The five women knew full well what a stir they were about to cause, but if they felt self-conscious, they showed only good humor and good grace. They had come to the Everett Gun Club at West Everett, Massachusetts, simply to shoot--the only competitors in the first official women's skeet shooting tournament. If you'd asked them what they thought about a tournament open only to women, all five probably would have said the same thing: It's about time. It was Wednesday, June 19, 1932.

Four lived in Massachusetts: Anna Mary Vance, Gertrude Wheeler, Gertrude Travis, and Mrs. Walsworth Pierce. Peggy Small had come all the way from Detroit. All five wore cloche hats and skirts that reached below the knee. Only Gertrude Travis was unmarried at the time.

The event was 50 targets. Mrs. Pierce, shooting a 16-gauge autoloader, and Gertrude Travis, shooting a 20-gauge double, each broke 34. Anna Vance and Gertrude Wheeler both shot autoloaders, Mrs. Vance a 16-bore and Mrs. Wheeler a 12. They broke 43 targets apiece. Peggy Small won the tournament with a 20-gauge double and a perfect score of 50 straight.

In a mixed-pairs shoot that followed, Mrs. Small broke another 25 straight, dropped two targets in the fourth round, and finished with 98 of a hundred. Then she borrowed a .410 and broke 19, just for the fun of it.

SHOOTING CLEARLY WAS FUN for Peggy Small. At the time, she held the women's long-run record at skeet with 81 consecutive hits. In April 1934, she extended it to 131 straight, still using her 20-bore double. Skeet was still in its infancy then and was a substantially more difficult game than it is today.

The writer who covered the 1932 tournament for National Sportsman made the predictable allusions to the goddess Diana and concluded his report by observing that "there is no reason why ladies cannot enjoy Skeet and shoot it as well as men." It's a proper sentiment, but I'm not sure he really believed it, for much of his article has a tone of slightly breathless wonder, as if he wasn't completely convinced that what he witnessed had actually happened.

Similar sentiments unfortunately are still with us. In the mildest form, it is simply a patronizing attitude toward women who shoot, as if a woman with a gun were an amusing anomaly not to be taken seriously. The radical view seems to have it that any woman who shoots, particularly if she shoots quite well, is a predator of menacing intent and ambiguous plumbing. Both opinions are utter nonsense, but they do exist.

There are plenty of sociological reasons why relatively few women take up shooting but not one valid reason in Creation why any woman cannot shoot splendidly if she chooses to do so.

AMERICAN WOMEN HAVE DONE just that for a hundred years. Annie Oakley's exhibition and trick shooting earned worldwide fame in the 1880s and '90s, but she also was a superb live-pigeon and clay-target shot. Women truly came into their own as target shooters in the 1930s. Marie Kautzky Grant--daughter of Joseph Kautzky, inventor of the Fox-Kautzky single trigger--was Iowa's state trapshooting champion 18 times between 1923 and 1947. Lela Hall, an equally brilliant trap shot, won the Missouri state championship time and again. Between them, Mrs. Grant and Mrs. Hall owned virtually every national championship in women's events and a healthy number in open events as well.

Peggy Small and Anna Vance dominated women's skeet shooting through the mid-1930s, succeeded by Patricia Laursen and Jean Smythe, who held world records in 1941 and '42. Since World War II, skeet has produced a host of excellent shots: Ann Martin; Carola Mandel, who in 1954 was the 20-gauge world champion of all skeet shooters; Kathleen Dinning; Ann Yancy; Karla Roberts; and Lori Desatoff, who has held virtually every women's high-average title since 1982.

I have taught several women to shoot, both formally and informally, and I believe I've learned more from them about the nature of shooting than they ever learned from me. From that experience, I'd argue that if a man and a woman, both beginners, were given good instruction and equal practice, the woman most likely would become the better shot in a shorter time.

ATTITUDE IS THE KEY. I have yet to meet a woman who believes that being born female implies an innate ability to handle a gun. The converse is not true for a lot of men. Because women tend to look on shooting as simply an acquired skill, which it is, they can approach it unfettered by some unnecessary pressures. The fact is, an ability to shoot isn't part of anyone's sexual identity, male or female, but many men, especially young ones, seem to have a hard time learning that. Some never do.

None of the women I've taught were defensive about being a novice, and that gave them an important advantage: They could concentrate on learning to hit a target without fretting over what it meant to their egos if they missed. Eye-hand coordination, the physical crux of shooting, works best when the conscious mind is undistracted--and stuffing pieces of your ego into a gun along with the shells is a major-league distraction.

Despite the cherished notions of the macho set, women are no more inherently recoil-shy than men nor any more susceptible to its cumulative effect. Given a well-fitted stock of proper length and pitch, with a good bit of cast at the toe, a woman in good physical condition can absorb as much recoil as anyone. Those who shoot hundreds of cartridges at trap tournaments certainly do, and a registered trap shoot these days can be as much an endurance contest as a game of skill.

I once overheard one knuckle-dragger chortling to another over how he had "cured" his wife's interest in learning to shoot by giving her his duck gun and a handful of three-inch shells. I trust there is a particularly hot corner in Hell reserved for such types. That might help cure what really needs curing.

THERE ARE MEN WHO PINE and sigh because they have no sons with whom to share their fondness for shooting. But all too many of them never seem to think of asking their daughters if they'd care to give it a try. Perhaps they see shooting simply as an adjunct to hunting and assume their daughters wouldn't enjoy hunting. Maybe they wouldn't, but hunting is a separate matter and there is no reason at all why anyone cannot enjoy target-shooting for its own sake.

Clearly, though, somebody has been encouraging daughters to shoot. In 1930, the National Skeet Shooter's Association, forerunner of the current NSSA, estimated that there were about a hundred women skeet shooters in the United States--a minuscule fraction of the total number of skeeters. At the end of 1985, women make up slightly less than 7 percent of the memberships of both NSSA and the Amateur Trapshooting Association. The numbers are lower than they ought to be, but the trend is encouraging.

One of the pleasantest memories I have from competitive shooting days is of coaching a women's collegiate trapshooting team, five young women who hadn't 300 targets-worth of experience among them when we started. They accepted me readily enough and took seriously the business of learning to shoot. By the end of the season they'd outshot every team they'd gone against. Just for fun, they took on the campus men's team, which I also coached, and outshot them, too. It had little to do with my teaching ability. They broke every target all by themselves and never got angry or glum over a miss. They were simply five good shots who took keen delight in playing the game. They won the championship trophy that year and gave it to me. I still have it.