkers tournaments. By the early 1900s, there were telegraphic tournaments in archery, bowling, and, especially, skeet shooting, allowing gun club members throughout the vast West and Northwest U.S. to compete with one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(There were even popular in-person \u201cfast-telegraphic tournaments\u201d for telegraph operators themselves. A 1890 tourney in New York City was won by a little-known railroad telegrapher, B.R. Pollock Jr., who sent 260 words in five minutes.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In summer 1928, an amateur golf association promised the first annual National Telegraphic Golf Tournament. \u201cThe click of the telegraph and the hornet hum of whissing balls will be heard in every state in the union,\u201d promised a United Press story. But there\u2019s no evidence the tournament ever happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rise of telegraphic women\u2019s archery tournaments wasn\u2019t prompted so much by the challenges of travel and distance. Instead, the physically distanced events were a reaction to the state of men\u2019s collegiate sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The women’s archery team on the old Rand Field in 1935. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By the second decade of the 1900s, men\u2019s collegiate sports, especially football, plagued by bribery scandals, were becoming a mess. A scathing report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching said, \u201cCollege sports have been developed from games played by boys for pleasure into systematic professionalized athletic contests for the glory and, too often, for the financial profit of the college.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response, U.S. women sports leaders, specifically the Women\u2019s Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation, sought to develop a more inclusive and participatory approach for women\u2019s college sports, emphasizing play for play\u2019s sake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A refrain of the time, which became the motto of the Bates Women\u2019s Athletic Association, was \u201ca sport for every girl and a girl for every sport\u201d (sometimes rendered as \u201ca sport for every girl, and every girl in a sport\u201d). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus it happened that in 1931, to \u201cadd more zest to our spring season of archery,\u201d according to a Althea Howe Adelhelm \u201832 in the Student<\/em>, Bates archers entered the telegraphic tournament, as they would in subsequent years, through the early 1950s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“A woman has to be four times as smart and work four times as hard to get to the same pay level as a man.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Seen in the 1933 Mirror<\/em>, Rebecca Carter Bailey ’33 was a member of Bates’ archery team in 1931.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Bates archers in the 1931 tournament \u2014 a group that we might now call Bates\u2019 first women\u2019s varsity team \u2014 were Rebecca Carter Bailey \u201933, Mary Hoag Moran \u201932, Deborah Thompson Tolfsen \u201934, and Eileen Soper \u201934. (While a full archery squad was eight, Bates fielded a five-person team.) UCLA women won the tournament, in which 66 U.S. colleges compared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Bates, Moran became a field investigator for Harvard Law School, while Tolfsen and Soper were teachers, the former on Staten Island and the latter at Wellesley (Mass.) High School.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rebecca Bailey volunteered for the WAVES in World War II, then earned a master\u2019s degree from the University of Wyoming. (The records are unclear, but she and her husband may have retired to a farm in Bethel, Maine.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bailey\u2019s observations about her experiences with the WAVES in World War II scored a bullseye: \u201cIt still holds true that a woman has to be four times as smart and work four times as hard to get to the same pay level as a man.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bates’ participation in a 1931 \u201ctelegraphic\u201d tournament is considered the first intercollegiate competition joined by Bates women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":139435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[24,224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics","category-society-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139428"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139580,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139428\/revisions\/139580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}