From the late nineteenth century, the Midwest was a hotbed of bowling culture, with Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at its historic and modern center—for a few reasons. In addition to being inexpensive entertainment, with a low bar to entry, bowling was familiar to and popular with European immigrant groups, particularly Wisconsin’s German community. The popularity of bowling in Europe is why, for example, New York’s oldest park is named for the “bowling green” established there by Dutch settlers. Matthew Buchinger, the seventeenth-century “Little Man of Nuremberg” (he stood only twenty-nine inches tall) was renowned for his bowling skill, as was shown in a 1710 etching highlighting his accomplishments. Many historians suspect the 1830 invention of the lawn mower made a lot of games (tennis, bowling, golf, croquet, you name it) broadly viable. But in moving from an elite lawn culture into the American Midwest, the game was better served by an indoor alley during cold, wet months. Bowling also partnered with tavern culture; bowler and writer Doug Schmidt notes that the typical alley owner “was essentially a saloon keeper. The breweries also owned a lot of the taverns that had bowling alleys attached to them.”
It was also a game nearly exclusively played by men. Public historian Erika Janik explains that by the mid-1800s, ninepin bowling had become wildly popular, and though “many wealthy men—and a few women—bowled in private clubs or estate lanes, bowling was most closely tied to working-class immigrants, chiefly men,” many of whom were distinctly against the advancement of women’s rights.
“Some feared that a voting woman would vote for prohibition,” Janik writes. “Brewery interests owned or controlled more than 80 percent of all taverns in the United States, and male culture fiercely defended spaces created for leisure and brotherhood.” When the American Bowling Congress (ABC) was formed in 1895 as a governing organization for the sport, its membership was limited to white men.
Even so, women were instrumental to bowling’s development as a popular pursuit. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when (white) women like Daisy Clark went to bowl in public, they were pushing at social conventions. Even if women bowled in long skirts and high collars, there was a sense that they were out of place at the alley, invaders in a presumed male domain. Schmidt quotes Helen Luccesi, who recalled that when she “started bowling at Bauer’s Rec, they would put up a bedsheet to separate the alleys from the bar. They thought a decent woman wouldn’t sit at the bar.”