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    Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar
    Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar
    Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar
    Ebook365 pages8 hours

    Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar

    By Sasha Abramsky

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “Masterfully captures the life of this little-known sportswoman, a versatile female athlete comparable to Babe Didrikson Zaharias.” —Booklist (starred review)

    Lottie Dod was a truly extraordinary sports figure who blazed trails of glory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dod won Wimbledon five times, and did so for the first time in 1887, at the ludicrously young age of fifteen. After she grew bored with competitive tennis, she moved on to and excelled in myriad other sports: she became a leading ice skater and tobogganist, a mountaineer, an endurance bicyclist, a hockey player, a British ladies’ golf champion, and an Olympic silver medalist in archery.

    In her time, Dod had a huge following, but her years of distinction occurred just before the rise of broadcast media. By the outset of World War I, she was largely a forgotten figure; she died alone and without fanfare in 1960.

    Little Wonder brings this remarkable woman’s story to life, contextualizing it against a backdrop of rapid social change and tectonic shifts in the status of women in society. Paving the way for the likes of Billie Jean King, Serena Williams, and other top female athletes of today, Dod accepted no limits, no glass ceilings, and always refused to compromise.

    “Eighty-five years before Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs fought the ‘battle of the sexes,’ a Victorian teenager showed what women could do . . . [Abramsky] celebrates her as a brave and talented and determined original.” —The Atlantic
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateAug 4, 2020
    ISBN9781617758263
    Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar
    Author

    Sasha Abramsky

    Sasha Abramsky grew up in London and now lives in Sacramento with dual UK-US citizenship. He is a freelance journalist, writer, public speaker and university lecturer at U.C. Davis. He has written thousands of articles and is the author of eight published books including Inside Obama's Brain (Penguin, 2009), The American Way of Poverty (Nation Books, 2013) and The House of Twenty Thousand Books (Halban, 2014).

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    Reviews for Little Wonder

