A Place on the Row, a Race of Their Own

On Boathouse Row, a door can mean two things. It opens onto the Schuylkill, where crews launch toward the same stretch of water. It also opens into a club: a place to keep boats, train with other rowers and belong to the sporting life of the river. In the 1930s, women could see that life from the bank. Most of the Row’s established clubs would not admit them as members.

Ernestine Bayer knew the distinction. Her husband, Ernest, an Olympic silver medalist, rowed for the Pennsylvania Barge Club. She watched him and, after years of asking, persuaded him to teach her. They used a club boat. Other male rowers objected—not because she had mistaken the river for somewhere else, but because she had entered a space they considered theirs. (washingtonpost.com)

Original charcoal illustration evoking women rowers on the Schuylkill beside Boathouse Row; interpretive historical scene.

Bayer’s lesson did not give women a club. That required seventeen women to organize one. On May 4, 1938, they founded the Philadelphia Girls’ Rowing Club, making an institution for the opportunities they could not reliably find elsewhere. Its history is often told through the races its members eventually won. The beginning asks a more basic question: What does it take to become a competitor when the sport’s facilities, clubs and schedules have been built without you? (findingaids.library.upenn.edu)

The answer, for these women, was not simply to wait for an invitation. They found a home at No. 14 Boathouse Row, in the former Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society building. They assembled members, boats and the ordinary machinery of a sporting club. Then they sought races. Their first appearance in a Schuylkill Navy regatta, in July 1939, came with a revealing condition. The women could compete in an exhibition. (philadelphiagirlsrowingclub.org)

Three doubles entered. Bayer and Jeanette Waetjen Hoover won. But the result alone cannot describe the occasion. Their course was a half-mile, shorter than the standard three-quarter-mile course, and the event carried a label that set it apart from the established competition around it. The race put women on the program without yet granting their rowing the same standing. (findingaids.library.upenn.edu)

That half-mile is the hinge of the club’s story. It was a real contest, with a winning crew, and an opening the women had worked to secure. It was also an illustration of how acceptance can arrive in pieces. PGRC’s rowers could take the water, but the terms under which they appeared still marked them as exceptions.

The club’s founding brought together more than one woman’s wish to row. Its members included secretaries, nurses, saleswomen and typists. They had jobs and lives beyond the boathouse, and they pursued rowing seriously enough to create an organization around it. Some press coverage nevertheless treated the enterprise as a curiosity, dwelling on the women and their clothing or imagining the club as a way to meet men. The mismatch between what members were building and how they were described was another obstacle to being recognized as athletes. (inquirer.com)

It would be misleading to suggest that no women had ever had a place along the Schuylkill before PGRC. No. 14 itself had a longer history, and the Sedgeley Club, an earlier tenant, is identified in the building’s National Register history as the first women’s boat club along the river. PGRC’s distinction lies in the particular work its founders undertook: establishing a women’s competitive rowing club at a time when most Boathouse Row clubs excluded women from membership. Their achievement was not to discover the river. It was to create a durable route into its competitive culture. (npgallery.nps.gov)

A boathouse made that effort possible in a way that a single permitted outing could not. Rowing depends on more than individual skill. Crews need equipment, storage, partners and repeated practice. They need a place from which the next outing can begin. By renting space at No. 14, PGRC’s founders gave their club an address on the Row. The building was not originally theirs, and an address did not confer equal status, but it allowed women to organize on the same river from which they had been excluded as club members. (philadelphiagirlsrowingclub.org)

The exhibition races continued through the late 1950s. Meanwhile, finding other women to race—and other competitions in which to meet them—remained difficult. PGRC could not build a competitive future by training alone; opponents and organized events had to exist, too. Its early decades were therefore about more than improving crews. They were about helping make women’s rowing into a sport with places to compete. (inquirer.com)

The women’s work also changed the meaning of No. 14. The building, dating from around 1860–61, had housed other organizations before PGRC arrived. Over time it became identified with the club that had made room for itself there. PGRC says it purchased the boathouse in 1962. Ownership gave a lasting form to what the founders had begun as tenants: a home on Boathouse Row held by the women’s club itself. (npgallery.nps.gov)

By then, the competitive landscape was beginning to change. In 1966, PGRC’s women’s eight won the first National Women’s Rowing Championships. The crew won again in 1967. These titles did not erase the conditions of the 1939 race, but they cast them in a new light. Women who had first appeared on the local regatta program as exhibition entrants now had a national championship to contest—and had won it twice. (philadelphiagirlsrowingclub.org)

The shift was not a simple march from rejection to applause. The club’s next stage exposed how much authority over women’s competition still rested elsewhere. In 1967, PGRC rowers went to the European Championships in Vichy, France, becoming, according to the club’s history, the first American women’s rowing club to race there. The prospect had met resistance. As The Washington Post later reported, John Carlin, president of the national governing body, feared that American women would be outclassed by established Eastern European teams. After the Americans won a Canadian exhibition race against retired male oarsmen, the international federation’s president allowed them to compete. (philadelphiagirlsrowingclub.org)

The women did not win a race at Vichy. That outcome matters: their international debut should not be turned into a victory it was not. So does the fact that they got there. A decade earlier, the question at home had been whether women would receive a regatta event at all, and on what terms. At Vichy, American women tested themselves against an international field. The gap between those occasions measures a widening opportunity, even if neither occasion represented full equality. (washingtonpost.com)

In the late 1960s, PGRC was admitted to the Schuylkill Navy, the association of rowing clubs on the river. It was another form of recognition, distinct from a race result. The club that had needed to arrange its own place on the Row and accept an exhibition slot was now part of the local rowing establishment. Membership could not retroactively turn the half-mile race into an equal one. It did show that the institution the founders created had endured long enough to change its relationship with that establishment. (philadelphiagirlsrowingclub.org)

Bayer remains the most familiar figure in this history, and her first lessons offer a clear view of the barrier the women faced. Yet the club cannot be understood as her story alone. Seventeen founders made it possible to move beyond one person’s access to a borrowed boat. Hoover shared the winning double in 1939. Later crews supplied the national titles. Members kept the organization functioning between those visible moments, through years when opportunities for women to race were still scarce. (washingtonpost.com)

That collective work is easy to overlook if the story is reduced to milestones. Founding a club, renting a boathouse, entering an exhibition, winning a championship and joining an association sound like separate accomplishments. For PGRC, they were connected forms of the same effort. The women needed a place to train before they could seek a race; they needed races before they could build a competitive record; and that record helped demonstrate that they belonged in the sport’s wider institutions.

Today, No. 14 remains PGRC’s home. The club has an ongoing campaign to preserve the historic boathouse for future women rowers. Its significance is not only architectural, though the old building is part of one of Philadelphia’s most recognizable landscapes. It holds a more particular history: women secured a foothold there when club membership along the river was largely closed to them, and they kept using that foothold to demand more. (philadelphiagirlsrowingclub.org)

From the water, a boathouse door is a practical thing. It is where a crew returns, puts away its boat and prepares to go out again. At No. 14, it is also a reminder that access to a sport is made from such practical things. The Philadelphia Girls’ Rowing Club did not win a place on Boathouse Row in one race. Its members built a club, took the limited race they were offered, and kept rowing until the terms began to change.