ABSTRACT
Men’s and women’s athletics at UBC had long been segregated into separate men’s and women’s athletic associations (and budgets), and men’s and women’s sports. Upon the official opening of the War Memorial Gym in October 1951, the bulk of the women’s athletic programme was relocated to the Old Gym, as we have seen. Archival and ethnographic research suggests that women, and women’s athletics in particular (including dance), were not especially welcome at the War Memorial Gym.26 Although female students participated wholeheartedly in fund-raising campaigns for the Gym they quickly learned their place.27 A former athlete active in women’s sports at UBC recalled that men belonged in the War Memorial Gym, women didn’t: ‘In my undergraduate years, I got to be in there once, about 1953, to do formal gymnastics.’28 In 1946, J.D. Penn McLeod, Executive Director of the Gym’s fundraising campaign, wrote that ‘the hall of heroes will be dedicated to the fallen sons of BC. The names of every BC soldier, sailor, and airman who died in Wars I and II will be inscribed in an honour roll.’29 Not only was the War Memorial Gym erected primarily as a tribute to the ‘great loss of young men in World Wars I and II’, with often no, or irregular acknowledgement of women’s war efforts; it was designed primarily to furnish a living shrine to the spectacle of male sporting heroism at UBC.30 The Gym was imagined as a showcase for male virility, and as a source of much-needed revenue from men’s widely lauded athletic prowess.
