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• Abby Rapoport

  The Girls of Summer

  Tags:

  amateurs,

  baseball,

  get some respect,

  newspapers,

  Progressives,

  sports,

  women

  

  Always appear in feminine attire when not actively engaged in practice or playing ball. This regulation continues through the playoffs for all, even though your team is not participating.
                                                  —“A League of Their Own,” United States, c. 1943

  The New York Times had been covering baseball for almost thirty years when, in 1883, they ran one of their more memorable sports headlines. “A Base-Ball Burlesque,” the large letters proclaimed. And in smaller font: “A Game In Which the Girl Players Got Hopelessly Mixed and Furnished Unlimited Fun to the Spectators.”

  The article went on to describe how the crowd “laughed themselves hungry and thirsty” watching the game. The women, it says, played “in a very sad and sorrowful sort of way,” and the author even goes so far as to wonder if the sport is “too great for their struggling intellects” before launching into a lengthy discussion of players’ wardrobe, hairstyles, and general attractiveness.

  By the 1880s, America was baseball crazy. Beginning in 1871, professional leagues were organized through the East Coast and Midwest, offering fans a place not only to spend some free time but to forge a new identity as loyal fans and fanatics. Newspapers, a major force in this effort, devoted column after column not only to the players and their teams, but also to the fan base, which often served as an extension to the team itself. In a country reeling from change—post-war, in the midst of industrialization—the sport had become symbolic of America’s “true” values, and fans as well players could be part of the new patriotism. They could arrive at the stadium and leave behind anxieties about what it meant to be a man in a world where women worked in factories and pushed for the vote. Instead, they could join in baseball’s jovial community which still valued manliness. To build the sport as a national pastime, the media went to great lengths to ensure baseball continued to encapsulate such values. Baseball games, the Christian Inquirer proclaimed in 1857, “are courts of honor as well as sports of myth.” Perhaps for that reason, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat declared, “The female has no place in base ball, except to the degradation of the game.”

  Practically from the onset, women played baseball professionally—the first paid women’s game was played in 1875. But when women played the sport in the same manner as men did, without fumbling balls or getting confused, they didn’t get the same condescending treatment as the burlesque teams. Instead they were simply ignored. Through the 1880s and 1890s, barnstorming teams called Bloomer Girls would travel around the Midwest, challenging local men’s teams and trying to attract some of their male counterparts' fan base. It never seems to have worked. While some players—notably pitchers Maud Nelson and Lizzie Arlington—made names for themselves, most teams got almost no attention from the press and generally failed to gain fans. Advertisements paid for by the Bloomer Girls themselves were often their only mentions in newspapers. One of the few stories about them, in the 1884 Chicago Tribune, described a team of female ball players as stranded “half-starved and in a sad plight.” The Atlanta Constitution did not fail to mention that “the costume which the players wear on the field is exceedingly attractive.”

  Sometimes the lack of respect wasn’t so surprising. The “burlesque” game featured two teams, the Blondes and the Brunettes. Other teams, the Singles and the Marrieds or the Fats and the Leans, offered different variations on the same gimmick. In these cases, the (usually male) managers weren’t exactly building legitimate teams based on strategic skills. In another exhibition game description, the Washington Post couldn’t help but mention that the team “wore brief yellow and black striped skirts that neither impeded the girls’ movements nor the crowd’s full appreciation of the girls’ physiques.”

  It’s not entirely clear who engineered these vaudevillian spectacles—mangers were generally men, but the ladies were certainly complicit in the comedic efforts. While serious female players found other avenues, the women of this stylized version of baseball often made a spectacle of their incompetence. The gender anxiety of a rapidly industrializing nation was clear enough; men traded family farms for city factories, and more often than not, saw their wives join them in the workforce. Watching women play a man’s sport as women offered not just a diversion, but also a nice contrast to the “real game” which, to be played correctly, needed manliness—courage, athleticism, and mental toughness. All the things our burlesque ladies appeared to lack.

  The only women to escape criticism were those who played baseball first. In 1866, just as baseball was developing a common set of rules, Vassar had what may have been the first female baseball teams, the Laurel and Abenakis Base-ball Clubs. Nine years later, the school had seven teams, and soon other women’s colleges, including the rest of the Seven Sisters, had organized their own clubs. At Vassar, the women played in long-sleeved dresses with full skirts that reached the floor; fences shielded the women from view, to avoid scandalizing the neighbors. The games were private diversions, encouraged for the potential health benefits of exercise. The Progressive era had brought a new emphasis on health for both men and women. Mary Taylor Bissell, a Progressive advocate for exercise, encouraged the time outdoors. But, she said women should focus on health and not the excitements that came from men’s sports. Comparing women’s sports to men’s, she lamented “will seem like comparing moonlight unto sunlight, and water unto wine.”

  Today’s female athletes may have reason to be jealous. The twentieth century has seen even fewer concerted efforts at women’s baseball. Since the Depression, softball has been the designated place for women who want to play ball. Except for a brief period during and after World War II, dramatized famously in A League of Their Own, there’s been little in the way of organized women’s baseball—the occasional minor league player or traveling team. Since 1974, Little League has been required to allow girls on teams. But once they’ve left Little Leagues, these would-be baseball players have almost nowhere to go. Under Title IX, the legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in any activity receiving federal dollars, if a school has a women’s softball team, women may not try out for the baseball team. America’s pastime is one of the only sports women don’t play in colleges. And after all, whoever heard of softball’s “court of honor?”

  July 21, 2010
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