20 Women Athletes Who Broke Barriers Throughout History

After declaring that baseball was “too strenuous” for women, Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis voided the contract of seventeen-year-old female pitcher Jackie Mitchell days after she struck out Babe Ruth (on four pitches) and Lou Gehrig (on three swings) on April 2, 1931. Both strikeouts were included in the box score of the exhibition game against the New York Yankees. Historians still debate whether Ruth and Gehrig were really trying.

Gertrude Ederle, nineteen years old on August 6, 1926, became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, and she bested the men’s record by 1 hour and 59 minutes. Wearing a custom two-piece suit and encased in a layer of grease, Ederle swam for 14 hours and 31 minutes through rough seas as she made her way from France to England. A ticker-tape parade welcoming the swimmer back to New York drew a crowd of two million people.

In 1950, Babe Didrikson Zaharias cofounded the LPGA, and she kept winning tournaments even after a terminal colon cancer diagnosis a few years later. Her 82 golf wins included 10 major championships. At the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, limited to just three events, Didrikson set world records in all of them, winning gold medals in javelin and hurdles and silver in high jump. That silver came from a controversial technique ruling—she had cleared every height.

Australian swimmer Annette Kellermann designed a form-fitting, one-piece suit, an alternative to the bulky woolen swimming dresses women were required to wear. When she wore it during a swim in 1907 near Revere Beach, Massachusetts, she was arrested for indecency. A judge allowed her to keep the suit so long as she wore a cape over it until she entered the water. She later made and sold suits under her name.

In segregated Georgia, Alice Coachman was forbidden from using the public sports facilities, so she practiced on the road, barefoot. At the 1948 London Olympics, she cleared the high-jump bar at 1.68 meters on the first jump, an Olympic record. She became the first Black woman from any country to win an Olympic gold medal, which King George VI personally handed to her. But the welcome-home ceremony in her hometown was segregated.

In 1908, Madge Syers won the Olympic gold medal in women’s figure skating. But years before this first Olympic win, she had competed in the 1902 World Championships in London, where the International Skating Union’s rulebook didn’t actually say that women couldn’t enter. So Syers did! Dressed in a long skirt, she competed against the men and finished second to Ulrich Salchow. The ISU quickly barred women from competing in men’s events afterward and created a separate Ladies’ Championship in 1906. Finishing second was enough to make them rewrite the rules!

Critics thought that Fanny Blankers-Koen, at thirty, was past her prime for the 1948 Olympics in London. Women could compete in at most three individual Olympic events, so she wasn’t allowed to compete in the high jump and long jump, where she held the world records. Critics were silenced, however, by Blankers-Koen’s unprecedented performance at the games, where she won four gold medals: the 100m, 200m, 80m hurdles, and relay.

Annie Kopchovsky, a Latvian-Jewish immigrant living in Boston, set out on a round-the-world trip by bicycle in 1894. Her trip was partly financed by advertising for Londonderry Lithia Spring Water, and as part of the sponsorship, she adopted “Londonderry” as her own name during her travels. Talk about committing to the ad! She set out from Boston in June 1894, traveling through North America, Europe, and Asia by bicycle, train, and steamship for the ocean crossings. She completed the trip 15 months later, in September 1895.

Raised in Harlem, Althea Gibson became the dominant force in the American Tennis Association, where Black players competed while much of American tennis remained segregated. In 1950, she broke the color barrier at the U.S. National Championships, becoming the first Black player to compete there. And she certainly didn’t stop at simply getting through the door! In 1956, Gibson became the first African American to win a singles Grand Slam title, taking the French Open. She also won both Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in 1957 and 1958, becoming the world’s top-ranked woman.

French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen worked with fashion designer Jean Patou to replace the restrictive corsets and long dresses women traditionally wore on the court with short pleated skirts and sleeveless tops. The outfits were considered scandalous at the time, and she also became known for her signature headband. She went on a 341-7 singles run between 1919 and 1926, during which she won 31 major titles, including six at Wimbledon and two Olympic gold medals. In 1926, she became the first major female tennis star to turn professional.

