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Amid all the excitement surrounding its first season of play, the Women's National Basketball Association remembered this summer to duly honor Smith College as the fountainhead of women's basketball. The Inaugural Season, a commemorative program published by the association, includes several handsome nods in Smith's direction. The program's prefatory essay, "The Women's Game Comes of Age," imagines a courtside gathering all of the significant figures in the history of women's basketball. First among these pioneers, it suggests, should be Smith gymnastics instructor Senda Berenson, "the matriarch of women's basketball," who in 1892, "less than a year after Dr. James A. Naismith invented the game adapted the rules for a women's game." In an article tracing the development of the WNBA, Berenson is given the first slot in a timeline on women's basketball. A subsequent article, "A Century of Growth," reproduces a full-length photograph of Berenson and includes a fuller account of her contribution to the game. Author Sally Jenkins notes that James Naismith invented basketball after his superiors at the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA Training School ordered him to find some indoor activity to divert unruly boys during the long winter months. "Berenson," Jenkins recounts, "read an article that Naismith wrote and wondered if the game would be a good activity for women [s]o she adapted the rules to make it easier for women to play and more acceptable for society matrons to embrace. She divided the court into three sections and required the players to stay in their assigned areas. To insure womanly decorum among her pupils, Berenson forbade snatching at the ball, holding it for more than three seconds, or dribbling it more than three times. In this way, Berenson hoped to prevent a young lady from developing 'dangerous nervous tendencies and losing the grace and dignity and self-respect we would all have her foster.'" Within two or three years of basketball's introduction in the Alumnae Gymnasium at Smith many other women's colleges nationwide took it up, dickering over whether to play Naismith's original game, Berenson's genteel variant or some other version. Jenkins reports other early controversies as well, over technique (Sophie Newcomb College rejected the two-handed throw because it thrust the shoulders forward "with a consequent flattening of the chest") and the game's tendency to inspire unladylike wellings of aggression and boisterousness. Berenson, Jenkins notes, was among those who recognized "that if the game did not improve its reputation for womanliness, [women] might not be allowed to play it. She also struck on the idea of aligning games to social affairs, serving refreshments or even elaborate dinners afterwards." Berenson was to see her version of the game ultimately lose out and the ramparts of propriety sag and buckle as women players increasingly chewed gum, made indelicate lunges after rolling balls, sat or even sprawled on the floor while resting, and freely and loudly used slang and called one another by last names or nicknames. If it was not exactly what Senda Berenson had had in mind, at least her own place in history is firmly on the record: in 1985 hers became the first woman's name included in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and the WNBA program honors her for her commitment "to providing women with the same opportunities that were available to men." |
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