In the Margins

Did you know that the US has a national women's baseball team?

And that women have played organized baseball for nearly as long as men?

You might be thinking, "Do you mean softball?"

But softball is an entirely different sport than baseball.

The ball is larger, the fields are smaller, and the pitch is wildly different.

Society has largely overlooked woman in baseball.

Aside from the classic 1992 film A League of Their Own, and the 2022 show of the same name.

Despite this lack of recognition, women never stopped playing baseball.

So why don't we know their names?

And why isn't baseball recognized as a women's sport?

Baseball's story in the U.S. begins around 1850.

What started as a regional game in New York became popular during the Civil War after soldiers on both sides brought the sport home.

Postwar, baseball was seen as a symbol of unification and a national pastime.

Within a decade, professional men's baseball clubs had cropped up all over the country.

And in 1866, the first women's baseball team was formed at Vassar College.

Most of the women playing baseball at first were white, upper-class, and had access to school teams or private clubs.

It was seen as social acceptable as long as they upheld Victorian ideals of the modest and chaste woman.

In practice, this meant playing baseball in ankle length skirts and following strict rules about conduct.

One woman's club in Florida said that if a player tripped on her hoop skirt during a game, she would be immediately expelled from the club.

By the 1800s, working class women, including women of color, had started to play baseball.

They could get paid to play for barnstorming teams, which are teams that travel and put on exhibition games.

These teams were often owned by men turning a profit on the novelty of women players.

In Philly, three all Black women's barnstorming teams were formed and played against each other.

These Philly teams were short lived as they didn't get much news coverage to help drive ticket sales.

What little reporting exists was both racist and sexist and focused on the players' outfits.

But times and uniforms were changing.

In the 1890s, women ballplayers traded the restrictive skirts and dresses for loose fitting pants, rejecting societal norms.

Known as Bloomer Girls, inspired by Amelia Bloomer, a suffragist and fashion advocate, these teams barnstormed across the country.

They challenged and won against men's teams of all levels.

Bloomer Girls typically didn't play each other, though, there were reports of an interracial women's game between an all Black team and an all white team.

For 40 years, the Bloomer Girls gave scores of women the chance to play baseball and even make money, although they still weren't taken as seriously as male players.

Male baseball reporters of the era wrote about women ballplayers as either "marvels" or "menaces".

Basically, they might have been considered talented for a woman, but they were also seen as vulgar intruders who had no business being in baseball as the weaker sex.

The economic downturn of the Great Depression, and reduction in ticket sales eventually caused the decline of Bloomer Girls' teams.

The last team disbanded in 1934, and opportunities for women in baseball fell to the wayside.

But in about a decade, women would experience a peak in opportunity brought by war.

It's the 1940s.

Thousands of American men are being drafted for World War II, including Major League Baseball players.

Baseball team owners like Philip K Wrigley were worried about the decline of the sport and their profit margins.

So they decided to form a women's league now known as the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Launched in May 1943, The league was a huge hit, ultimately growing to more than 600 white women, ten teams, and attracting nearly one million fans over the next decade.

Playing in the league gave women confidence, autonomy and a way to support themselves.

Researchers found that 35% of the woman ballplayers receive a college degree much higher than the national average of 8%.

Yet players were constricted by the owners' outdated ideas of femininity, which they enforced through strict rules of conduct.

These included no drinking or smoking in public, following a curfew, taking etiquette classes and even approving the players' dates.

Several players were even dismissed for having short haircuts.

One of the reasons for the League's hyper focus on presentation was to make sure the players weren't perceived as lesbians, according to historians and former players, many of whom had to hide their sexuality.

The 2022 series remake of A League of Their Own highlights this discrimination against the Queer community, in one episode where the players visit a gay bar that is raided by the police.

In that era, police arrested gay people and would reveal their sexualities publicly, often causing them to lose their jobs.

The league's owners also excluded women of color, except for a few light-skinned Cuban players.

So women of color had to find other avenues for playing professional baseball.

In 1953, Toni Stone was the first woman to play in the Negro Leagues.

