Ottawa Alert a tribute to women who helped break the ice a century ago

When news broke late last month that the nascent Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) had filed trademark applications for six team names including the Ottawa Alert, James Powell felt a sense of déjà vu.

Powell, a member of the Historical Society of Ottawa and author of the blog Today in Ottawa's History, had recently written about another pioneering women's hockey team with the same name. Well, almost the same.

The Ottawa Alerts — that's Alerts plural — burst onto the sports scene in 1915, a year into the First World War. With many of Canada's most accomplished hockey-playing men enlisting and serving overseas, there was suddenly room on the rink for the women.

The team drew young women from the Ottawa Ladies' College and the YWCA. 

Women's hockey was nothing new in Canada. Lady Isobel Gathorne-Hardy (née Stanley), daughter of the governor general who would later lend his name to hockey's most coveted prize, famously hosted an all-ladies shinny game at Rideau Hall in 1889. (A rematch the following year produced the first known photograph of women playing hockey.)

Women's hockey flourished over the following decades, and there were plenty of local teams. Powell lists the Rideau Club Ladies, the Westboro Pets and the Vestas of Hull among the popular capital region clubs at the time. 

The women's game was still seen as something of a novelty, however, and not everyone viewed it as a suitable pursuit for proper young ladies in the early 20th century. 

"It was considered unladylike, I would put it that way," Powell told CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning earlier this week.

But spectators soon learned that these women could really play. Following a 1916 road trip to Cornwall, Ont., a local newspaper described the Alerts as "good