My first encounter with cultural connections between tennis and sex occurred in the 1990s. While browsing a bookstore’s magazines, I found an oversized photography one, misplaced. I reached for it, thinking I would put it back where it belonged. When I picked it up, I discovered a surprise. Someone had used the generous proportions of the photography magazine to conceal a smaller pornographic magazine. Inside, a feature on “mixed doubles” showed a man and a woman engaging in sex acts on a tennis court.Footnote 1 The pictorial was the manifestation of ideas that had circulated for more than a century.
In everyday objects and occurrences—long before the Open Era began in 1968—cultural creators imagined and imposed sexy possibilities on the involvement of women in tennis. This phenomenon counterbalanced tennis’s reputation and status as a space of sophistication and liberation for women. The sexualization was not only the irritating and demeaning foe of top players but also their occasional friend by contributing to the popularity of women’s tennis, producing off-court opportunities, and increasing the cultural visibility of players.
1. First set: origins in life and art
Art yielded the first depictions of the intimate possibilities of tennis. Soon after the manufacture of the first sets of lawn tennis equipment in England in 1874, artists began painting tennis parties.Footnote 2 Held at private estates, these gatherings popularized tennis among the upper classes of Britain and America. Women’s presence made tennis parties a favorite subject of painters, who were “drawn to the sport’s dynamic movement and to the novelty of female players in their restrictive costumes.”Footnote 3 Artists captured blushed cheeks, chaperones, and rebuffs as men and women courted, imparting tennis with “an air of romance” absent from the playing cultures of other sports.Footnote 4 Yet the air was ripe with constraints as tight as the women’s corsets: “Young women were expected to be neither as strong, nor as energetic as men, and at this point, an over-arm serve or a swift spring to return a fast ball, broke the rules of social etiquette.”Footnote 5
Money and class allowed women to advance in tennis more rapidly than in any other sport. Tennis’s acceptability for them rested on its upper class connotations as well as perceptions that it was a social pastime rather than a competitive endeavor, “depends on grace and timing, not brawn and muscle,” and “involves no body contact and risk of injury.”Footnote 6 The wealthy established private country clubs. Although men were resolutely in charge, many clubs offered memberships and tournaments for females. The first national women’s championships of England (Wimbledon) and the United States were held in 1884 and 1888, respectively. By the early 1900s, the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), tennis’s governing body, was sanctioning dozens of tournaments at private clubs, putting the game decades ahead of other sports in organized competitive opportunities for women and girls.Footnote 7
Tennis flourished and so did the notion that female players—outfitted in elegant white dresses, skirts, and blouses—were “ladies.” The generalization was not applied to women in less expensive sports like basketball, track and field, and baseball. Society judged that ladies were physically attractive, adhered to stereotypes of femininity, and demurred to men’s authority. Ladies were worthy of respect. In segregated America, ladies were exclusively White.Footnote 8 Founded in 1916, the American Tennis Association (ATA) governed tennis for Black players, who were largely ignored by the White media and barred from the clubs and tournaments of the elite amateur tennis circuit.Footnote 9
2. Second set: picture postcards
The adoption of tennis as subject matter in the “postcard craze” of the first several decades of the twentieth century signaled two important developments: (1) that tennis had become a popular leisure activity for America’s expanding middle class and (2) that the romantic and the sexual would comingle in depictions of women.Footnote 10 In postcards, comic and sentimental, captions and imagery making corny puns of “tennis courts” and “courtship,” often in either staged scenes or illustrations of men and women embracing and kissing, were genre staples. Others revealed the sexual undercurrent that pervaded the cultural vision of women tennis players.