    4/5

    22 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I lent this book to a tennis-loving friend and he enjoyed it quite a bit. However, he only recently returned it to me... unfortunately it has taken some time for me to read & review. What a different time it was when Lottie lived -- and what a talented and fascinating woman she was! What I like most about the book was how it provided an unusual glimpse into the life of a woman who was born, grew up and came of age during Victorian & Edwardian times.
    • 4/5
      Lottie Dod was a superstar, in just about anything she tried, but she is most well known for her prowess in tennis. A great look at her privileged life and at society back then. And what it was like to be a woman.
    • 4/5
      What a fascinating women! Lottie's story is one that spans a period of great change in the world and as a person on the forefront of the rise of professional sports, she stands at the center of much of that change. Even though I don't consider myself a sport's fan, I was deeply interested in the variety of directions that Lottie took her sporting abilities. The only thing I would mark as a hindrance on the book is that some of the contextual information (suffrage movement, WWI events, etc.) could have been a little better tied to Lottie's personal story. I hope that in the future more stories and information about Lottie's life comes to the forefront!
    • 4/5
      A) Doing anything, particularly highly active things, in victorian ladies' dress is remarkable. 2) Holy shit, what an impressive list of life activities - most professional level competition: repeat Wimbledon (tennis) champion, olympic silver medalist in archery, British golf champion, endurance bicyclist, field hockey player, mountaineer, tobogganist!!, ice skater, WWI hospital volunteer, madrigal singer. III) Winning exhibitions against her male contemporaries, founding a women's field hockey club, exercising her right to vote with the first generation of british women able to do so. …._) Dude, how fucking delightful would it be to not have to make money and have the means to fully explore your passions and talents? #drunkreview
    • 4/5
      Little Wonder from Sasha Abramsky recovers from obscurity the story of a true pioneer in both women's sports and in confronting restrictive roles for women during her life.Lottie Dod has largely been forgotten for a number of reasons. While the single biggest is that she was a woman during a time when it was acceptable to openly "keep them in their place," it is also because of the lack of surviving documentation. I also think it is because she was so multi-talented that, while successful in pretty much every endeavor, she didn't stay in any one area long enough to make a sustained impact. Unfortunately those who succeed in many fields but don't stay in any one for a long time can be lost in the mist of time.This very well researched biography wonderfully recaptures the times as a whole as well as Dod's own accomplishments. This is essential because on their own her actions are amazing but in light of the restrictions of society they become a phenomenal testament to her spirit and her talents.Highly recommended for readers in the areas of sports and women's studies, and I think it would also be of interest to history buffs who enjoy the late 1800s and early 1900s.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
    • 4/5
      Charlotte Dod. If you don't know her name, you don't know the history of women in sports. Don't feel bad though. Despite being a multitalented athlete, her fame as a star burned bright in many arenas, but faded from all of them just as quickly. First known as a tennis sensation at the age of fourteen, Lottie (as she was known), only played competitively for five years. In that time she became the doyenne of tennis, winning five Wimbledons. The only years she didn't win she didn't even compete. Sadly, it was as if she grew tired of smashing the competition and needed new thrills. She left the sport...at twenty one years of age. After tennis, Dod set her sights on field hockey. She helped pioneer the sport for women. Then came skating. Obsessively training for hours on end, Dod was not only able to pass the rigorous women's skating test, she passed the much more difficult men's test as well. When she was done with ice skates and cold weather , she moved on to golf and mountaineering and archery and Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing and choral singing. She climbed mountains in support of women seeking equal rights and won a silver medal for archery at the --- Olympic games.While Abramsky does a great job detailing Lottie's life, he has to fill in the gaps with speculation because sadly, much of her correspondence was lost or deliberately destroyed. Expect words like "maybe" and "perhaps" and "might." The photographs are fantastic!Arabella Garrett Anderson, Agatha Christie, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Nelly Bly were contemporaries of Dod's.
    • 4/5
      An entertaining biography of an amazing woman. Admittedly, the author was hampered by numerous gaps in information which he compensated for by detailed descriptions of people and places as well as guesses as to the reasons for certain actions. Those descriptions did, however, help provide a picture of the times.
    • 4/5
      It is wonderful to have a book about this extraordinary athlete, particularly in the high Victorian era. She was amazing. Babe Didrickson is the closest person we American would know.I was astounded by the nine pages of acknowledgements that seemed like self-aggrandizement but it was interesting. His writing style was a little tricky; I tripped over some of the wording but it was ok. Glad to see all the notes but wished there was an appendix of all the contests in which she participated.
    • 3/5
      In 1887 15 year-old Charlotte Dods won the Wimbledon title at her first attempt. Over the next ten years she won the title four more times. After ‘retiring’ she went on to be a pioneering mountaineer, accomplished ice skater, pioneer cyclist, national golf champion, Olympic archer, and at one point was the “fastest woman on earth” after a record breaking toboggan run down the cresta run. Yet she died unknown and alone in a 1960s nursing home. Abramsky does a great job of uncovering the story of this remarkable woman. However he may be a little too enamored of his subject front loading the book with mentions of her accomplishments and life rather than letting it unfold through the narrative. In fact there’s so much in the introduction that it almost renders the rest of the text superfluous.
    • 4/5
      Despite watching tennis religiously throughout my life, I did not know the name of Charlotte “Lottie” Dod. She was a five-time winner of Wimbledon in the late 1800s. But she was more than a mere tennis player. She was an ice skater, a tobogganist, a mountain climber, an endurance bicyclist, a hockey player on the English national team, a championship golfer, and an Olympic silver medalist in archery. Quite the resume. After her sporting days were through, she ventured into nursing during the world wars and into singing in peacetime.With all of those accolades, why don’t we know her name? Well, she’s a female and achieved in an era before video and electronic communication. In this biography, fortunately, Abramsky seeks to let us know a little more about her and to trumpet her legacy a bit.The quality of his research shows throughout this work. Although source material is limited as almost all observers are deceased, he manages to paint a vivid narrative based on newspaper clippings, interviews with the Dod estate, and direct observations of scenery. In particular, his settings in England are impressively detailed. Although the reader sadly cannot see the quality of Dod’s tennis shots in motion, the pictures in the book and Abramsky’s back-stories paint as vivid a picture as can be expected.Interestingly, the author writes as a lifelong tennis fan, not as a professional sports writer. Instead, by trade, he is a freelance writer in the field of politics. That background shows as he does not dwell on the feats of the body much. His writings’ strengths lie in setting, the human spirit, and interpersonal interaction. These unique qualities and eccentricities make this work even more enjoyable.This work will be popular in the women’s-studies classroom as well as among female athletes. But the appropriate audience should also extend to fans of sport, regardless of gender. Dod’s “fabulous” story can inspire us to embrace life to the fullest and to seek ever greater heights in our own personal journeys. In history, Dod was not enamored with fame or money; rather, she sought to live a great life first and foremost. That lesson ought to teach us all.

    Book preview

    Little Wonder - Sasha Abramsky

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