By Megan Reynolds
With just 1:20 remaining in the third period at the Tsongas Center, Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) Boston has a chance to break the 3-3 tie and clinch their spot in the playoffs with a win over PWHL Montreal. Going into the third, Boston was up 3-0, with goals from the captain, Hilary Knight, the third draft pick overall, Alina Müller, and associate captain, Megan Keller. Montreal nearly overcame Boston with three unanswered goals in the third with two from Mikyla Grant-Mentis on the power-play and one from Montreal’s captain, Marie-Philip Poulin.
At 18:40, with just over a minute until the end of regulation, Kaleigh Fratkin for Boston finds the back of the net after the puck deflected off a Montreal player, pushing Boston to a 4-3 lead. With Fratkin’s goal, Boston secured their spot in the PWHL inaugural season playoffs.
The team would go on to beat Montreal again in the semifinals, in a best-of-five series, and face PWHL Minnesota in the finals. Boston unfortunately fell to Minnesota in the championship game, in a 3-0 loss. While Minnesota was crowned the PWHL’s Inaugural Season Walter Cup Champions, Boston still fought hard in their inaugural season and represented the women who came before. The legacy of earlier teams, Massport Jets (1971-1998), Boston/Worcester Blades (2010-2019), and the Boston Pride (2015-2023) helped pave the way for the now Boston Fleet.[1]
With the formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) in Summer 2023, the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King Enterprises secured hope for the future of women’s professional hockey. Prior to the PWHL, there hadn’t been one unified professional league for women’s hockey. Instead, there were a handful of small leagues playing throughout North America beginning in the early 2000s but none on the same scale as, say, the men’s National Hockey League (NHL). Unlike the NHL, which was founded in 1917, these women’s leagues were messy, struggled financially, and had to fight for ice time. The Massport Jets, the first recognized professional and successful women’s hockey team in the United States, had few other women’s teams to play against; in the 1970s, the Jets primarily played against men. After the Jets disbanded in 1982, women’s hockey at the professional level nearly ceased to exist until the US Women’s Ice Hockey Team won Gold at the 1998 Winter Olympics. These Games saw the first-time women’s ice hockey played at the Olympic level.
In the following decades, various women’s hockey leagues formed across North America, each with its own struggles; in Boston, these included the Boston Blades, Boston Pride, and Boston Fleet. Despite this history, these leagues and teams are still underrepresented within public spaces. Even in Boston, a city that is well-known for its hockey teams and fans, this important sports history has no presence in monuments or museums.
Much of this reluctance to fully embrace women’s professional hockey connects to the beginnings of the modern sports era in the late 19th century. The idea of Muscular Christianity – the masculine practice of Christianity that prioritized health, masculinity, and building a strong, muscular body – shaped the development of sports and play (Putney 5). In ascribing such characteristics to men, Muscular Christianity helped define athletics and sports as masculine– physically and mentally demanding; building muscle and staying active were for men. Associating sports with the masculine made them inappropriate for women, and women who engaged with sporting activities were seen as unladylike.
Historically, women’s hockey has been measured against Muscular Christianity’s masculine/feminine dichotomy and is thus judged as being too masculine for women. This historical setback has led to the struggle of legitimizing women’s hockey as a professional sport. I envision revealing this struggle and giving space and visibility to the history of women’s ice hockey through a public exhibition.
***
An internship with Interpreting Sports has provided me with the tools and methods to recognize when and how women’s sports are constrained from recognition in the public sphere. Through workshops and their book, Interpreting Sports at Museums and Historic Sites (2023), Interpreting Sports educates museum professionals in reinterpreting sports history; they seek to help museums move away from primarily celebratory/commemorative interpretation of sports history, to incorporate socially relevant history.
Celebratory and commemorative interpretations can offer a bridge to exploring the social history of sports; it is important not to eliminate these celebratory narratives entirely. To support this, I have focused on creating workshop slides for Interpreting Sports that introduce social history into the narrative. This work has helped shape my ideas around planning an exhibit to interpret Boston’s four professional women’s hockey teams. Looking ahead, I hope that my capstone project will call out the lack of celebration and commemoration for these four teams. I imagine an exhibition that engages a wide audience, one that offers a balanced interpretation that includes celebration, commemoration, and the socially responsive and culturally relevant stories that humanize players and teams. The exhibit will explore the impact of Title IX – a federal civil rights law passed in 1972 – provided women a more equal opportunity to play sports at federally funded institutes. It will also focus on team histories, players’ introductions to hockey and the obstacles faced along their journeys to professional leagues. This strategy will allow visitors to connect with individual players’ stories, while also offering a narrative that considers broader social context. The final exhibition will be located at The Sports Museum, inside TD Garden. Integrating this exhibit into the already existing stories The Sports Museum tells will increase potential audiences and accessibility. The exhibit’s key audience will be women’s hockey fans – whether women, men, or children – with their enthusiasm and increased interest since the founding of the PWHL.
References:
Harris, Kathryn Leann with Douglas Stark. Interpreting Sports at Museums and Historic Sites. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.
Maurer, Elizabeth L. “Evening the Score: Interpreting the History of Women and Sports.” In Interpreting Sports at Museums and Historic Sites, edited by Kathryn Leann Harris with Douglas Stark, 36-39. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.
Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Reid, Patrick A. and Daniel S. Mason. “‘Women Can’t Skate That Fast and Shoot That Hard!’: The First Women’s World Ice Hockey Championship, 1990.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 32, no. 4 (2015): 1678-1696.
[1] As I was writing this, the Professional Women’s Hockey League announced official names and logos for their Original Six teams. PWHL Boston, as they were known during their inaugural season, is now the Boston Fleet.