With the second season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) underway, sports media is rightly excited about a long-awaited professional league for women’s ice hockey. Behind this achievement, however, is a century of advocacy and struggle to have women’s hockey professionally and officially recognized in the same way the National Hockey League (NHL) and its players are.  

Sports journalist Ian Kennedy chronicles the long history behind women’s professional hockey in North America in Ice in Their Veins. Published in October of this year, Kennedy’s book follows the sport from its beginnings in the 1800s with the establishment of women’s university teams, to the PWHL and the current explosion of recognition for women’s hockey, as well as its prior growing pains.  

The book begins with a preface from former Olympic hockey star Geraldine Heaney, which sets the stage for the struggle for legitimacy that women’s hockey has long fought for.

“Women and girls were told hockey wasn’t for them, that we weren’t welcome,” Heaney writes. “But we played anyway, and we found ways. The truth is, hockey has always been a game for women, and it always will be.”  

I have long been a fan of women’s hockey. Growing up, national players like Heaney, Hayley Wickenheiser, and Jayna Hefford captivated my young imagination and told me—then the sole girl on a boy’s hockey team—that I could go beyond the spectacle of the NHL. While influenced by the popular power-violence of men’s hockey, it was the work ethic of these women that inspired me to go further and dig deeper at such an early age. 

Like me at that time, they had something to prove to their counterparts. 

The events of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics canonized the women of Team Canada, but only 13 years later did these saints get their wish with the establishment of the PWHL. Now entering its second year, the journey to the PWHL has not been without its challenges. 

After the unexpected shutdown of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) in 2019, the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) was formed, committed to a boycott of existing women’s leagues until the establishment of a unified and financially viable professional league. The PWHPA is now the union that protects players’ rights and ensures fair compensation and wages for PWHL players. 

The PWHL has been a sorely needed force in professional hockey, and its popularity  has been one of the recent keystone events in women’s sports that truly recognizes a burgeoning revolution of female athletes that are both deeply talented and invigorating to watch flourish. 

The forebearers chronicled in Kennedy’s Ice in Their Veins are a wonderful compliment to the season ahead—which I highly recommend getting a primer on—and allows readers to fully absorb how much history women’s hockey is steeped in. Sure, we’re all familiar with the recent canonization of the sport, but bringing the select histories of North American women’s hockey and its players to the forefront really makes the achievement of the PWHL so much sweeter.

Kennedy weaves a lovingly researched historiography into the context of the present, emphasizing the importance of figures forgotten by sports historians.. When Kennedy brings us back to the present through his experience, it is more to reflect on where women’s hockey has come from and explore his evolving relationship to the sport and its players. We are not here to sympathize with a man about his feelings on women’s sports—he lets these athletes do the talking.

There is something rare about how Ice in Their Veins deals with misogyny in sport. It is not handled in a detached, unfeeling way, and Kennedy makes it clear from the initial section of this book that he has had quite the ideological shift over the entirety of his life. Ice in Their Veins is not solely guided by rectifying the author’s past transgressions, however. Kennedy clearly has reverence for the female forebearers of hockey history, and that respect absolutely translates to the reader.  

  Kennedy’s retelling of Albertine Lapensée of the Eastern Ladies Hockey League (ELHL), founded in wartime Montreal in 1915 is especially captivating, with her sportsmanship publicly rivalling most men of her time. Steeped in the context of women’s treatment during the First World War, this chapter is a great instance where Kennedy does not shy away from the challenges Lapensée—and many of her successors—faced.

Lapensée was so unbelievably dominant that the public believed her to be a man, with the book highlighting how sports press claimed she was “a boy in girls’ clothing.” Multiple teams sought to prod and investigate her, but she remained unfazed, continuing to soar in popularity and drawing thousands to any game she was playing. Even then, Lapensée was not compensated for the skill and prestige she brought to the ELHL, despite most of its players being working class women. Eventually, when conscripts came home from overseas, men’s hockey resumed its business as usual, yet the push for professional women’s leagues began with its pioneers simply asking for basic compensation and recognition.  

Today, we see those results a century later, but still with the trappings of a cultural contempt for women. Throughout the rest of this sports chronology, the policing of gender is the standardized response to women’s athleticism, with repeated cases of athletes having their womanhood publicly discussed and scrutinized after displaying proficiency in their sport. This scrutiny is not strictly isolated to hockey, however: we now see world-class athletes like basketball superstar Caitlin Clark and Olympian boxer Imane Khelif at the centre of similarly invasive investigations by sports media. Only now do we see the attachment of trans hysteria to these “assessments” due to a widespread moral panic surrounding transgender athletes and their participation in professional and international competition.  

  When we consider the present of women’s professional hockey, it is essential to discuss these issues in relation to the historical context that Ian Kennedy provides, because the barriers that blocked pioneers like Albertine Lapensée still exist almost one hundred years later. While the sport looks vastly different, the precarity of making a living in women’s hockey and the razor-thin margins that women’s professional leagues operate on are inexcusable and absurd for the national pride we place in hockey as a sport.  

In the later throes of the book, Kennedy details the preceding conditions of the CWHL and the “beer league” austerity of its operating budget. During the 2017-2018 season, team salaries were capped out at $100,000 total. This is a galling number to consider when the NHL boasted a team salary cap of $75 million that very same year. Professional league players would work second jobs to pursue their dream, something unheard of in professional men’s leagues of a similar calibre.  

  While the CWHL operating budget ballooned to $3.5 million by the League’s end, former goaltender Sami Jo Small ends the book by imparting that paying women ice hockey players wages comparable to that of the NHL and other premier leagues has paid off with the formation of the PWHL. To Small, the formation of this league is informed by the history that Ice in Their Veins details.  

“All of us in women’s hockey are the caretakers of this incredible history,” Small writes. “Let’s remember it and dig deeper to unveil the stories and lessons from our shared past so that we may illuminate the future together.” 

  The amount of legal, social, and political challenges the women in Ice in Their Veins face reinforces the necessity of professional women’s sport, and Ian Kennedy does not shy away from trading blows with the misogyny and machismo of hockey’s image. Women’s professional hockey is a reinvigorating force to be reckoned with, telling readers that there should be no outside comparison to the ultra-talent and rigor these players possess.  

As this season of the PWHL unfolds, I will not only remember the plight of these pioneers, but let history fuel my rally behind these incredible athletes.  

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