(ABOVE) Wahine in the lineup: Left to right, Kim Heyer, writer Mindy Pennybacker, Kaiulu Downing, Evie Black and Melissa Kurpinski at Makalei Beach Park.
On January 22, 2023, the biggest glass ceiling in surfing shattered when six women competed for the first time in the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay, known as the Superbowl of Surfing and a stridently boys-only club for more than thirty years. Because the rules require consistent waves of at least twenty feet (by Hawaiian scale; faces might be forty feet or higher), 2023 was only the tenth year the Eddie had run since 1985. It was also the first time I ever went in person, braving the crowds, traffic and blazing sun in the spirit of sisterhood. For although I'm just a recreational wave rider, these elite pioneers are blazing new paths for all women surfers.
It was a glorious day as big, beautiful waves with up to sixty-foot faces peeled off the point, and offshore winds groomed glassy walls curling into cavernous tubes. I screamed when Maui's Andrea Moller took off, becoming the first woman ever to surf in an Eddie. By the end of the day, I was hoarse from cheering the six women-Moller, Keala Kennelly, Paige Alms, Emily Erickson, Makani Adric and Justine Dupont-who paddled into some of the world's biggest waves alongside thirty-four men.
When I started surfing at 14, in the summer of 1966 on Oahu's South Shore, I was usually the only girl at Tonggs, off Diamond Head. I had to learn from the neighborhood boys, who paddled effortlessly into waves and pushed lightly to their feet. I was always slower, lacking their upper-body strength, not to mention testosterone. As a modern dancer, I had good balance and muscular legs, but the boys said I would surf better with skinny legs and narrow hips, like theirs. Thus my lifelong struggle with body image was born. Of course, if the goal is to surf like a boy, it might help to be shaped like one, but dieting made me too weak to surf. So I kept my thighs, which enabled me to make vertical drops on overhead waves and discover what it really means to surf like a girl.
I studied surf magazines and films, which never showed women surfing. In 1963 the first woman appeared on the cover of a surf magazine, standing on the beach. This was US champion Linda Benson, a Californian who in 1959 at age 15 was the first female recorded riding Waimea Bay. "I took a wave-someone said eighteen feet-and when it was over I thought, 'I'll never do that again,' and I never did," laughed Benson when I met her last June at the California Surfing Museum in Oceanside.
According to the International Surfing Association, male surfers outnumber female surfers four to one, and while women began receiving equal prize purses in 2019 and were finally allotted championship tour events at Pipeline and Sunset Beach in 2022, competitions still field twice as many males as females.
But it wasn't always that way. While researching my book, Surfing Sisterhood Hawaii: Wahine Reclaiming the Waves, published last May, I learned that in ancient Hawaii, women surfed as men's equals and sometimes their betters. While they weren't allowed to eat at the same table, the ocean was free of gender-based kapu (restrictions). The Hawaiian goddesses Pele and Hiiaka were said to have surfed. So did Queen Kaahumanu, and in 1793, diarist Peter Puget observed her mother, Namahana, riding an "immensely high" wave. In the first reported surf contest in 1887, a woman defeated her husband.
But when surfing took off in the 1950s, thanks in part and perhaps ironically to the popular Gidget book and films, men seized the opportunities. And, as the more than thirty female surfers in Surfing Sisterhood attest, including Hawaii's Carissa Moore, serial world champ and the first Olympic surfing gold medalist, males still dominate the lineups with numbers, but there are lots of supportive guys among the dinosaurs. I recently gave a talk showing photos from my book alongside common male surfer wisdom. "Women can't get barrelled," they say. (Witness Rochelle "Barrels" Ballard under the hood at Backdoor in 1992, and Keala Kennelly behind the curtain at Pipeline in 2023.) "Women can't surf big waves," they say. (See "Banzai" Betty Depolito riding quadruple-overhead Sunset Beach in 1978, and the Eddie women charging at Waimea Bay.)
But for most women in the waves, size doesn't matter. Kaiulu Downing, daughter of George Downing, the late legendary big-wave surfer who for thirty-three years decided whether the waves were monstrous enough for the Eddie to run, says she got the best wave of her life on a five-foot day in Waikiki because her father told her to go. What matters, I can now tell young surfers, aren't the metrics but the immeasurable joy.
