Women in Surfriding Revival

Students discussed during our section that women were actually present in the Surfriding Revival section of Pacific Passages, but after revisiting the articles I still adhere to my initial assessment that women were mostly absent. When they were mentioned they were belittled and almost always associated with the danger of the sport, and definitely placed in the background of this era’s dominant narrative of masculinity.

Beginning with Jack London’s “Riding the South Seas Surf,” the sport of surfing is built up to be the epitome of masculine dominance over nature, in which he describes surfing as “a royal sport for the natural kings of earth” (139). London fills his prose with martial metaphor of battle, and later with the male dominated sports of wrestling and fighting. Before his mention of a woman surfer several pages later, the portrayal of surfing, using the hyper-masculine language of dominance and conquering, it’s difficult to find a place for a woman surfer to exist in his definition of the sport--and even harder to find where she might actually appear in his work. A reader without knowledge of the sport could only assume that she didn’t exist. When he does finally acknowledge a women, he takes it upon himself to initially believe that had “saved her life” by dodging her, while in fact it was his own inexperience that put her in danger in the first place (143). He admits she laughed at him, but goes on to thank Ford, who taught him how to steer, as her savior. Never once did he mention the women, present in the waves, and how they might have surfed or on what boards they used--her mention serves only to provide an interesting anecdote of one of the many dangers that surfriders must overcome.

    Alexander Hume Ford only mentions the young surfer girls to explain how easy it is for a foreigner to learn the sport and eases the reader by explaining “the water at low tide is not more than two feet deep,” water in which young children and girls can learn in (148).

Tom Blake mentions women using a very familiar trope as well:

“[T]he girl rises first, then the boy stands up with her on his shoulders--very thrilling, indeed, for the girl. The next board has two girls for riders. They “jam up,” after a short fifteen yard ride, with an inexperienced surfer and all three lose their boards and get ducked, barely missing getting hit by the loose boards. Rather brave these girls to be out there” (159).

Even though Blake acknowledges it was the inexperienced surfer who is at fault, Blake still manages to imply that the women are brave for surfing despite of these risks, in which the man, inexperienced, would apparently be more equipped to handle--more so than the women who are more experienced surfers.
    Coupled with the hyper-masculine descriptions of surfing, these sparse descriptions of women surfers used by these authors appeal only to their own notions of the passive and fragile female--feeding into a narrative that I still feel ignores the athletic female surfers of the time.

Alex Terry