Sifting through the history of montreal women’s sports
Group photo of women’s basketball team The Olympics. Ida Bly is first row, second from left. Courtesy of the JPL Archives, Ida Bly Fonds, ID: 1482_[1]_076a.
As a practicum student for my Master’s of Library and Archival Studies degree, I had the privilege of processing the fonds of Ida Bly (1915 - 1990), an athlete active in Montreal’s basketball and softball leagues during the 1930s and 1940s. Viewed from a 2025 perspective, her fonds is important for how it complicates the received idea that women of her generation were supposed to be focused on making a good marriage and starting a family. Her personal archive—which comprises a scrapbook, uniforms, softball equipment, and trophies—documents her athletic career, while the other aspects of her life, like marriage and children, are evident only in the periphery of the collection. Here we have a narrative of impressive athletic ability, hard work and obvious passionate interest in sports. This passion and ability are not limited to just Ida Bly—her fonds documents the same interest and motivation in her teammates who make repeated appearances in newspaper articles and photographs over a period of ten years. Many of the newspaper articles collected in the scrapbook are from Myrtle Cook’s column, “In the Women’s Sport Light,” in the Montreal Daily Star. Myrtle Cook (1902 - 1985) was herself a Canadian athlete, winning gold in the 1928 Olympics for the women’s 4x100 m relay. While female sports journalists are still a minority today, in the 1930s an Olympic gold medalist was covering the careers of female athletes in the biggest English-language newspaper in Montreal.
“Four of the girls chosen for Montreal All-Stars Basketball Team in August, 1934. (Left to right:) Millie Lack, Ida Wiseberg (Ida Bly), Millie Leather, Betty Charles”. Courtesy of the JPL Archives, Ida Bly Fonds, ID: 1482_[1]_61.
During her sports career, Bly, with her Olympics teammates, won four Eastern Canada Basketball Championships, seven Quebec Championships, and five Victory Trophies. With her softball and basketball teams she travelled for games in other cities and played several ‘Boys vs Girls’ games as entertainment for troops during WWII. With her softball team, the Maroons, Bly made a 1938 trip to New York City to play in a women’s softball tournament held at Madison Square Garden. I, for one, did not know that women’s softball pre-dated Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden by more than thirty years. During a ‘Boys vs Girls’ games, Bly was singled out by spectators for her “honey of a shot, […] the prettiest of the entire game” and in another she “emerged the No. 1 star” for her eighteen points, leading her team to victory over the boys. In the fonds, Bly’s family life is evident on the sidelines, with one article mentioning that her mother was looking after her children so that she was free to play the game. Another article from 1942 notes that her husband, Max Bly, “does not mind her playing basketball”—suggesting that this attitude was an exception and many husbands would mind.
Taking photos of artifacts inside our digital studio space.
The Ida Bly fonds provides a perspective on what was meaningful and important to a woman in her life. It broadens our historical understanding of women’s activities and ambitions, documenting an exceptional athletic ability at a time when women could be both Olympic gold medalists and simultaneously subject to societal pressures that hindered them from pursuing such activities outside of the home.