Located in Brooklyn, New York, F.G. Henry and Co. printed postcards in 1910 that portrayed men and women in amorous relations on tennis courts. Two postcards quipped on popular types of serves. “The English Service” shows a man and woman standing at the net as he stubbornly awaits her kiss.Footnote 11 Suggesting that Americans were forward, “The American Service” depicts a couple kissing passionately. The woman protrudes her behind and thrusts her bosom across the net and against the man’s arm.Footnote 12 Images on other Henry postcards are sadistic. In “Back Volley,” a woman spanks a man with a tennis racket as he bends over, while “Could You Beat It?” pictures a man reaching across the net with his racket to spank a woman.Footnote 13
Henry was not unique in producing racy tennis subject matter. Printed by an unnamed firm, “Serves You Right” presents a woman gazing into the camera. She holds between her thumb and middle finger a tennis ball for whacking with her racket.Footnote 14 Another postcard exhibits a lone woman wearing a low-cut blouse and dangling a racket below her waist. Her legs are spread, one on the ground while the other is raised on a tree stump. The title, “Won’t You Come and Play with Me,” is a double entendre.Footnote 15
Sexualized tennis postcards shared the same effects as more typical fare yet did much more. Both were handheld versions of life-sized people and things as well as “a way to communicate rapidly with friends and relatives” before the invention of social media.Footnote 16 Yet the production, sale, mailing, and receiving of sex-themed tennis postcards also conveyed contemporary theories and fears that sportswomen, even those in the “ladylike” tennis, possessed heightened sexual urges and curiosity.Footnote 17 These postcards circulated a discourse that women tennis players were sexpots—sexually desirable, interested, and available for men’s visual and erotic pleasure.Footnote 18
3. Third set: players, pin-ups, posters, opportunities, tours, and panties
For the next half century, sexualized portrayals of women tennis players—real and imagined—abounded in American culture. Physical Culture, Bernarr MacFadden’s popular magazine, published multiple covers between 1926 and 1933 parading women wearing swimsuits while playing tennis.Footnote 19 Pin-up artist Gil Elvgren painted “Net Results” (c. 1942), a green and white fantasy of a red-haired woman entangled in a tennis net. Dress askew, her breasts are partially exposed, and her open legs and thighs are bare.Footnote 20 Painted from the perspective of someone standing over her, the woman may allude to Pauline Betz, the red-haired champion of Wimbledon in 1946 and four-time winner of the USLTA’s National Championship at Forest Hills. In 1951, RKO Pictures released Hard, Fast and Beautiful, a drama about a tennis prodigy, Florence, who must choose between her mother and a man. Its promotional poster was an illustration of Florence wearing only white shorts and a pointy white halter top midriff that reveals the shape of her right nipple.Footnote 21 Paradoxically, the persistent popularity and social acceptance of tennis for women as ladylike went hand in hand with sexy visuals, underscoring the “virtuous-vixen dichotomy” that characterized conceptions of women tennis players.Footnote 22 The images evinced the fetishization and the social (and thus erotic) value of White women who were able-bodied, slim, and adherent to stereotypes of femininity.
Female tennis players, the most visible and socially prominent female athletes in America, carried out their careers in this cultural climate of objectification and sexualization, with top stars—those who won Wimbledon, Forest Hills, or both—receiving opportunities and publicity unheard of for most other sportswomen. (Only swimmers, golfers, and figure skaters came close.)Footnote 23 Alice Marble appeared on the cover of Life, which regularly chronicled tennis.Footnote 24 Time made cover models and stories of Wills, Jacobs, Betz, and Gibson, an ATA product and the first African American to compete at Forest Hills and Wimbledon and the first to win titles at them.Footnote 25 These women plus Maureen Connolly and Doris Hart wrote autobiographies.Footnote 26 Wills, Jacobs, Sarah Palfrey Cooke, and Connolly wrote instruction books.Footnote 27 Magazines and newspapers regularly hired Wills, Jacobs, Marble, Cooke, and Connolly to write articles.Footnote 28 Wills, an artist whose drawings and paintings were exhibited in galleries in America and Europe, rendered pictures to enliven her writings. Celebrated for her looks and her style, she was also a fashion designer.Footnote 29
Players welcomed the business opportunities and media exposure. The amateur code of elite tennis made competition itself unremunerative. Amateurs, furthermore, could not endorse products. Sexist attitudes that women were second-rate athletes led to subprime court assignments and further limited their earnings if they turned professional.Footnote 30
Stardom did not spare these highly accomplished women from navigating sex-related events, innuendos, and expectations that surfaced on their career paths in a straight, masculinist culture. Wills, the most prominent woman in the “Golden Age of American Sports,” won 19 singles majors between 1923 and 1938.Footnote 31 Her memory of her first, Forest Hills in 1923, was marred by “annoyance”: at the end, the umpire “jumped down from his chair and kissed me on both cheeks.”Footnote 32 Wills was 17. She refused to accommodate sportswriters who criticized her for not smiling during her matches. Historian Larry Engelmann writes that Wills’s father inspected her mail and that she was stalked.Footnote 33
