Long distance swimming champion and women's rights activist, Rose Pitonof.

The year 2011 marked several sports anniversaries of note, including three that hold special meaning for New York City. But while two of these are easily recalled (the 25th anniversaries of the N.Y. Mets’ World Series win and the N.Y. Giants’ Super Bowl win), the third has faded from collective memory—despite its significant social impact. One hundred years ago, in 1911, Rose Pitonof won the title of Long Distance Swimming Champion of the World, proving that women were as capable athletes as men.

In the context of the times Pitonof's win was an enormous feat, equivalent to Billy Jean King’s “Battle of the Sexes” tennis upset of Bobby Riggs in 1973. Around the turn of the last century, swimming was not considered a sport; few people knew how to swim and women were strongly discouraged from performing what was termed the “vulgar act of public bathing”. This was because, by necessity, swimming requires far fewer layers of clothing than proper societal ladies regularly wore. Conventional wisdom also held that because they lacked the upper body strength of males, ladies would almost assuredly drown. Rose Pitonof knew differently.

“Little Rose,” as she was then called, had grown up in Boston with three brothers and a younger sister and was determined to prove that swimming was a perfectly proper pastime and lifesaving skill. To make her point, she referenced the General Slocum tragedy of June 15, 1904, in which 1,021 passengers drowned while attempting to save themselves from a burning boat that was banked in only seven feet of water less than twenty feet from shore. Only the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, rank higher among victims of a single tragedy in New York City.

Before her world-famous swim in 1911, Pitonof first gained national attention the year before, when at only 16 she was the first woman to ever compete in the Boston Light Swim, an eight-mile open water event that she won in six hours and fifty minutes. Seven men began the competition with her in the cold Atlantic but none finished, prompting the Chicago Tribune to ask its readers the now-famous question Pitonof had long known the answer to: Is there anything women can’t do?

Almost immediately after the Boston Light Swim event, Pitonof became a vaudeville performer. So odd was the notion of a "female swimmer" that she attracted tremendous crowds and even headlined for a time. Her managers built her a special tank for performances that showcased swimming, diving, and what at the time was very close to modern water ballet. More importantly to Pitonof—but to the displeasure of her handlers who thought it slowed the show—she dedicated a part of each performance to demonstrating proper swimming form and lifesaving techniques.

At only 17 years old and billed as “the tiny girl student from Boston,” Pitonof entered New York’s Long Distance Swimming Championship event on August 13, 1911, to the delight of a crowd that had swelled to 50,000, according to the The New York Times. After downing a chicken sandwich and some coffee, Pitonof entered the water at 9:20 a.m. and set herself to begin the grueling 17-mile swim from East Twenty-sixth Street to Steeplechase Pier, Coney Island. To battle the adverse tides she encountered at the beginning and end of the marathon, Pitonof went with the breaststroke and swam in a zig-zag pattern around and under piers, including the Fifth Street Pier where the General Slocum disaster had taken place. Pitonof’s strategy lengthened her personal course to 21 miles, but she finished the race in record time (8 hours, 7 minutes) and as the winner.

“Coney Island never held a more enthusiastic or demonstrative crowd than that which welcomed the girl swimmer at Steeplechase Pier,” remarked The New York Times, who also noted that the crowd of stunned congratulators was so exuberant that “attendants were totally unable to hold the people in check” as Pitonof headed up the beach to her dressing room.

After later attempts to become the first woman to swim the English Channel were thwarted due to successive years of bad weather and then World War I, Pitonof rejected an offer from Hollywood and settled down to marry Boston dentist Frederic Weene. The couple had two daughters, Evelyn and Elinor, the latter of which became a championship swimmer in her own right.

In August of this year, 2011, to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of Pitonof's historic feat, six swimmers duplicated her efforts along the same course in New York City as part of an event organized by Urban Swim. Proceeds from the event went to select charities and the organization plans to establish the “Rose Pitonof Swim” as an annual event.

Although Rose Pitonof Weene died on June 15, 1984, at the age of 89—leaving behind her two daughters, three grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren—she did so after a life well-lived on her own terms. Long before 1946 saw Ethel Merman belt out the lyrics to “Anything you can do I can do better” on Broadway, Pitonof had firmly proved the notion in New York’s waterways. She also single-handedly established swimming as an acceptable recreational exercise worthy of classification as “sport” and a valuable lifesaving skill.