8 March 1889
The sport of ice hockey owes a huge debt of gratitude to Lord Stanley of Preston and his family. Not only did the noble lord, who was Canada’s Governor General from 1888 to 1893, donate the Cup that today signifies North American hockey supremacy, he and his children did much to popularize the sport. After attending a hockey game in Montreal at that city’s 1889 winter carnival, the Stanley family, along with members of the vice-regal staff, donned skates and picked up hockey sticks to play shinny on the outdoor rink at Rideau Hall. In that status-conscious time, the vice-regal stamp of approval did much to boost hockey’s acceptance. Two of the Stanley boys, Arthur and Edward, became members of the “Rideau Rebels,” or more formally, the “Vice-Regal & Parliamentary Hockey Club.” Arthur Stanley, along with two other “Rebels,” helped establish the Ontario Hockey Association in 1890.
Sometimes overlooked is the role of Lord Preston’s daughter, Isobel, in promoting hockey during these early days. Like her brothers, she became enamoured with the sport and played with them and with Rideau Hall ladies on the family’s rink. The earliest known photograph of women playing hockey features a blurry image of Lady Isobel stickhandling around Rideau Hall women dressed in long dresses on the Rideau Hall’s outdoor rink. Lady Isobel playing hockey, c. 1890, Ottawa Citizen.
The first known women’s hockey game occurred in Ottawa on Friday, 8 March 1889. The match was held at the new Rideau Skating Rink located at the corner of Theodore St (now Laurier Avenue, East) and Waller Street, today the site of the Arts Hall of Ottawa University. The Rideau Rink, which was one of the first indoor rinks in Canada, had a rink for skating as well as sheets of ice for curling. It had been officially opened by Lord Stanley at the beginning of the previous February. Stanley, an avid sportsman, had helped to finance the rink’s construction along with local investors and the city’s skaters.
The first women’s hockey game matched a Government House team against a team from the Rideau Skating Club. The Citizen reported that the Government House team was comprised of Miss Lister (captain), Mrs. Bagot, the Hon. Isabel Stanley, and Miss Kingsford. The Rideaus were represented by Mrs. Jones (captain), Mrs. Crombie and the two Miss Smiths.
Few details of the game were provided in the news article other than saying that the Government House team won. It is noteworthy, however, that there were only four players on each team. The usual complement for a hockey team at that time was seven: three forwards, two half-backs, one full-back, and a goalkeeper. This suggests that the number of female players was very small at that time. The women also likely came from Ottawa’s high society.
Women’s hockey then slipped out of the news for a few years. In late 1893, the Ottawa Daily Citizen opined that “We very much fear that “Ladies’ Hockey” is dead.” However, echoing Mark Twain, reports of the death of women’s hockey were greatly exaggerated. While it might have been slumbering in Ottawa, especially following the departure of Isobel Stanley in 1893 at the end of her father term as Governor General, it remained alive in eastern Ontario. In March 1895, a hockey match was held between women’s teams from Carleton Place and Perth; Carleton won two goals to one. The Ottawa Journal reported that the Perth players wore dark skirts, white sweaters, and a light tweed cap while the Carleton Place team had “no uniform garb.”
The following November, a women’s hockey club was organized in Smith’s Falls. The news of a Smith’s Fall’s team put the pressure on Ottawa to follow suit. “Why should Ottawa be behind Smith’s Falls? asked the Journal. By January 1896, the Journal happily reported that Rideau Rink was lively on weekday mornings with the resumption of ladies’ hockey practices. The players seem to have been drawn from the women who attended hockey classes at the Ottawa Amateur Athletic Club.
There were at least three women’s hockey teams in Ottawa in 1896—the Rideaus, who practised out of the Rideau Rink in Sandy Hill, the Alphas of New Edinburgh, and a team of “Stewarton Ladies.” (Stewarton was an area surrounding what is now the Museum of Nature.) In late February 1896, the Alpha Ladies’ Hockey Club took on the Smith’s Fall’s team in Smith’s Falls. The Ottawa team wore white jerseys with a red letter “A” on front, with red skirts and white tam-o’shanters. The Smith’s Falls’ team wore blue. Both teams were fully staffed with seven players. The Ottawa club won four goals to two. Reflective of the times, the Ottawa team members, who were all unmarried, had a married woman chaperon for their trip to Smith’s Falls.
A few days later, the Alphas and the Rideaus played the first of two games against each other. While the Rideaus reportedly had a weight advantage over their rivals, and were judged better skaters, this was their first time in competition. In contrast, the Alphas had the experience, having been victorious in their two earlier games (with Smith’s Falls and Stewarton) and were said to have better stick-handling abilities. The Rideau Club work dark blue skirts, light blue “waists” and dark tam-o’shanters. The Alphas dressed in white skirts, red jerseys with a white letter “A” on front, with white tam-o’shanters.
The game must have been a real barnburner. Tied at zero at the half, Bettie Bell, one of the Alphas’ forwards scored with just two minutes remaining. Her goal unleashed pandemonium among their fans. The Journal reported “Fair girls shouted and jumped on chairs to flaunt their colours, while (shame to tell it) a number of the male supporters of the Rideau Club were observed to be surreptitiously changing their colours behind the posts, only to come out and yell ‘Alpha’ with the best.”