Known for her speed and agility in pulling off double plays, playing for the Indianapolis Clowns, she was later followed by two other Black women players.

Pitcher Mamie Johnson, who was turned away from the AAGPBL tryout, and second baser Connie Morgan.

Several other Black women also played briefly on majority male teams like The Clowns and the New Orleans Creoles.

Though they've largely been left out of the historical record.

These pioneering women all faced similar issues playing on men's teams.

They experienced harassment from their male teammates and other discomforts, such as having to change in the umpire's room and stay in brothels when the team traveled.

Morgan and Johnson ultimately only played for one season and Stone played for two.

Stone's presence was credited for making 1953, the first year that the Negro American League was profitable since integration.

since many Black players had left and joined Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson's historic signing in 1947.

By the early 1950s, the AAGPBL was also nearing its end, in part due to rising conservative attitudes that disapproved of women's playing exhibition games against men, and homophobia against women athletes.

In 1952, women were banned from joining Major League Baseball to prevent women from being used as a publicity stunt.

The AAGPBL was shut down in 1954 as changes in ownership and negative societal views decimated ticket sales and attendance.

It took a few decades before women in baseball regained their momentum.

But who doesn't love a good comeback?

In 1972, 12 year old Maria Pepe played in three games for the Young Democrats, when her coach asked her to leave the team or else they would lose their Little League baseball charter for violating a clause which stated that girls were not eligible under any conditions.

Pepe didn't want to make the other players mad, so she agreed.

But soon her ejection drew national attention and she and her family decided to sue the league to allow girls to play, too.

Pepe's case was appealed all the way to the Superior Court, where she won.

In 1974, Little League was ordered to give girls a chance to play baseball, and the next year, more than 30,000 girls signed up across the country.

In the same year, the Little League organization also created Little League Softball.

Many players say that this perception of softball as the female equivalent of baseball has continued to hinder progress for women in baseball.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments Act, including Title IX, which prohibited federally funded institutions from excluding students from educational and athletic programs based on sex.

The law greatly expanded women's access to sports like basketball and tennis, creating women's teams as well as men's.

But since softball was seen as the female equivalent to baseball schools, didn't form women's baseball teams.

A professional women's baseball team didn't appear again until 1994: The Colorado Silver Bullets.

Sponsored by the Coors Brewing Company, the Silver Bullets played nearly 200 games against men's all-Star amateur and semi-pro teams.

While the team had a rocky beginning, they did start collecting wins in their later years.

The team only played through 1997, but even briefly, seeing these women in action made a significant impact on a number of today's players.

By the end of the 20th century, Title IX had made a huge impact on women's participation in sports overall.

In 1971, woman made up 7% of high school athletes.

By 2001, that number was 41%.

In 1996, the WNBA was founded.

In 2004, the U.S.

Baseball Women's National Team was established.

Since then, the team has played in biennial World Cup games against other national teams and twice taken home gold.

Today, players continue to push the field forward.

In 2014, Mo'ne Davis was the first girl to pitch a shutout at a Little League World Series.

In 2022, Kelsie Whitmore signed with the Staten Island Ferry Hawks and became the first woman to play in an MLB partner league.

In 2023, Olivia Pichardo became the first woman to play Division I college baseball for Brown University.

While women have made a lot of strides in baseball, they still face challenges in accessing the sport.

Scholarship opportunities are much more common in softball and other women's sports, and can pull collegiate athletes away from baseball.

And one of the biggest hurdles for women baseball players is the surprise and skepticism they get from seemingly everyone they meet.

There remains a misconception that softball is the female equivalent of men's baseball.

Today, the players on the Women's National Baseball Team are approximately 50% women of color.

Yet players of color have been historically overlooked in Major League Baseball.

In an effort to rectify the past, in 2020, MLB officially elevated the Negro Leagues to Major League status.

This would make Toni Stone the first woman to play in Major League Baseball.

Throughout history, women in baseball have fought to play a sport they love, enduring everything from unreasonable uniforms and rules, to harassment and physical threats.

While individual women have made incredible contributions to baseball, they're not exceptions.

They are part of a lineage of women driven by their desire to create opportunities for all women in the sport.