Cheers from 1920s journal

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Colleges across the country noticed a vast improvement in athletics during the 1920s. One sport today is characterized by the feminization that it entails: cheerleading is now stereotyped as being an all-girl ordeal, however it was not always that way. The first cheerleaders at Concordia and in America were male and they dominated the sport until the 1920s when the first females joined and forever changed the sport.[1] This is a journal/notebook from the 1920s that contains cheers and yells that were used at Concordia College sporting events. This journal was donated by Marjorie Gevre, who was a student that attended Concordia at the time. Cheerleading by the 1920s was organized and widespread throughout America and in American colleges especially.[2] Concordia College followed the national trend of feminizing cheerleading in the 1920s.

The first step for feminizing cheerleading at Concordia was when the Rooter King or the person who led the cheers, allowed two females to be his assistants. From then on more females joined the pep squads. For example, between 1930-1931 nine freshmen girls whom called themselves the Ninepins each wore a designated letter on their sweater to spell out C-O-N-C-O-R-D-I-A which created the college’s first pep squad of girls that aided in cheering on athletes during games and entertaining the crowd at intermissions.[3]

 

 

Notes:

[1] Natalie G. Adams and Pamela J. Bettis, Cheerleader! An American Icon (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 28.

[2] Mary E. Hanson, Go! Fight! Win! Cheerleading in American Culture (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995), 14.

[3] Erling N. Rolfsrud, “The 1920s were a golden age of college sports,” Cobber Chronicle, March 13, 1930, Moorhead (MN).

Essay By Emily Wendorff