Making a Stand

In 1961, she filed a formal application and, beforehand, unofficially entered a six-and-a-half-mile race in Chicopee, Mass., where she finished 34th and defeated eight men. She also let it be known that she planned to defy the A.A.U. ban on women in Manchester. The news media took up the cause of this 19-year-old sophomore, although in a manner that was as paternalistic as it was supportive.

Newspaper headlines of the day said: “Move Over Marathoners, College Girl Horning In”; “Coed Just Likes to Run, Yet Burley Males Object”; “She Wants to Chase the Boys.”

In the accompanying articles, there was an attempt to suggest that Chase-Brand could run and still be considered feminine. Reporters noted that she was smart, pretty and funny. A week before the 1961 Manchester race, The New York Journal American wrote: “Under questioning, Miss Chase said she is 5-4 ½, weighs 118 pounds and does not know her other dimensions. (Eyewitnesses report her other dimensions are very good.)”

Not lacking a touch of showmanship, Chase-Brand climbed a tree for Life magazine, whose headline noted that her running aspirations put her “out on a limb.” She heard from supporters in South Africa and Japan. She appeared in newsreels. A nudist from Poland wanted an outline of her feet.

But she also sensed intense conflict: “Women don’t run. You run. What are you?”

Women in other countries were allowed to run distance races, she told intractable race officials. Why not in the United States? She was not the first in her family to attempt to open closed societal doors.

Her great-grandfather William Dudley Foulke was president of the American Woman Suffrage Association in the late 1800s. Her grandmother Mary Foulke Morrisson was a leading suffragist; two months before the 19th Amendment was ratified and women gained the right to vote, she gave a seconding nomination to Herbert Hoover’s ultimately failed attempt to gain the presidential bid at the 1920 Republican Convention.

On Nov. 23, 1961, Chase-Brand arrived at Manchester wearing a headband, a skirted running outfit, running shoes and a cross around her neck. Photographs showed her talking to a race official, her palms up, as if pleading her case. She remembers the official asking her to leave. She refused.