Gender and Chess - The Ever-Changing, Never-Ending Question...

Selected excerpts from Women in Chess, Players of The Modern Age

by John Graham
McFarland & Company, Inc.(1987)

Women, by virtue of their place in society, were not part of the development of chess until the Middle Ages. However, there is ample evidence in literature that they played. In most cases it was a game of the leisure hours, oftentimes between a wife and her husband, occasionally between lovers. Oftentimes in literature, the female was cast in the role of a woman who, oddly, is a good player and who could have won, but who, for the sake of the story, throws the game.

Thus, in The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux by Sir John Bourchier, printed in 1534, the heroine "doughter of the kyng" lost the game on purpose, since in doing so her opponent would "have her all nyght in his bed to do pleasure." If her opponent had lost, he was about to "lese his hede." However he quickly called the kyng and said "Syr, I am content to relese the wager, let youre doughter go to her chambre and sporte with her damselles at her pleasure." The kyng was relieved and let him go with a gift of money. However, "the lady went her way sorrowfull, and sayde to her selfe: A false faynted hert for yf I had known that thou woldest thus a refused my company, I wold have mated thee, and then thou haddest lost thy hed."

Likewise, Thomas Hardy, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1877, writes:

The game proceeded. Elfride played by rote: Stephen by thought. It was the cruellest thing to checkmate him after so much labor, she considered. What was she dishonest enough to do in her compassion? To let him checkmate her. A second game followed; and being herself absolutely indifferent as to the result (her playing was above the average among women, and she knew it) she allowed him to give checkmate again. A final game in which she adopted the Muzio Gambit as the opening, was terminated by Elfride's victory at the twelfth move.

Stephen looked up suspiciously. His heart was throbbing even more excitedly than was hers, which itself had quickened when she seriously set to work on this last occasion.

"You have been trifling with me till now!" he exclaimed, his face flushing. "You did not play your best in the first two games!"

"Elfride's guilt showed in her face. Stephen became the picture of vexation and sadness, which, relished for a moment, caused her the next instant to regret the mistake she had made.

"Mr. Smith, forgive me!" she said sweetly. "I see now, though I did not at first, that what I have done seems like contempt for your skill. But, indeed, I did not mean it in that sense. I could not, upon my conscience, win a victory in those first and second games over one who fought at such a disadvantage and so manfully."

There is a common theme in these and other pieces of literature. Women played all right, but they were not supposed to be very good on average, and the fact that these literary examples were "above the average among women" made them suitably different to include in a story. The prevailing thought in those days must have been that women were not generally as capable at chess as men.

However, this didn't stop them from playing, even though their own "place" in society got in the way.

* * * * *

Can women play chess as well as men?

In most literary quotations on the subject of women playing, there is the implication that women, although they could play, could only play in an inferior way. But this may just have been protection for the male ego!

It is worth exploring this question at more length because it places in context the trials that a woman player has in competing in the chess world today. This selfsame feeling of the inferiority of women's play still exists, 200 years later, and it is quite deeply ingrained.

Curiously, there has been no allowance for opportunity and equal learning. When asked if a woman plays chess as well as men, the kindest and most intelligent of men found reasons for the ineptness of women over the chess board!

Psychologists "explain" chess in terms of "libidinal conflicts gratified (in) men at the anal-phallic levels of development," to quote Reuben Fine. By this he means that male players get some satisfaction at being able to overcome the king or father figures, where the father figure also has a phallic symbolism. By this sort of reasoning, it is also logical that a woman should not find chess attractive, nor should she perform particularly well. Fine confirms his reasoning by observing that "chess is played primarily by men."

However, there is a simpler theory. Chess is a game of conflict, a game which thrives on aggression. One player is trying to overrun the other and immobolize the opposing king. From time immemorial, the male has been the hunter and the fighter, and aggression has been bred into the male of the race. The accepted role for the female has been the homemaker. It is our age-old chauvinism all over again! Thus, in the past, when women were not encouraged to take an aggressive role in society, the background of experience was not available to them in many spheres, chess being one.

More reasonable men than Fine have different ideas, some which are so tenuous that they are difficult to counter. International Grandmaster Harry Golombek who is also a chess arbiter, a writer, and a long-time student of the game revealed his belief that, apart from lack of opportunity for women, there was another reason for differences between their play and that of men. He said, "This may be ungallant, but I think chess is really a game for the masculine imagination. There is a different quality of imagination involved. Men are more imaginative and women are better technically. Vera Menchik was a case in point. Nona Gaprindashvili is an exception: she is more tactically and imaginatively gifted. There she stands head and shoulders above the rest."

You will note that the word "difference" relating to women's play compared to men is a euphemism for "inferior," even for this gentle man. Prejudices die hard. If Harry were correct, the playing of quality chess by a computer would be doomed to failure, whereas in fact the best chess programs are those that are technically correct and use brute force to search for options. There is no imagination involved at all. There is instead, recognition of position, an understanding of topological relationships, memory, learning of prior success and failure paths, and a mathematical weighting of the various options depending on the probable outcomes. No flashes of inspiration.

In 1973, after Bobby Fischer had won the world title, Dimitrije Bjelica reported on the results of a pool he took to the question "Why do women play worse chess than men?"

Robert Byrne responded: "Are you sure they do? (He was annotating the Fischer-Boris Spassky match games.) "Here are Spassky and Fischer plodding on for two hours in a complete dead draw. I can tell you, Nona Gaprindasvili, Alla Kushnir, Tatiana Zatulovskaya, Milunka Lazarevic and some others play better than many, many men. You might also ask why we have so few women as famous composers or mathematicians?"

A Dutch master, Tim Krabbe, said: "Remember what our Grandmaster [Johannes] Donner said: "Women can do everything but they cannot think logically. They have no intuition."

Grandmaster William Lombardy, then a chess-playing priest, showing the worst kind of thoughtless chauvinism said: "Women play worse because they are more interested in men than in chess."

Fischer answered the same question in 1962 at the Varna Olymiad by saying: "I could give any woman in the world a piece and a move; to Gaprindashvili even, a knight." When, however, Bjelica met Mikhail Tal and reported the conversation, Tal laughed and said "Fischer is Fischer, but a knight is a knight!"

"Women play worse because they are only women," said Lothar Schmid, but his wife disagreed: "We play worse because we are more tender, we have more feelings." Another woman player agreed with her: "Men are more aggressive than women."

Svetozar Glogoric thought, "It is something biological. I just do not know why they play worse." Larry Evans: "Because they have no subconscious urge to kill their father." Lubos Kavalek: "Maybe the reason is that those women who play chess are not the best ones."

A medical doctor wrote to the magazine Chess: "As regards chess, the difference is not so much in the brain, but in the hormones which act on the brain. For instance, if a great chess master were castrated or took female hormones in large does, his chess ability would markedly deteriorate." One further letter noted only: "The fact is that men are better at everything than women; without exception, and the main reason is that they have, in general, more efficient and more inventive brains."

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Apart from Byrne and Kavalek, not one of the men had raised the suggestion that the only difference might be one of opportunity, and that there might be no difference between the play of men and women if the opportunities available to the players were eventually made equal. It is not a matter of too little imagination or too little logical ability, too much tenderness or too little aggression. Lazarevic understood the problem. Girls and women have until recently been expected to do other things.