The national Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) conducted a national tournament for women, in which most of the teams came from the South and the West. The physical education establishment in Chicago (reflecting the national view) regularly condemned men’s rules for women, considering it both physically and emotionally to women, and possibly damaging their ability to become mothers.1 The women’s amateur basketball establishment in Chicago derided this ‘line game” as playing like an “animated checker.” When in 1933, the huge American Tournament in Chicago introduced a “girls’ rule” class, the audience was so unfamiliar with the “odd looking” game it was confused as to what was going on. There were other rules in guarding that reduced roughness. Each player was limited to her section, with the number of dribbles limited to three (national AAU rule was one), thus reducing the game to a mostly passing game. In the Chicago women’s game (which varied a bit from the national rules) the court was divided into two sections with a center line, with six players on each side, three offensive and three defensive.

Most high school and college teams in the Chicago area, however, played the game only intramurally and used the moderated women’s rules. In Chicago, most amateur women basketball teams in the city and suburbs played the game under the men’s rules. The Spencer Coals competed in AAU competition, against church teams, and toured the upper Midwest, and further afield to Oklahoma, Wichita, and Canada. The company was highly involved in the support of a variety of sports, sponsoring prairie football, baseball, and softball teams, and operating a baseball field on the North Side. The Spencer Coals was a typical industrial team of the era, sponsored by Spencer Brothers Company, a coal supply concern.

The Spencer Coals as the top team in Chicago, the major hotbed of men’s rules basketball in the nation, developed a national reputation as what a modern woman could do athletically, thereby advancing women equality and achievement at a time when were denied opportunity to achieve by glass ceilings in all kinds of fields. Louis, and other cities in the northeast section of the country, as well as pockets elsewhere, promoters of amateur women’s basketball believed that women should play the same physical, fast, and aggressive game as men and helped the game prosper in those areas. Elsewhere, in Chicago mainly, but also in Cleveland, Detroit, St. With regard to basketball, in the high schools and colleges, and in much of the South and West, women played a highly moderated game that presumed women lacked strength, aggressive instincts, and physical endurance to play like men. In Depression era America, the country was divided over what represented suitable and safe athletic competition for women. The Spencer Coals women’s basketball team, which achieved national fame while competing under men’s rules in Chicago and the Midwest in the 1930s, was at the center of the conflict among women’s amateur basketball authorities over playing the moderated women’s rules or the aggressive highly athletic men’s rules.

Ruth helen spencer chicago 1930