The rematch, held a week later, ended in a tie. Again, the game was hard played. The Citizen commented that the play “surprised hundreds of the sterner sex who went to the match expecting to see many ludicrous scenes and to have many good laughs. Converted by the women’s prowess on the ice, the men became “wildly enthusiastic.”
Still, women’s hockey was considered unladylike by some, and mocked by others. Between the two matches between the Alphas and the Rideaus, a burlesque men’s hockey game was held at the Rideau Rink with the “Gems” of Montreal taking on the “Pets” of the Ottawa Amateur Athletic Club. The Ottawa “Pets” were dressed in the “style of the new woman” wearing bloomers of many colours and fancy hats. They apparently earned many guffaws from the crowd.
Despite the ice success of the Alphas and the Rideaus, women’s hockey teams seemed to come and go in Ottawa through the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, with games played on an ad hoc basis at both the Rideau Rink and Dey’s Rink.
Elsewhere, women’s teams were formed in other centres, including Pembroke, Renfrew, Montreal, Toronto, and Kingston. One game held in Montreal in 1900 featured a match between “maids” and “matrons.” Men were barred from the rink except for males officiating the event. One small boy who snuck in was chased out.
Here in Ottawa, two hockey games were played in 1900 at the Rideau Rink between “the young ladies of Upper Town,” also known as the “Union Jacks,” and the “young ladies of Sandy Hill.” Reportedly, the players set a fast pace with heavy checking, including body checking. Miss Bates, in goal for Sandy Hill, was described as ‘a veritable stone wall” who deftly turned aside shot after shot. Sandy Hill’s captain, Jessie Gilmour, was “a tower of strength at cover point” [roughly equivalent to defence]. The journalist covering the game likened her to Weldy Young, the Ottawa Senators’ star defenceman who had just left the capital to try his luck in the Klondike gold rush.
However, the Sandy Hill women had met their match with the “Union Jacks, led by Frances Geddes, their captain, who played a “faultless game.” After an hour of play with the score tied at nil, an extra fifteen minutes of overtime was played. The game ended in a scoreless tie.
Ten days later, the teams met again to decide who was the better team. Again, Frances Geddes of the Union Jacks was the star, playing “like a real Canadian champion.” But Miss G. Davidson, the Sandy Hill goaltender, was faultless, stopping every shot. The evenly matched teams ended play with another scoreless draw. The Citizen called the game the “most hair-raising hockey that could be imagined.”
In 1908, a women’s hockey team called the “Busy Bees,” also known as the “Cliffsides,” claimed the Ladies’ Hockey Championship of Ottawa, after downing a civil servants’ team and the Sandy Hill team, the latter with a score of two goals to one. The Busy Bees later lost to a team from Westmount, Quebec.
Women’s hockey gained considerable popularity during World War One. In 1915, the Eastern Ladies’ Hockey League was established with four teams in Montreal—the Maisoneuve Stanleys, the North End Stanleys, the Westerns and the Telegraph. The teams played at that city’s Jubilee Arena, where they drew in excess of 3,000 fans per game. The first goaltender to wear a facemask was Miss Hardman of the Westerns. This was almost half a century before Jacques Plante of the Canadiens did likewise.
In 1922, the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association was formed, which included an Ottawa team called the “Alerts” who won the Ontario Ladies’ Championship in 1923 and 1924. After peaking in the 1930s, with the very popular Preston Rivulettes winning ten successive women’s hockey titles, women’s hockey went into decline, and virtually disappeared after World War II. Hockey became viewed as a men-only sport.
The modern women’s hockey game dates to the 1980s. Women’s ice hockey became an Olympic sport at the 1992 Nagano, Olympics in Japan. In 2015, the professional National Women’s Hockey League, now known as the Premier Hockey Federation, was formed. Initially with four teams, the Federation has seven teams—the Boston Pride, the Buffalo Beauts, the Connecticut Whales, the Metropolitan Riveters, the Minnesota Whitecaps, the Montreal Force and the Toronto Six. The Federation’s championship trophy is the Isobel Cup, named in honour of Lady Isobel, Lord Stanley’s daughter who debuted women’s hockey in 1889.
Sources:
Gazette (Montreal), 2014. “Eastern Ladies Hockey League Began Playing in 1915,” 4 January.
Evening Journal, 1896. “The Puck in Fair Hands,” 13 March.
——————–, 1900. “Ladies’ Played Hockey,” 24 January.
——————–, 1900. “Ladies Played Hockey,” 8 March.
Montreal Star, 1916. “Lady In The Iron Mask For Next Cornwall Game,” 7 February.
Ottawa Daily Citizen, 1889. “The Season’s Pastimes,” 9 March.
————————-, 1895. “Just A Little Slip,” 18 March.
————————-, 1895. “Ladies’ Hockey Team In Sight,” 19 December.
————————-, 1896. “Society In Ottawa,” 21 January.
————————-, 1896. “Ottawa Ladies Win,” 2 March.
————————-, 1896. “Ladies Play Hockey,” 18 March.
————————-, 1900. “The Ladies Played Hockey,” 31 January.
————————-, 1900. “Ladies Play Hockey,” 12 February.
————————-, 1908. “Busy Bees Victorious,” 24 March.
————————-, 1908. “Cliffsides’ Busy Day,” 29 February.
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