Abstract des Autors

Alexandrine Gibb distinguished herself as an athlete, pioneering leader and administrator of women's sport, manager of several international athletic teams and as Canada's most pre-eminent women sports journalist of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet she has been almost forgotten by today's sport world, and certainly by the newspaper, the Toronto Star, where she worked for thirty years. Although this is her story, it is also an account of the early days of organizing women's sport in Canada, when Gibb and her contemporaries were major players. She fervently believed in 'girls sports run by girls', and in 1925 founded the Women's Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada, an organization she helped nurture until its demise in 1953. As a sportswriter and editor at the Toronto Daily Star, she wrote a lively and influential column called 'No Man's Land of Sport' until the Second World War, when she was reassigned to edit a section on women's war work. In 1935, Gibb was sent by her newspaper on a trip to the Soviet Union and through several Mediterranean countries to write a special series about women, sport and daily life far away. After the war, she wrote mainly features at the Star. She was part of the press corps who accompanied Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edingburgh on a royal tour throughout Canada in 1951. In 1954, Gibb was primarily responsible for persuading sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Marilyn Bell, who at the time was comparatively unknown, to challenge the American Florence Chadwick in her attempt to swim lake Ontario. Gibb was one of the strongest advocates for women's sport Canada has ever seen. She never married, and in 1958 she died at the age of sixty-six. Verf.-Referat