“The only helmet a woman should wear is at the hairdresser.” That’s reportedly what race director Raymond Roche said when he barred Maria Teresa de Filippis from the 1958 French Grand Prix. She got her chance at the next race instead: she started 19th and finished 10th in the Belgian Grand Prix on June 15, 1958. She got no points from her strong finish since only the top five got points in 1958.

Thirty-year-old Greek runner Stamata Revithi was barred from participating in the 1896 Athens Olympics by organizers under Pierre de Coubertin. So, on the day after the men’s marathon, she ran the exact same 40-kilometer route anyway, finishing in approximately 5 hours and 30 minutes, only to be refused entry into the Olympic stadium by officials. Her feat went unrecorded in the official Olympic record books, so Revithi had her marathon run verified with signatures collected from local mayors and witnesses. If the Olympics wouldn’t make it official, she was going to get the receipts herself!

In October 1922, nineteen-year-old American swimmer Sybil Bauer became the first woman in recorded history to beat a men’s world record in any sport. At a swimming meet in Bermuda, she completed the 440-yard backstroke in 6 minutes, 24.4 seconds, four seconds faster than the existing men’s record. And she wasn’t even done making history! Bauer went on to win an Olympic gold medal in 1924, but sadly died of cancer just three years later at only 23.

Kinue Hitomi wrote a 234-page textbook about women’s track in 1926 and built an athletic career despite the discouragement of women’s sports in Japan at the time. Hitomi was the only woman competing for Japan at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. She was eliminated in the 100m heats but decided to compete in the 800m, despite having never raced that distance competitively before. First time was the charm! Hitomi won silver in 2:17.6, making her the first Asian woman to win an Olympic medal.

Halina Konopacka, who helped evacuate Poland’s gold reserves during WWII and was a published poet, also won the first-ever gold medal for her country. Her world record of 39.62 meters in the discus on 31 July 1928 in Amsterdam was also the first Olympic gold medal in the women’s field events. Hours later, Betty Robinson won the first track gold medal for women, in the 100 meters.

Despite losing her hearing to an infection in 1896, British tennis star Charlotte Cooper continued competing at the highest level. At the 1900 Paris Olympics, the first Olympic Games to include women, she defeated Hélène Prévost on July 11 while playing in a full-length skirt and relying on an overarm serve. Playing Olympic tennis in a floor-length skirt already deserves some respect from me! Cooper also triumphed in mixed doubles and became the first woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal.

Marcenia “Toni” Stone was best known for being the first female to play regularly in a men’s professional baseball league. Stone signed on with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League in 1953, taking over the roster spot left by former Clowns player and major leaguer Hank Aaron, and played second base. Stone batted .243 in 50 games. She’s also remembered for reportedly recording a single against pitcher Satchel Paige in an exhibition game.

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Tidye Pickett, competing in the 80m hurdles, became the first Black woman to actively compete for the United States at the Olympics. Although Pickett made it to the semifinals, she broke her foot on a hurdle during the event. Pickett and fellow Black athlete Louise Stokes had already become the first Black women selected for a U.S. Olympic team in 1932, although racism kept them out of the relay final. Four years later, Pickett finally got her chance to step onto the Olympic track and make history herself.

Margaret Abbott was a twenty-two-year-old art student in Paris in 1900. In October, she shot 47 at Compiègne, France, to win a nine-hole golf tournament that was loosely part of the 1900 Paris Olympics (held in a hodgepodge way along with the World’s Fair). But there was no standard medal that year (Abbott won a porcelain bowl), and Abbott lived her life and died (in 1955) without ever knowing that she was an Olympic champion, a fact only uncovered decades later by historian Paula Welch.

Danish rider Lis Hartel was paralyzed below the knees after contracting polio in 1944 while pregnant. She learned to ride by using her thighs and balancing with her upper body on her horse Jubilee, and won the silver medal in individual dressage at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, the first Olympics to allow women to compete in equestrian events. Unable to walk without assistance, Hartel had to be lifted onto the podium by gold medalist Henri Saint Cyr. She won another silver medal in 1956.

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