Author: Natalie Porter
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Suzie Rowland
Suzanne Rowland-Levin was originally a surfer who pursued skateboarding in the early 1960s along with her friends. This time-period was considered the First Wave of skateboarding primarily based around the Palisades, CA. Several teams were forming and gaining sponsorship who didn’t seem particularly interested in recruiting girls, but that was not a deterrent. In 1963,…
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Thrasher Betty Hunt
Thrasher magazine in the early 1980s was hit and mostly miss when it came to the representation of women skateboarders in their pages. The problem was that there was this fear around being labeled a poseur or a fraud that likely stemmed from the punk scene, which was always intent on rooting out folks who…
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Cindy Berryman
Cindy Berryman will be the first to tell you that the real skateboarder of her family was little sister Ellen Berryman, seven years younger. And yet, Cindy played a crucial part in promoting and advocating for women in skateboarding in the 1970s and deserves recognition. In Ellen’s story for the book, Lives on Board (2009,…
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Ianire Elorriaga
Ianire Elorriaga is from the town of Bakio and is the first female skateboarder from the Basque country to gain international attention for her impressive selection of tricks, contest results as six-time European Champion, and for going pro. Photo: Roxy ad featuring Ianire in the March 2003 issue of Beach Brother magazine in France. Ianire…
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Wendy Zaks (Rector)
Wendy Zaks appears skateboarding in the bottom right corner of an ad within Thrasher March 1989 and Transworld June 1989 as a member of the Powell Peralta Factory Team, just a few years after the legendary all-female ad that stated “Some Girls Play with Dolls. Real Women Skate” with Anita Tessensohn and Leaf Treinen, although…
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Kim Kinsley
Kim Kinsley was a Blue Sky Skatepark Team member out of Albuquerque, New Mexico and appears briefly in the January 1978 issue of the National Skateboard Review, practising her freestyle moves with a smile. She had also been part of a group photo for her team in the September 1977 issue, in a feature article…
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Judi Oyama
Judi Oyama’s history as both a pioneer for women skateboarders in the 1970s and for her current accomplishments in her sixties, as she continues to compete in slalom and downhill to this day, demands respect! You can listen to her story here on YouTube, launched on International Women’s Day 2023 for Santa Cruz: It all…
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Gigi Gits
Gigi Gits was a punk skateboarder in the 1980s from Richmond, Virginia who made her way to Atlanta, Georgia. In Bonnie Blouin’s game-changing article for Thrasher in April 1986 called “Sugar and Spice..?” she writes, “I’m supposed to be writing an article about girl skaters. Only problem is, in 3 years I’ve only met three……
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Peggy Turner
In The Florida Times (May 9, 1980), Peggy Turner shared that she had begun skateboarding at age 14 for fun. “It was a fad everybody seemed to be doing… Then I really started enjoying it and then I got good. Now I want to skate for a long time.” Peggy’s home skatepark was the legendary…
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Alexis Sablone
Alexis Sablone first exploded into the consciousness of skateboarding at age 15 with her part for the Coliseum skateshop video P.J. Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life (2002) based out of Boston. The video was creative, ground-breaking, and hugely popular, and Sablone’s one-minute-long part was an absolute gamechanger for women in skateboarding. Alexis, filmed by Dave Korden,…
Womxn Skateboard History 