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    Yes, She Can!: Women's Sports Pioneers
    Yes, She Can!: Women's Sports Pioneers
    Yes, She Can!: Women's Sports Pioneers
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Yes, She Can!: Women's Sports Pioneers

    By Glenn Stout

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Yes, She Can! celebrates ground-breaking female athletes who became the first—and sometimes only—women to achieve at the highest levels of their sports.

    Featuring Trudy Ederle, the subject of Young Woman and the Sea, the Disney+ biopic starring Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley.

    In this middle grade collection of sporting heroines these pioneers show girls that anything is possible with grit, determination, and practice.

    The ahletes include:

    • Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel
    • Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett, the first African American women to race on the Olympic track team
    • Julie Krone, the first female winner of a Triple Crown race
    • Danica Patrick, the only woman to win an IndyCar Series race
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 4, 2011
    ISBN9780547574097
    Yes, She Can!: Women's Sports Pioneers
    Author

    Glenn Stout

    Glenn Stout is a writer, author, and editor, and served as series editor of The Best American Sports Writing, and founding editor of The Year’s Best Sports Writing. He is also the author of Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, Fenway 1912, Nine Months at Ground Zero, and many other award-winning and best-selling books. He also served as a consultant on the Disney+ film adaptation of Young Woman and the Sea. Stout lives in Lake Champlain in Vermont.

    Read more from Glenn Stout

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    • 4/5
      "Yes She Can! : Women's Sports Pioneers" tells the stories of five women who broke new ground in sports history. From Trudy Ederle, who in 1926 became the first woman to swim the English Channel, to Danica Patrick, the first woman to win an Indy car race, these inspirational women's achievements span over eighty years. The informal, conversational tone of the book will appeal to kids, but can make it difficult to locate concrete information like dates within the text. It is also unclear why these sports figures in particular were chosen, while other influential women's sports pioneers such as Babe Didrikson Zaharias were passed over. There are also no athletes included between from the period between the 1936 Olympic Games and the 1970's, raising questions of whether nothing notable happened in that period or whether the author did not exercise due diligence in performing research. A list of resources for further reading appears at the end of the volume; a full bibliography is not included. Recommended for fourth through sixth graders, especially sports fans or fans of biographies.

    Book preview

    Yes, She Can! - Glenn Stout

    Copyright © 2011 by Glenn Stout

    All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Sandpiper, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

    www.hmhco.com

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Stout, Glenn, 1958–

    Yes she can!: women’s sports pioneers/by Glenn Stout.

    p. cm.—(Good sports ; 2)

    ISBN 978-0-547-41725-7

    1. Women athletes—Biography. 2. Sports for women—History. I. Title.

    GV697.A1S74 2011

    796.0922 dc22

    2010022984

    eISBN 978-0-547-57409-7

    v2.0214

    This book is dedicated to

    SAORLA STOUT,

    PIPER DEAN,

    AINSLEY DEAN,

    and all my other young friends

    and readers who are Good Sports

    [Image]

    Introduction

    Girls don’t do that.

    Girls shouldn’t do that.

    Girls can’t do that.

    Have you ever heard someone say that? Well, not very long ago, that’s exactly what many people said whenever a woman tried to play a sport or do anything athletic. Most people believed that women were physically too weak and delicate to play sports. There might as well have been a sign at the gymnasium door that said MEN ONLY.

    Fortunately, some women didn’t believe what they were told. When these sports pioneers were told Girls don’t, they did. When they were told Girls shouldn’t, they asked Why not? And when they were told Girls can’t, they became more determined than ever. This book tells the stories of several pioneers in women’s sports, all of whom refused to be told what they could and could not do. And because they proved that girls can do anything, women today compete in sports of all kinds, from track and field, figure skating, and swimming to tackle football and racecar driving. Sports not only provide good exercise, they also help participants gain self-confidence and learn to work together and set goals.

    It took some remarkable women to show everyone else the way. That’s what Gertrude Trudy Ederle, Louise Stokes, Tidye Pickett, Julie Krone, and Danica Patrick all have in common. When these girls were told they could not do something, they made even those who had doubted them say, Yes, she can!

    [Image]

    TRUDY EDERLE

    A smiling Trudy Ederle practices swimming in the English Channel.

    [Image]

    Trudy’s Big Splash

    ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 6, 1926, an editorial appeared in the London Daily News about the rights of women to compete in and play sports. The editorial ended, Even the most uncompromising champion of the rights of women must admit that in contests of physical skill, speed, and endurance, they must forever remain the weaker sex. As residents of London read the paper over their morning tea, a young American woman named Trudy Ederle stood on the shore in France and looked out across the English Channel toward England, twenty-one miles away.

    Although dozens and dozens of people had tried to swim the English Channel before, only five—all men—had made it across. Swimming the Channel is one of the most difficult and dangerous athletic feats in the world. Even today, more people have climbed Mount Everest than have swum the English Channel. In 1875, Matthew Webb became the first person to swim the Channel, a feat that took him nearly twenty-two hours to accomplish. The speed record was held by the third person to swim the Channel, Enrique Tirabocci, who in 1923 made the crossing in sixteen hours and thirty-three minutes.

    Although many had tried, no woman had ever swum the English Channel. A few had made it within a few miles of the opposite shore before bad weather, fatigue, and tides forced them out of the water, and many more quit after only a few hours in the water. In 1925, in fact, Trudy Ederle had tried to swim the Channel only to fail. Although she had been considered the greatest female swimmer in the world at the time, many observers thought that if Trudy could not swim the Channel, then no woman could.

    Trudy disagreed and decided to try again. Now, just a few minutes after seven a.m., she adjusted her swimming goggles and stepped into the water. When the waves reached her chest, she took a deep breath, looked up at the sun peeking through the hazy summer sky, and whispered, God, help me. Then, with a big splash, she dove beneath the waves and started swimming.

    Trudy was determined to succeed this time. She knew that a woman could swim the English Channel.

    All she had to do was prove it.

    In the summer of 1915, Trudy’s father, Henry, purchased a small cottage near the beach in Highlands, New Jersey. The Ederle family lived in New York City, where Henry owned and operated a successful butcher shop. Henry and his wife, Gertrud, thought their children—Helen, age twelve; Meg, age ten; Trudy, age nine; and Emma and George, both toddlers—would enjoy spending the summers out of the city.

    Highlands was beautiful. Trudy loved gazing out over the water, the sea breeze blowing through her light brown hair and the sun bringing out the freckles on her face. There were plenty of children her age to play with, but Trudy, who was partially deaf due to a bout with the measles a few years before, was a little shy. She sometimes couldn’t understand what strangers were saying and occasionally felt embarrassed when meeting new people, so she followed her older sisters Helen and Meg around like a puppy. Nearly every day they all went to the beach together.

    That was the problem. Helen and Meg knew how to swim. Trudy did not. When Helen and Meg went in the water, Trudy had to stay behind, playing alone in the sand and wading in the shallows.

    It seems hard to believe today, but a hundred years ago, very few women knew how to swim, and few were allowed to compete in sports of any kind. When women went to the beach, they were expected to wear long-sleeved blouses and stockings that made swimming next to impossible. There were virtually no swimming pools with lifeguards, no groups like the YWCA that gave swimming lessons, and no girls’ swim teams or swim meets for young girls to compete in. Trudy’s sisters only knew how to swim because they had been taught the dog paddle and the breaststroke by their cousins when the family had visited relatives in Germany. Trudy had been too young to learn, and now she felt left out.

    Henry Ederle, however, had a solution. One day he went to

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