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Women's Sports History Helen Wills on the Cover of Time During Her 1926 Rise to International Tennis Fame

1926ref. 164521926. Wills Helen. Time: The Weekly News-Magazine July 26 1926 cover issue featuring the American tennis champion during the year of her celebrated encounter with Suzanne Lenglen and her emergence as one of the most visible women athletes of the interwar period. Wills ultimately won 19 major singles titles including eight Wimbledon championships as well as Olympic gold medals in singles and doubles at Paris in 1924; her eight Wimbledon singles titles remained the women's record until Martina Navratilova surpassed it in 1990. The present cover therefore belongs to the period in which Wills was becoming not simply a successful competitor but a nationally recognizable female sports figure offering evidence of the expanding place of women athletes within American mass media and celebrity culture. Time: The Weekly News-Magazine. Vol. VIII No. 4. New York: Time Publishing Company July 26 1926. Complete issue; pagination and dimensions not supplied. Helen Wills appears prominently on the cover. Earlier that year on February 16 at Cannes she faced France's Suzanne Lenglen in their only singles meeting a contest so heavily publicized that Time compared its attention to that surrounding the Locarno conference. Lenglen won 6-3 8-6 but Wills's performance against the dominant French champion further established her international standing. The issue thus captures Wills at a pivotal point between her early American successes and the sustained dominance that began the following year when she won her first Wimbledon singles title. Wills's later career underscores the historical weight of this early cover appearance. She went on to dominate women's tennis through much of the late 1920s and 1930s and in 1933 she defeated Phil Neer then ranked eighth among American men in a San Francisco exhibition match an unusual mixed-sex contest four decades before the much-publicized Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs match of 1973. The 1926 Time cover therefore documents both the media construction of a female athletic celebrity and the broader cultural visibility of women's competitive sport during the interwar years. No specific defects are supplied; overall very good. A strong contemporary periodical source for the study of Helen Wills women in sport tennis history and the representation of female athletic achievement in American popular media. unknown