In a society where men are seen as the “more athletic” of the two sexes, it’s hard to find sports specifically geared towards women. Gymnastics, volleyball, and softball are all examples of sports that have an equal or higher ratio of women to men, at least stereotypically. But when you think of female-dominated sports, there’s one that probably doesn’t come to mind: roller derby.

Roller derby is far from high on pretty much anyone’s list. When it was first introduced in 1935, it was based on a study that Leo Seltzer had read just once, one saying that 90% of Americans had roller-skated. At the time, roller skating was nothing more than watching teams of two, one man and one woman, skate around a single track 57,000 times. This took over three weeks.

20,000 people attended the first marathon. Clearly, the nation was ready. 

Derby organizers soon realized that what the crowds seemed to most enjoy was people falling or trying to pass each other. It was suggested that they begin emphasizing the violence. The game was changed to a point-based system: one point for every person you passed, with violence along the way strongly encouraged. Audiences loved it, and the derby that we see today was born. 

It’s important to note that, since its inception, Derby has had exclusively co-ed leagues. Women playing a contact sport was almost unheard of at the time, and still often is today. The rules stayed entirely the same regardless of whether men or women were playing. More than that, these leagues were almost always willing to accept queer people. 

In the ‘70s, roller derby as a sport fell out of favor. Several revival movements were started, but none ever took root. Roller derby was largely dead and forgotten by America by the ‘90s.

Then, a group of women from Austin formed the Texas Lonestar Rollergirls. Slowly, more leagues started to pop up throughout the nation. All of which were modeled in a similar, decidedly feminist way – they were all born out of the need for a space where women could feel at home. 

Even though these new derby leagues were centered on women, they hadn’t forgotten their history as a space for queer people to exist. The Rollergirls began the tradition of creating fake names specifically for roller derby, based on drag queens who were present in the same communities that the sport was popular in. 

Today, most roller derby is presided over by the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association. Despite the name, any gender is allowed to participate in most derby leagues. Modern derby is one of the few sports that doesn’t care who you are. All they care about is how fast you can roller skate in a circle over and over again while desperately trying to not get your fingers crushed. If you attend a roller derby bout today, you’ll see many different kinds of people. Primarily, though, you’ll see women, often queer ones, of all ages. All these women gather to play or watch a sport that started when their right to vote had only recently been acquired. 

Derby is not well known, but that has absolutely never been an accident. Even when it was more popular, its experimental nature was what allowed it to be one of the few safe spaces for women in sports. The fact that few people are watching it now allows derby to be more radical in what it’s able to do for women and their sense of community within the sport.

So, the next time  you’re talking to someone who’s trying to tell you about how the woke mob is ruining sports by trying to include women, tell them about how the woke mob was there in the ‘30s, creating roller derby. It won’t diffuse the conversation, but it will prove that women have always been athletes. It will prove that regardless of what they think the latest, most “wokified” sport is, roller derby has always been far worse.