With the launch of the PWHL, I am exploring the history of women's hockey in Canada.
Today, I am looking at the story of Abby Hoffman!
Abby Hoffman was born on Feb. 11, 1947 in Toronto. She learned to skate when she was three. When she was nine, she wanted to begin playing organized hockey.
There were few leagues for girls at the time, so her parents registered her as Ab Hoffman in a boys' league.
She cut her hair short to pass as a boy.
She excelled in the league, playing defence, and was chosen for the All-Star team. League policy dictated that all players had to show their birth certificate to play in the All-Star Game.
When it was discovered she was a girl, she was banned from playing on the boys' team.
Her parents took the case to the Ontario Supreme Court, and gained news coverage in Time and Newsweek.
Abby received publicity and the support of several NHL teams. Abby won her case, with the court ruling that if there are boys' teams, there had to be girls' teams. The verdict was a landmark ruling that changed the face of Canadian sports.
Her case helped bring the issue of a lack of options for female athletes to a national audience.
As a student at the University of Toronto, she was not allowed to run on the indoor track at Hart House as it was an all-male facility. She successfully had the track opened to women.
As an adult, Hoffman went on to compete in four Olympic Games from 1964 to 1976, four Pan American Games and two Commonwealth Games.
She won two gold, a silver and two bronze at the Pan American Games, and one gold at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games.
In 1976, she was the official flag bearer for Canada at the Summer Olympics in Montreal.
From 1981 to 1991, Hoffman served as the first female director general of Sport Canada. She was also the first Canadian woman elected to the Executive Committee of the Canadian Olympic Committee.
In 1982, she and Maureen McTeer put their support behind a national championship in women's hockey. The Abby Hoffman Cup was created, and awarded to the Canadian National Women's Hockey Champion from 1982 to 2009.
She has been awarded the Order of Canada, and been inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame and the Jewish Canadian Athletes Hall of Fame.
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I don’t like this sort of politics. Societies are made up of individuals with different backgrounds, opinions, economic interests and moral and philosophical positions. The primary job of politicians in my view is to at least try to navigate these differences (guided of course by their own hopefully well-thought out political philosophy) with the aim of building a stable consensus - a necessary foundation for a well-functioning and prosperous society. That’s very hard of course, but it should be the desired destination. Nobody gets everything they want in a democracy, because a free society is a collection of individuals who hold different views, but also nobody should feel absolutely defeated. This is not compromise in a wish-washy sense of the word - it’s the very essence of and indeed the guarantor of our freedom as individuals. As Feynman memorably said, democracy is based, like science, on a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance; running societies is very hard, and nobody really knows how to do it, so we regularly change direction whilst building on the achievements of the past. Understanding this requires humility, and the instinct to unify rather than to divide. Seeking division therefore runs counter to everyone’s interests because it undermines a key idea underpinning democracy itself - the idea that individuals have legitimately differing views. To Mr Sunak - topically - I would say read some post-war Oppenheimer. He was aiming to persuade national leaders not to do what this article says you want to do, because in the context of countries with atom bombs, that would be literally playing with fire.
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