By Joe Spier
CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — Who was the only Jewish person featured on a Canadian postage stamp? Don’t know – here’s a hint. She was an Olympic Games multi-medal winner. Still don’t know – another hint. She was named Canada’s woman athlete of the half-century. Give up – then read on.
Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld was born on December 28, 1904 in Dnipropetrovsk, Russia. Prior to her first birthday Fanny’s family immigrated to Barrie, Ontario where her father started a not too successful junk business.
As a child, Fanny entered her first race, winning and receiving her prize, a box lunch. Fortunate because she had lost the money her parents had given her to buy a meal.
Becoming a teenager, Fanny excelled at a variety of sports, hockey, which was her favorite, basketball, track, lacrosse, softball and tennis. Fanny was quick and wiry and played with passion and aggressiveness. She bobbed her long hair to keep it out of her eyes while playing and hence received the nickname of “Bobbie” which stuck with her throughout her life. Her father was her number one fan always cheering her on at her games and races.
The Rosenfeld family moved to Toronto in 1922 where Bobbie obtained a job as a stenographer at the Patterson Chocolate Factory participating in sports during the evenings and on weekends including centering the women’s’ basketball team for the local YMHA.
The year 1923 was pivotal in the life of Bobbie Rosenfeld. She was at a picnic competing in a softball tournament on her factory’s team. A number of sporting events were going on at the picnic and her teammates encouraged Bobbie to enter the 100-yard dash. Bobbie was reluctant to do so because she was wearing a spinnaker midi, pup tent bloomers, wool socks and cleatless running shoes. Nevertheless, she did so, won the race, and afterwards was mobbed by people yelling, “Do you know who you beat?” She did not. It was the Canadian champion. In that race, Bobbie broke the Canadian record. She responded, “Isn’t that dandy”.
Bobbie was now given a coach, which she had never had before, received proper running cleats and went into training alongside the Canadian champion.
After a period of training, a major track meet was set at the 1923 Canadian National Exhibition between the Canadians and a U.S. team, which was the best relay team in the world and contained the world record holder for the 100-yard dash. At first, the Canadian girls were reluctant to come out. Not because they were afraid of the Americans but because the Americans were nattily dressed in matching little shorts and sweaters while each Canadian was left to her own resources in picking her attire. Bobbie wore an old baseball sweater, her brother’s swim trunks and her dad’s wool socks. She later described herself as “looking like something out of Disneyland”. The Canadians did come out and Bobbie won the 100-yard dash, beating both the world and the Canadian champions. As she crossed the finish line her father, sitting on the stadium fence, shouted, “Dat’s my girl”. That evening Bobbie played softball, her team winning the city championship.
In 1924, Bobbie Rosenfeld won the Toronto Ladies Grass Court Tennis Championship. In 1925, competing in the Ontario Ladies Track and Field Points Championships, in one afternoon, she won Gold in the discus, the 220-yard dash, the low hurdles and the long jump and Silver in the 100-yard dash and the javelin. In 1928, she set Canadian national records in the broad jump and the long jump that lasted for over 20 years. One sportswriter humorously wrote that the most efficient way to characterize Bobbie’s sports career is to say that, “she was not good at swimming”.
For the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, six female athletes, including Bobbie Rosenfeld, were chosen to represent Canada in track and field. The 1928 Olympics were, in essence, the first Olympics open to women. For women to be going to the Olympic Games in 1928 is itself quite a story.
At the ancient Olympic Games, women were banned from taking part. Married women were even forbidden to be spectators although virgins and prostitutes could watch.
The Olympic Games were revived in 1896. No women participated in those games, their involvement being opposed by the Vatican and by Pierre de Coubertin the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) who stated that the inclusion of women “would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect”.
It was later decided that women could participate in the more genteel sports. In 1900, women competed in ballooning, croquet and golf and before 1928, also in tennis, archery and figure skating but never in track and field.
By 1928, de Coubertin had retired as head of the IOC and for the first time women were permitted to compete in track and field but in only five events.
And so six Canadian female track and field athletes including Bobbie Rosenfeld arrived in Amsterdam, Bobbie for the first time wearing a uniform, a white blazer emblazoned with a crested red maple leaf.
