ARCHIVE: Printed matter and photographs.
THE ALL AMERICAN GIRLS BASEBALL LEAGUE
ARCHIVE
Thousands of women have played baseball in the United States as early as 1866. The history of
women in baseball parallels the rise and fall of the women’s liberation movement throughout our
history. Social, political and economic factors throughout history have provided women
opportunities to step outside traditional roles and participate in baseball. Although women in the
U.S. have made significant gains in access to resources, power and prestige, including amateur
and professional sports, baseball lags behind on the inclusion of women and girls. This
ideological justification for exclusion is based on cultural presumptions of female physical
inferiority that emerged in the 19th century and remains strong today.
The paternalism of the late 18th century assumptions of women’s natural physical and mental
inferiority was met with hostility by the mid 19th century with the Seneca Falls, New York
convention of 1948 that marked the emergence of the first-wave feminist movement in the United
States. By the 1880s, baseball was entering its Golden Era and women wanted to be more than
fans; they wanted to play ball.
The 19th century American women did not have the right to vote; could not own property after
marriage; could not divorce; and could not receive an education. It was not considered proper for
women to engage in competitive sports and wear functional clothing. Their participation was in
complete antithesis to the role of the ideal woman. Envisioned as the weaker sex, women were
seen as biologically frail and in need of protection. Having children was the primary function of
married women and the “true” woman was expected to devote her life to her husband and to
motherhood. With this accepted gender-role ideology and concept of gentility, it seems
incongruous that women actually played baseball during the Victorian era. But it was during this
time that American society was undergoing rapid social and economic change as the result of
industrialization, urbanization, massive immigration and the depression of 1873. The women’s
suffrage movement, the establishment of women’s colleges, technological changes that provided
women with more leisure time and the changing medical attitudes about health and fashion
opened the door to women in baseball.
In their struggle for equal rights, women turned to female colleges. Vassar was founded in 1865
and the founders of these first women’s colleges endorsed the new medical ideas about
advocating exercise for women although they advocated a cautious approach to women’s athletic
activities. Intercollegiate sports were banned But woman could play baseball. The Vassar
Resolutes even had uniforms, although cumbersome in nature; long-sleeved shirts with frilled
high necklines, belts embroidered with the team name, RESOLUTES, wide floor-length skirts,
high button shoes and broadly striped caps.
In all societies, clothing is imbued with symbolic meaning signaling social status, power and
appropriate roles. Among women involved in the first-wave feminist movement, bloomers were a
symbol of freedom from restriction and a broader agenda for social inclusion. The emergence of a
feminine athleticism that included some women playing baseball was part of a broad social
revolution in the U.S. associated with modernity. With the transition to industrial capitalism, new
ways of working arose with people working outside the home in a variety of worksites that
employed both men and women. These changing economic relations of production generated new
contexts for the construction of gender in the home, workplace, colleges and in other public
political events associated with the first-wave feminist movement. Private baseball clubs existed
at this time but promoters realized by as early as the 1860s that attractive women playing ball
against men would attract large crowds. The first women to play baseball for pay to the fiel
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