Despite the efforts of avid players, The Dude, and assorted poets, bowling in America still ends up with a broadly dorky reputation. Nonetheless, it’s one of the most popular and enduring games in American history, for good reason: you can play indoors when the weather’s lousy, it’s inherently social, and even if you’re not all that good at it, you can still have a good time (thank you, inflatable bumpers).
What may surprise you about bowling is that it’s been a vehicle for social change and equality movements throughout American history, both in the fight against racism in sport and in the arena of women’s rights.
From the late nineteenth century, the Midwest was a hotbed of bowling culture, with Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at its historic and modern center—for a few reasons. In addition to being inexpensive entertainment, with a low bar to entry, bowling was familiar to and popular with European immigrant groups, particularly Wisconsin’s German community. The popularity of bowling in Europe is why, for example, New York’s oldest park is named for the “bowling green” established there by Dutch settlers. Matthew Buchinger, the seventeenth-century “Little Man of Nuremberg” (he stood only twenty-nine inches tall) was renowned for his bowling skill, as was shown in a 1710 etching highlighting his accomplishments. Many historians suspect the 1830 invention of the lawn mower made a lot of games (tennis, bowling, golf, croquet, you name it) broadly viable. But in moving from an elite lawn culture into the American Midwest, the game was better served by an indoor alley during cold, wet months. Bowling also partnered with tavern culture; bowler and writer Doug Schmidt notes that the typical alley owner “was essentially a saloon keeper. The breweries also owned a lot of the taverns that had bowling alleys attached to them.”
It was also a game nearly exclusively played by men. Public historian Erika Janik explains that by the mid-1800s, ninepin bowling had become wildly popular, and though “many wealthy men—and a few women—bowled in private clubs or estate lanes, bowling was most closely tied to working-class immigrants, chiefly men,” many of whom were distinctly against the advancement of women’s rights.
“Some feared that a voting woman would vote for prohibition,” Janik writes. “Brewery interests owned or controlled more than 80 percent of all taverns in the United States, and male culture fiercely defended spaces created for leisure and brotherhood.” When the American Bowling Congress (ABC) was formed in 1895 as a governing organization for the sport, its membership was limited to white men.
Even so, women were instrumental to bowling’s development as a popular pursuit. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when (white) women like Daisy Clark went to bowl in public, they were pushing at social conventions. Even if women bowled in long skirts and high collars, there was a sense that they were out of place at the alley, invaders in a presumed male domain. Schmidt quotes Helen Luccesi, who recalled that when she “started bowling at Bauer’s Rec, they would put up a bedsheet to separate the alleys from the bar. They thought a decent woman wouldn’t sit at the bar.”
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Women rollers started the Women’s International Bowling Congress (WIBC) in 1916 to encourage participation (the organization excluded bowlers of color until 1950). While Prohibition, which stretched from 1920 to 1933, certainly affected bowling alleys, especially the ones that served alcohol (which is to say, most of them), women started to bowl in greater numbers during that time.
“[W]omen looked to bowling as an outlet for financial frustrations and stress,” Janik notes. So many women had taken up bowling and come so far in the sport by 1940 that the New York Times reported that at least half of America’s three million female bowlers could recall “the time when their sex slid apologetically into the side-street entrance to a bowling alley.”
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During and after World War II, white women bowlers boosted the sport’s prevalence and popularity, even as Black Americans—through organizations such as the National Negro Bowling Association (NNBA)—worked to integrate the sport. Members of the WIBC’s Wings of Mercy fundraising program “collected more than $100,000 to purchase a Douglas A-20 bomber with the [organization’s] insignia in the cockpit,” according to Janik, linking the game to wartime patriotism. WIBC President Jeannette Knepprath, a Milwaukee resident who served thirty-six years and grew membership from a few thousand to 1.5 million women, presented the plane to the Air Force. Continued fundraising allowed the WIBC to provide three ambulance planes and a truck by 1945, and to provide continuing veterans’ support after the war.
Knepprath was evidence of Milwaukee’s continued strong influence on the sport. Schmidt lays out the specifics, explaining that
[i]n 1935, Milwaukee had 200 ABC-sanctioned leagues, which ranked fifth behind Chicago at 493; Cleveland, 235; St. Louis, 225; and Detroit, 215, so Brew City could never claim to have the most bowlers. However, those cities also dwarfed Milwaukee’s population of 600,000. Windy City inhabitants had already surpassed 3.4 million, followed by Detroit at 1.6 million, Cleveland at 900,000, and St. Louis at 825,000. Simply put, no other metropolitan area could match Milwaukee’s obsession with the sport on a per capita basis.
Knepprath and scores of lady bowlers changed the sport irrevocably, well beyond Milwaukee, writes Janik. They made bowling not only popular but socially acceptable and family-friendly, “a sport in and of itself rather than as a sideline to alcohol and gambling.” Gone were the dark bars and cigar dens, replaced postwar by suitably mid-century alleys with shiny chrome bumper rails. Even women’s teams secured high-profile sponsorships by this time (meet Meister Brau’s “Bowling Queens!”).
“Increased leisure time after World War II also helped push bowling’s popularity,” writes Janik, “since it was easy to earn, inexpensive, and, thanks in part to the WIBC, had no gender restrictions.”
Bowling was now squeaky clean, broadly accessible, and viewed as all-American—at least for some.
At the same time the boundaries of the sport were being broadened by the WIBC, other organizations were trying to break down the Jim Crow laws keeping Black Americans out of the alleys. After the war, the NAACP, labor unions, and a newly formed National Committee for Fair Play in Bowling built on the work of the NNBA to challenge the ABC’s discriminatory practices at tournaments in particular, Patricia L. Dooley writes. A series of successful lawsuits saw the reversal of the ABC whites-only policy in 1950.
“However,” Dooley notes, “the ban on women competing in ABC events was not lifted until 1993.”
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