Bobbie was to compete in four out of the five events open to women, the 100 and 800-meter races, the 4 x 100 relay race and the discus but a scheduling clash forced her to withdraw from the discus. She won the silver medal in the 100-meter race and was the lead off runner for the Canadian team that won the gold medal in the 4 x 100 relay setting a world record, but her finest performance was in the 800-meter race.
She entered the 800-meter race together with her teammate Jean Thompson, the Canadian favorite, who had been nursing a sore leg. Part way through the race Thompson began to falter, Bobbie who was running behind her sprinted beside Thompson, refusing to pass and coaxed her to a fourth place finish. Bobbie finished fifth. She undoubtedly would have won a medal except for her selfless act of friendship to a teammate. Of Bobbie Rosenfeld’s sportsmanship, Canada’s team manager said, “In the annals of women’s athletics there is no finer deed than this”.
At the 1928 Olympic Games, Bobbie Rosenfeld won more points for her team than any other athlete, male or female.
Following the 1928 Games, women’s participation in the Olympics suffered a setback. The IOC considered a resolution opposing the participation of women in future Olympic Games, a resolution supported by the Canadian representative who argued that women “were too high strung and were not physically capable of such competition”. The resolution was defeated but a compromise resolution prohibiting all women’s races over 200 meters was passed. That ban stayed in effect until 1960. Incidentally, prior to 1981, no woman served as a member of the IOC.
Within a year of her Olympic triumph, tragedy struck Bobbie Rosenfeld. She developed a severe case of arthritis so debilitating that a doctor recommended that she have her foot amputated which she refused. She was bedridden for 8 months and afterwards confined to crutches for a year. By 1931, Bobbie had recovered sufficiently to star on softball and hockey teams but a second attack in 1933 forced her permanent retirement from athletics. For a time thereafter, she coached track and softball.
In 1936, Bobbie Rosenfeld found her second calling. Where before she had championed women’s athleticism on the field, Bobbie would now do so with the pen. She became the only female sportswriter for the Globe and Mail writing a column entitled “Sports Reel”.
For 20 years, Bobbie wrote her column with wit and wisdom promoting, encouraging and defending women’s sports and extolling the virtue of female athleticism. She was an advocate for greater female participation in sports, she lobbied for expanded physical education programs for schoolgirls and she celebrated female pioneers in sport. She was one of those responsible for toppling traditional barriers against women’s involvement in athletics attacking the establishment when required.
Bobbie’s greatest delight was deflating, in print, the pompous chauvinism of some of her male colleagues. Calling upon “athletic maids to arms,” she used her pen to humiliate those who would depict female athletes as amazons and ugly ducklings rather than paragons of beauty and health. She did not suffer in silence the perverted egos of sexists. Responding to a particularly misogynistic column written by a male scribbler with the New York Post, Bobbie flayed and skewered him and then concluded with the words, “Aw nerts,” leaving little doubt as to what she was really telling him to do.
After two decades of writing, Bobbie hung up her pen to become her paper’s public relations manager. She retired from the Globe and Mail in 1966 because of illness.
Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld passed away on November 13, 1969 at the age of 66.
Bobbie’s awards and memorials include induction into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, selection to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, commemoration by Canada Post on a postage stamp and election by the Canadian Press as “Canada’s Female Athlete of the Half-Century”.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Bobbie Rosenfeld was to be chosen by the Jewish Women’s Archive as one of sixteen trailblazing Jewish women who “left a meaningful contribution that transformed the communities of which she was a part”, the list of which includes Bella Abzug, Emma Lazarus and Henrietta Szold. Bobbie Rosenfeld joins them on the same pedestal.
Today’s female athletes stand on the shoulders of Bobbie Rosenfeld who eased the way for them by having the courage to reject the anti-feminist views predominant in the athletics of the first half of the twentieth century and in so doing altered the course of women’s sports.
Each year a trophy is awarded to Canada’s Female Athlete of the Year. It is the Bobbie Rosenfeld Trophy.
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Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history. You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com. Comments below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and his or her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)