barrettWhen I first started surfing, as a teenager in Honolulu in 1966, my uncle would clear a way for me through the big, intimidating men on long, heavy surfboards—men who vastly outnumbered women in the fabled waves at Queen’s surf break in Waikiki.
Back then, I didn’t see the irony in men dominating a break named for a powerful woman—Queen Lydia Lili‘uokalani, whose cottage had once stood on that very beach. As far as I knew, surfing had always been a man’s sport, one that girls like me were just breaking into. Only later did I learn that women had been surfing since the very beginning, but had been driven out of the sport as it became popular. – Mindy Pennybacker, The Atlantic Magazine, 9/6/2023
As part of her exciting adventure in San Diego, Lori Leak takes up the sport of surfing. But did you know she is NOT so unusual? Females, women and girls, have been surfing since the beginning of time but in the 1960s.
In the 19th century, Lili‘uokalani’s own niece Princess Victoria Ka‘iulani famously loved to surf. Long before that, Kelea, a chief of Maui before Europeans first reached the islands, was famous for her surfing, which she had a reputation for loving more than any man. Queen Nāmāhānaʻi Kaleleokalani was “one of the most expert” surfers the British explorer Peter Puget observed when he traveled to Maui in 1794. “The surf that brought her into the beach was immensely high,” Puget wrote. “On its top she came, floating on a broad board till the break[er] had nearly reached the rocks; she then suddenly turned.” Nāmāhāna’s daughter Ka‘ahumanu was also a surfer, and paddled out with her husband, King Kamehameha I, at the wild cliff breaks of the Big Island’s Kohala coast. “The surfing places were constantly filled with men and women,” the historian John Papa Ī‘ī wrote in 1870. He had served in the royal court as a boy. Under the Hawaiian kingdom’s traditional kapu system, women could be put to death for eating at the same table as men, however, in the surf, men and women had always ridden as equals, on the same waves.
Sometimes the wahine outsurfed the kane. In a contest held in Lahaina in 1887, the favorite, Poepoe, was challenged by his wife, Nakookoo, who shot “like a flying fish through the whitening foam, jostle[d] the champion on his wonted plank of victory, and came in foremost amid the outcries of a delighted multitude glad that the woman had won,” according to a local newspaper at the time.
What Happened? USA Sports & TV
The backlash against women surfers took hold in the 1960s, after, ironically, popular books and Hollywood films about a California surfer girl named Gidget (a real life surfer named Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman) launched the sport as a commercialized lifestyle trend, stoked by the music of the Beach Boys. Men muscled women aside, seizing control of surf contests, magazines, and sponsorship opportunities, and appropriating and revising surf history, stigmatizing women as weaker and less interesting to watch. A now-famous 1966 documentary, The Endless Summer, glorified men from California on a round-the-world surf safari while relegating women to supporting positions in bikinis on the beach. California had claimed Hawaii’s endemic sport as its own creation and narrowed it to exclude women, and was selling it back to Hawaii and women.
Men’s and women’s contests were held at different breaks (areas where people surf). The places where surfing looked really great on film and camera got the most attention. American television stations, sports organizations and sponsors back men’s surfing but gave very little attention and money to women surfers.
These were places such as Banzai Pipeline and the giant Waimea Bay—both on Oahu’s North Shore. Then it was decided that these places were off-limit to girls and women because they would be “too dangerous and difficult”. The men and boys were paid a lot of money to surf and the women very little and sometimes nothing. Imagine how unfair that is! Women were not given the same payment and opportunities to surf. Today, women and girls are not expected to surf, But Lori Leak is not letting that get in her way.
Check out Lori Leak’s surfing in Lori Leak Travels To San Diego!