The lady athlete

Various feminine forerunners of sport and their modern counterparts, proving that the costume varies, not the woman

■ The lady athlete, contrary to popular supposition, did not spring, full-grown and armed to the teeth, from the brow of the present decade. She has been going on, in her own quiet way, for quite some time, as the accompanying photographs will plainly show, developing muscle after muscle and winning cups and medals hand over fist. Where today little Katherine Rawls wins the 10-foot springboard dive and the 300-yard medley race championships, we used to have Annette Kellerman diving from cliffs and shocking the world with her one-piece bathing tights. Ruth Law used to put her brother's cap on backwards and go out for a spin in her new-fangled flying-machine, and Fräulein Katchen Paulus jumped from balloons before anyone could stop her. The differences between past and present would seem to be chiefly sartorial—with the pioneers working under a handicap, although even a long skirt could not prevent Mary Browne from bounding around a tennis court with such agility that she held the national singles championship for three years running—1912, 1913, and 1914