at Saint-Cloud, Paris, on her fifteenth birthday, making her the youngest person in tennis history to this day to win a major championship.
Lenglen made her Wimbledon debut in 1919, taking on seven-time champion Dorothea Douglass Chambers in the final. The historic match was played before eight thousand onlookers, including King George V and his Queen-Consort, Mary of Teck. Lenglen won the match; however, the young woman’s skill wasn’t the only subject to draw notice and public comment. The media squawked about her dress, which revealed her forearms and ended above the calf; at the time, others competed in body-covering ensembles. The staid British were also shocked to see this French woman-athlete dare to casually sip brandy between sets.
Lenglen dominated women’s tennis singles at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Belgium. On her way to winning a gold medal, she lost only four games, three of them in the final against Dorothy Holman of England. She won another gold medal in the mixed doubles event; in the women’s doubles, she was eliminated in the semifinals but won bronze after the opposing pair withdrew. At Wimbledon, she won the singles championship every year from 1919 to 1925—except in 1924, when health problems forced her to withdraw after winning the quarterfinal. After 1925, no other Frenchwoman would win the Wimbledon ladies’ singles title again until Amélie Mauresmo in 2006. From 1920 to 1926, Lenglen won the French Championships singles title six times and the doubles title five times, as well as three World Hard Court Championships in 1921–1923. Astoundingly, she only lost seven matches in her entire career.
Suzanne Lenglen was the first major female tennis star ever to go pro. Sports promoter C. C. Pyle paid her fifty thousand dollars to tour the US and play a series of matches against Mary K. Browne, who at thirty-five was considered past her best years for tennis—although Browne had made it to the French Championships final that year, she lost to Lenglen and only managed to score one point during the entire match. This was the first time ever that a women’s match was the headliner event of such a tour, even though male players were part of the exhibition as well. When the tour ended in early 1927, Lenglen had won every one of her thirty-eight matches; but she was exhausted, and her doctor advised a lengthy respite from the sport. She decided to retire from competition and set up a tennis school with help and funding from her lover, Jean Tillier. The school gradually grew and gained recognition; Lenglen also wrote several tennis texts in those years.
Lenglen’s talent, verve, and style had changed women’s tennis forever. Before the arc of her brilliant career, very few tennis fans were interested in women’s matches. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978, and many hold her to be one of the best tennis players ever. The following year, the French Open began to award a trophy called the “Coupe Suzanne Lenglen” to the winner of the women’s singles competition. With this trophy, Suzanne Lenglen’s legacy is literally being handed down from champion to champion, as the world watches the skill, athleticism, and excitement of women’s tennis.
I belong to that group of people who move the piano by themselves.
—Eleanor Robson Belmont, an actress and opera singer who, upon marrying a millionaire, threw herself into charity and art; as a Red Cross representative during World War I, she braved the danger of German U-boats to cross the Atlantic and inspect US Army camps based in Europe
I can do anything.
I speak my mind.
I am intelligent.
You have to be taught to be second class; you’re not born that way.
—Lena Horne, a singer, actress, and civil rights activist who turned down any roles that stereotyped African American women, despite the controversy which her more-than-reasonable refusals caused at the time; she succeeded by finding other, more dignified roles and through her singing career
In southern Spain, they made me eat a bull’s testicles. They were really garlicky, which I don’t like. I prefer to take a bull by the horns.
—Padma Lakshmi, food expert, actress, model, businesswoman, Emmy-nominated TV show host, and New York Times bestselling author; her unprecedented career has taken her around the world
After me there are no more jazz singers.
—Betty Carter, a jazz singer known for her creative improvisation; she was practically the living embodiment of the saying “My way or the highway,” refusing to drop her own interpretation of jazz to produce more mainstream music
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
—Emma Goldman, a writer and activist who refused to allow her opponents to keep her silent, protesting war and advocating for women’s rights
Badass to the Bone:
Teenage immigrant Emma Goldman had escaped from Russia in 1885, after witnessing the wholesale slaughter of idealist political rebel anarchists who called themselves the Nihilists. The following year, this young woman, who seemed “born to ride the whirlwinds,” learned that America was not immune to political violence. Across the country, anarchists were joining socialists and others in agitating for stronger labor laws to protect workers, including an eight-hour workday. In Chicago, May Day 1886 brought tensions to a boil; on May 3, police opened fire on a crowd of strikers at a factory, killing at least two. The following day, anarchists held a demonstration in Haymarket Square which started out peacefully, but when the police ordered the protestors to disperse, someone threw a bomb and police cleared the square with gunfire. Anarchists were blamed and arrested, Chicago’s power elite cracked down on labor and immigrant groups, and the press flew into a hysteria against anarchism. Amid this swirl of popular prejudice, a hostile judge presided over a trial that condemned seven anarchists to death.
The Haymarket affair, rather than scare her away from the politics of idealism forever, drew young Emma further toward the kind of political passion that risked death for principles. She “devoured every line on anarchism I could get,” as she notes in her autobiography, Living My Life, “and headed for New York City, command central in the 1890s for radicals of many stripes.”
In New York, Emma met one of the anarchists whose writing she’d been devouring, Johann Most, who encouraged her to develop her gift for public speaking. Emma worked as a practical nurse in New York’s ghettos, where she saw the price women paid for want of any birth control. Soon she was taking to the soapbox to air her views on this lack of available contraception and the resulting reliance on back-alley abortions. Her campaign reached the ears of Margaret Sanger and influenced the development of a national birth control campaign.
She continued to mesmerize crowds with her impassioned speeches until 1917, when her opposition to World War I led to a two-year imprisonment. She was subsequently deported, since the Justice Department was fearful of allowing her to continue her antiwar campaign: “She is womanly, a remarkable orator, tremendously sincere, and carries conviction. If she is allowed to continue here she cannot help but have great influence.”
She continued to exercise influence from abroad and
