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How long have women been playing ice hockey?

Women have been playing hockey for at least as long as men have. Certainly, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, women’s amateur teams and leagues were sprouting up all over Canada, from the Maritimes to Dawson City, Yukon. During the Boer War, the first moneymaking women’s game was staged in Montreal in a bid to raise cash to aid the wives of Canadian soldiers fighting in the conflict in South Africa. The first documented women’s league began life in 1900 when teams from Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec City joined forces to compete against one another. In those days women had to wear long skirts that they bunched around their ankles and used tactically to block shots. Needless to say, the men of the era fulminated against this “unseemly” female behaviour, frequently suggesting that women weren’t strong enough for the rigours of the sport or complaining about the ever-possible danger that they might fall and expose themselves. Judging by newspaper accounts in the early part of the twentieth century, women hockey players could take care of themselves, and sometimes fights as vicious as those common in men’s matches broke out on the ice. American women, too, embraced the new sport enthusiastically, and there is a newspaper account as early as 1899 of a game on artificial ice between two teams in Philadelphia. Early women’s clubs had colourful names such as the Arena Icebergs, the Civil Service Snowflakes, the Dundurn Amazons, the Saskatchewan Prairie Lilies, and the Meadow Lake Golden Girls. Very occasionally, women would play men, and in 1900 a female squad from Brandon, Manitoba, beat a men’s club representing a town bank. The first Ontario championship was played in 1914, and soon after, teams were competing for the Ladies’ Ontario Hockey Association’s trophy.