On 23 September 1970 nine women decided they had seen enough misogyny in tennis and broke away to play their own tournament, sowing the seeds for today’s WTA
If Kristy Pigeon’s father had had his way, she certainly would not have been a tennis player. She would have spent her youth as a cheerleader with ample angora sweatshirts and then in college her priority would have been the pursuit of her future husband, of her future breadwinner.
“That’s just another indication of how men viewed women back 50 years ago,” Pigeon says in a phone interview. “I was teased when I would jog and be training for tennis. In high school … people thought it was not very attractive for women to want to pursue a sport.”
