Next Monday, thousands of women will be running in this year’s Boston Marathon. But 60 years ago, there was just one … and she had to crash the party.
Bobbi Gibb defied the rules prohibiting women from running in the marathon by doing it anyway. That act of defiance has permanently cemented her in Boston history — literally. There’s now a statue honoring her near the starting line.
We’ve gone from a time when officials said women simply weren’t physically capable to now, as Boston celebrates a new generation of professional women’s sports. Bobbi’s persistence in fighting for gender equality has helped push that movement forward. She joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about what compelled her to crash the marathon six decades ago. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: It’s great to talk with you again! I wanted to go back to that moment in 1966, and not talk about the race so much — we’ve talked about that before, and you’ve told that story so many times — but more about specifically your mindset before the race and summoning the courage. Give us a sense of what it meant to have that kind of courage in that moment, what 1966 was like.
Bobbi Gibb: People forget what it was like, especially for women, before 1966. I was born in the middle of World War II, and opportunities for women were almost non-existent. You’re expected to get married. If you were lucky enough to go to college, you were supposed to be engaged your senior year and then get married, because virtually, there was no other way of supporting yourself and having a family. I mean, this is just the only way you could do it in those days.
There were hardly any professional women; there were hardly any [women] doctors, lawyers, and even women in the arts weren’t taken seriously as much in those days. Now, I hear these young women, they say, “Well, I’m going to run the marathon, and then I’m going to go to medical school.” That was impossible when I was growing up.
When I applied to medical school — and I was pre-med at the University of California — my grades were great, everything was great; I was really a top student. When I went for my interview, they told me, and I quote, “You’re too pretty to go to medical school. You will upset the boys in the lab. Sorry, we have to save the places for men who are actually going to practice medicine.” This was the mindset; it wasn’t just one person who was like this. This was the situation, and people do not realize where we’ve been.
There was no New York Marathon, no Chicago, no Berlin, no London. The Boston Marathon is the oldest continuously run marathon in the country, and it was the only one I knew of. I first saw it in 1964. My dad and I went out, and we watched it, and I fell in love with it. I just fell in love. I always loved to run. Even as a little child, I loved to run. I love that feeling [of] freedom. I used to run in the woods with the neighborhood dogs. We lived in Winchester, and the [Middlesex] Fells Reservation was there. I’d go, and I’d run and run and run, and I felt free. I felt like myself.
Rath: In that context, you found that freedom in running, but all of those voices telling you “You can’t do this,” and also, “You’re not allowed to do this,” right? Where did it come from inside you, Bobbi? How did you get the gumption to go and do it?
Gibb: For some reason, I’ve always felt tuned into this sense of love in the universe. I’ve always felt this love. I felt the love in the sunshine, love in the trees — even sitting on the subway and [seeing] all the people sitting there and all their different lives and what they’re dealing with, their feelings and stuff, I feel this sense of love. I fell in love with the Boston Marathon; it was love.
They say love casts out fear, and so I fell in love with the Boston Marathon. I had never seen a group of people running like that together, and it just hit some chord inside of me — like, these people knew how I feel when I run, and I want to be part of this. I want to be part of this great human drama.
So, I just set off training. I had no idea how. There weren’t any books on running. Nobody ran, not even men. For ordinary people to go out and run was unheard of. And it was thought improper for a grown woman to run in public. That’s why I ran up in the woods with the dogs, and I felt free from all of that. I just followed what I loved; that’s how I did it. I just follow what I love from the inside.
Rath: You said you fell in love with the Boston Marathon, and the feeling is clearly mutual. There’s a statue of you now at the starting line. How does that make you feel?
Gibb: I sculpted that statue. I wanted to do one of Joan Benoit, and she said, “No way! You have to do it of you. You were the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon.” The people in Hopkinton wanted a sculpture there, and I said, “No, it’s gotta be Joan.” And she said, “No, it’s you or nothing.” So I said, “Well, if you put it that way, OK.”
I did a life-size sculpture of myself. I took the clay sculpture that I did, and then, through a series of molds, we transferred the exact size, dimensions, and all the details — even down to the fingerprints — and translated that into the bronze. So, the ultimate bronze sculpture is exactly the way I made the clay, and that is what went in Hopkinton.
Rath: That’s amazing. Boston now has growing women’s professional sports teams. Tell us how you feel about the significance of that kind of visibility.
Gibb: That is wonderful! Women’s sports [are] now coming to the foreground, in terms of the skill and the strength and everything it takes to do well in sports, whether it’s figure skating, basketball, football — or soccer, as we call it. Women are now taken seriously. And that was my purpose.
When I trained for two years, and I wrote for my application in 1966, I got a letter from [Boston Marathon director] Will Cloney that said women are not physiologically able to run 26.2-mile marathons. Those were the rules of sports. That’s what everybody thought. Even women — women coaches would tell their girls, “Now dears, don’t run more than a mile and a half. It could damage your reproductive system,” and this sort of thing. It was a widespread belief that women were not physically able to do this sort of thing.
I suddenly saw that if I could prove this false belief about women wrong, I could throw into question all the other false beliefs about women: they’re not smart enough to be doctors, they’re not strong enough to become lawyers, they can’t possibly be astronauts. I mean, all these false beliefs about women [are because of] prejudice — the whole tragedy of prejudice.
Rath: Bobbi, I’ve got to get your reaction to this. A woman has just flown around the far side of the moon and back, Christina Koch, one of the Artemis II astronauts.
Gibb: I loved it! I loved that. That would never have happened when the moon mission first started. I mean, it was great, but it was all men. I mean, this is wonderful. Men and women can do things together. That’s why I wanted to end this stupid war between the sexes and show that men and women can be best friends, they can be married, they can have children, and they can do what they’re best at doing. It’s wonderful.
