Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld: A “Modern Woman” of Sport and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Canada

Abstract

Jewish-Canadian athlete Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld has been remembered as an exceptional all-around athlete, whose career triumph occurred at the 1928 Olympics where she won a gold medal as the lead-off member of the 4 × 100-meter relay team, a silver medal in the disputed 100-meter race, and placed fifth in the 800-meter race. She was also a hard-hitting sports journalist, in an occupation dominated by men, who championed women’s issues at all levels—local, national, and international—through her daily column for the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1937 to 1958; a coach for the women’s track and field team at the 1934 British Empire Games; and a critic of sport policy, particularly amateur athletics. In 1950 she was named Canada’s woman athlete of the half-century, narrowly edging out figure skater Barbara Ann Scott. The only Jewish athlete ever to win a gold medal in track and field, she was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel in 1981. The accolades for Rosenfeld continued to mount. In 1991 the city of Toronto established the Bobbie Rosenfeld Park situated between the Sky Dome and the CN Tower. On 9 June 1996, the Canada Post Corporation paid tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Modern Olympic Games by issuing five stamps honoring Canadian Olympians who distinguished themselves at previous Olympics, and included Bobbie Rosenfeld among those recognized.1 Rosenfeld’s athletic career spanned that crucial period in women’s sport history between the two world wars, long recognized by sports historians as “the golden age of women’s sport in Canada.”2 Rosenfeld, with her bobbed hair—the derivation of her nickname “Bobbie”—her lean athletic body, independent career girl persona, and immigrant working-class background, was the embodiment of a new type of femininity that emerged in the interwar years known variously as the Modern Girl and the Modern Woman. As a collective of women’s historians demonstrated recently, the Modern Girl emerged quite literally around the world in the first half of the twentieth century.3 Historian Kathy Peiss writes, “The Modern Girl was variously a symbol of female social freedom, normative Western racial hierarchies, the universality of beauty, standards of hygiene and fashion, and a modernizing economy.”4 Whereas the Modern Girl is usually associated with the representation of the sexualized, commodified flapper in the scholarly literature, another version