Like Wills, Jacobs scoffed at the sexually charged environment. She was infuriated by the “lack of respect” when The New Yorker called women tennis players “galloping virgins.”Footnote 34 She broke tradition in 1933 by choosing shorts as her playing uniform to increase her mobility. In 1935, Jacobs posed for English society photographer Dorothy Wilding. In one portrait, Jacobs wears long shorts and a polo shirt. With an outstretched leg, a hand behind her head, and a smile, Jacobs, a lesbian, parodied cheesecake photography.Footnote 35
Sexual perceptions and uses of tennis persisted in the 1940s. Patriotically, several women accepted War Department invitations to play morale-boosting exhibition matches on military bases during World War II. The tours gave players more chances to compete, heightened name recognition, and travel experience. Alice Marble, a leading participant, assumed that soldiers “turned out just to see girls in shorts.”Footnote 36 Decades later, a veteran swore that another player “was stark naked under her short, pleated tennis skirt, and she took every opportunity to show herself to the sailors, who howled in approval.”Footnote 37 His fantasy elides with the tours as part of the American military’s history of organizing activities to divert and harness soldiers’ sexual interests.Footnote 38
The sexualization of women’s tennis burned Gertrude “Gussy” Moran. Lacking time to shop for panties to match her new Teddy Tinling-designed tennis outfit before Wimbledon in 1949, Moran wore lace-trimmed ones that a Tinling underling sewed at the couturier’s command. None sought titillation, only something “flatteringly feminine” on short notice.Footnote 39 Nevertheless, a media frenzy ensued at Wimbledon as press photographers strained to snap pictures of Moran’s underwear. Instantly, Moran became famous, or infamous. She received a $75,000 professional tennis contract and jobs in sports broadcasting but also censure. Wimbledon’s leaders accused her of “bringing vulgarity and sin into tennis.”Footnote 40 Mortified by the unwanted attention to her body, Moran said later: “I am interested in clothes I can play tennis in, not in creating a sensation and certainly not in anything anyone at all could consider in poor taste.”Footnote 41
Sex, women’s tennis, and civil rights collided in the last full decade of the pre-Open Era. The Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The decision contributed, and exacerbated resistance, to integration. South Carolina governor James F. Byrnes painted a vivid picture to express his displeasure: “white girl in shorts plays tennis in the yard of a segregated school; Negro boy enters playground; the basic wall between the species begins to crumble, and social chaos has begun to envelope humanity.”Footnote 42 Byrnes’s comments were part of the history of stirring fears of interracial sexual contact and relationships to justify segregation.Footnote 43 Byrnes thus applied tennis to trade in the stereotype that Black males covet White females, exercise a possessive attitude toward White women and girls, and undermine the civil rights of African Americans.Footnote 44
One of whom was Althea Gibson. Together, racism and sexism in American culture impeded Gibson’s ability to profit from professional tennis and product endorsements.Footnote 45 In 1959, she embarked on a professional tour with the blond former amateur Karol Fageros. Closer to the Madison Avenue ideal, Fageros, pursuing publicity and business opportunities, wore gold lamè panties during their matches. In its January 28, 1960, issue, Jet published a picture of the pair as they applied their makeup before a match. Gibson allowed the photographer to shoot her bare legs from behind, while Fageros intentionally exposed her panties. The tour was short-lived, but the picture led Jet’s section called “The Week’s Best Photos.”Footnote 46
4. Match point: taking advantage in the open era
The Open Era began in 1968, allowing amateurs and professionals to meet in the majors and other tournaments, and ignited the lucrative “tennis boom.” Founded in 1970 by nine women, including 12-time major champion and women’s rights activist Billie Jean King, the Virginia Slims Tour—named for a line of cigarettes sold by sponsor Philip Morris—sought more competitive opportunities and higher and equitable prize money for women. Ensconced in the Sexual Revolution, the Slims, as the tour was known, embraced the maxim “sex sells,” through revealing apparel, flirtatious publicity campaigns, and a provocative slogan—“You’ve come a long way, baby”—which irritated feminists.Footnote 47 In 1973, King founded the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), which gradually subsumed the Slims. She believed sex and tennis were a winning combination: “I think tennis is a very sexy sport and that is good. The players are young, with excellent bodies, clothed in relatively little. It offers the healthiest, most appealing presentation of sex I can imagine, and we in the sport must acknowledge that and use it to our advantage.”Footnote 48
The WTA endures today as the longest lasting women’s professional tennis tour. Beyond museums, women’s tennis before the Open Era is practically ignored.Footnote 49 The WTA website begins its history in 1968, overlooking the achievements and challenges of past players.Footnote 50 The WTA has come farther than it even knows—or has it, baby?
Author contribution
Conceptualization: A.B.; Data curation: A.B.; Formal analysis: A.B.; Funding acquisition: A.B.; Investigation: A.B.; Methodology: A.B.; Project administration: A.B.; Resources: A.B.; Software: A.B.; Supervision: A.B.; Validation: A.B.; Visualization: A.B.; Writing - original draft: A.B.; Writing - review & editing: A.B.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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