Women’s tennis: A small step at the US Open 50 years ago was a giant leap
Women’s tennis was luckier. It had a King.
It is 50 years since women’s tennis scored its first victory in pay equality. In 1973, the US Open became the first Grand Slam to announce equal prize money for men and women.
In 1968, Billie Jean King had won the first Open era Wimbledon women’s title and received £750 for it while her ‘counterpart’ Rod Laver took home £2,000. In 1970, she and eight other US women players broke away from the US tennis tour over equal pay demand. They created Virginia Slims Invitational circuit.
But things didn’t change. In 1972, the US Open men’s singles champion Ilie Nastase received $25,000. The women’s winner, King, got $10,000. The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) was launched in 1973 and King threatened to boycott the US Open until the pay was equalised. And it was!
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Some 50 years before that, Suzanne Lenglen had set the wheels in motion for the many freedoms that women’s tennis has fought for, and still doing. The women’s contribution in the first World War (1914-18) had already given women’s suffrage a boost. As American historian Leslie P Hume noted, “it had challenged the notion of women’s physical and mental inferiority”.
In 1919, at Wimbledon, Lenglen scrapped the corset and petticoat. For a long time, corsets had been responsible for making women faint (they would have done the same to men too). Also, the reason behind two-out-of-three sets for women versus three-out-of-five for men in tennis. Langlen then went sleeveless a few years later, but Vanity Fair’s Grantland Rice chose to gush over her “perfectly molded arms, bare and brown from many suns”.
Lili de Alvarez of Spain debuted
