Women's Baseball in the 1860s: Reestablishing a Historical Memory

Theories about the exact origins of our national pastime still evoke lively debate among baseball historians, but one fact needs no debate: throughout the history of "American" baseball, most players and spectators have considered it a masculine sport—wholly unsuited for girls and women.¹ In 1856, the New York Times opined, "The game of Base Ball is one, when well played, that requires strong bones, tough muscle and sound mind; and no athletic game is better calculated to strengthen the frame and develop a full, broad chest, testing a man's powers of endurance most severely."² Harper's Weekly put it more succinctly in 1865 when it proclaimed, "There is no nobler or manlier game than base-ball."³ This sentiment has persisted pretty much unaltered for over a century and a half. Despite baseball's masculine reputation, countless women have embraced the national game as their own. From at least the 1850s onward, American women have played baseball; served as team owners, officers and official scorekeepers; umpired men's and women's games; written about baseball as journalists; and supported their favorite teams as enthusiastically as the most dedicated male "cranks" and "fanatics."⁴

Accurately portraying the history of women's involvement with the national pastime is a challenge because of the dearth of primary and secondary sources documenting their activities. Until scholars introduced the formal discipline of women's studies in the mid-twentieth century, most recorded history was just that—"his" (men's) story. According to traditional histories of the United States, women's role in shaping the nation was an indirect one: women influenced events through the moral authority they exerted as wives, mothers, and teachers. Not surprisingly, the early decades of serious baseball scholarship that began in the mid-twentieth century reflected the same pattern of historical interpretation: Men accomplished great things on the baseball diamond and women watched from the sidelines, imparting a high moral tone to the proceedings merely through their presence.

The historical misrepresentation of women's involvement with baseball has perpetuated the now deeply ingrained attitude in the United States that the baseball diamond is, and has always been, the sole domain of men. Women are encouraged to watch, but they must not play. This assumption stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century when baseball began to evolve into its present form and assume its lofty status as the national pastime. Women have been unable to establish their legitimacy as baseball players due to the lack of historical memory between generations of women players. In Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End, Sara Evans describes how succeeding generations of women's rights activists reinvented feminism because they had little historical memory of those who had gone before them. The same can be said of women baseball players. Each new generation of players thought it was the first because it had no historical memory of preceding generations. Contemporary media perpetuated this historical amnesia by touting each new women's team or player as a "novelty." The letters, diaries, and reminiscences of women players from the nineteenth century onward indicate a similar belief that what they were doing was out of the ordinary and "new." One player from the late 1870s recalled that she and her teammates considered playing baseball "contraband pleasure."⁵

Because each generation of women players were unable to establish strong links to previous generations, they were unable to alter the perception that they were usurpers of a masculine pastime, not legitimate participants in a gender-neutral sport. With each passing decade that women players were labeled "novelties," baseball's reputation as a masculine sport became more deeply entrenched. Today's female players battle the same prejudices their predecessors faced in the nineteenth century. Only when the historical memory of women baseball players is restored, and only when enough girls and women play the game so that media and spectators no longer consider them "novelties," will the mantra "baseball is for boys and softball is for girls" become obsolete.

Contrary to prevailing myths, girls and women have never been...