Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball
Publisher and their web page for book: University of Illinois Press
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A revealing look at the history of women’s exclusion from America’s national pastime:
This history of women in baseball demonstrates that, far from being strictly a men’s sport, baseball has long been enjoyed and played by Americans of all genders, races, and classes since it became popular in the 1830s. The game itself was invented by English girls and boys, and when it immigrated to the United States, numerous prominent women’s colleges formed intramural teams and fielded intensely spirited and powerful players. With the professionalization of the sport in the late nineteenth century, however, American boys and men shoved girls off the diamonds and sandlots. Girls have been fighting to get back in the game ever since.
Jennifer Ring questions the forces that try to keep girls who want to play baseball away from the game. Focusing on an history that, unfortunately, repeats itself, Ring describes the circumstances that twice stole baseball from American girls: once in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and again in the late twentieth century, after it was no longer legal to exclude girls who wanted to play. In the early twentieth century, Albert Goodwill Spalding–sporting goods magnate, baseball player, and promoter–declared baseball off limits for women and envisioned global baseball on a colonialist scale, using the American sport to teach men from non-white races and non-European cultures to become civilized and rational. And by the late twentieth century, baseball had become serious business for boys and men at all levels, with female players perceived as obstacles or detriments to rising male players’ chances of success.
Stolen Bases also looks at the backgrounds of American softball, which was originally invented by men who wanted to keep playing baseball indoors during cold winter months but has become the consolation sport for most female players. Throughout her analysis, Ring searches for ways to rescue baseball from its arrogance and sense of exclusionary entitlement and to restore the great American sport’s more optimistic nickname: the people’s game.
“By examining the systematic exclusion of women from baseball, this compelling book goes into depth about a topic that most historians do not even question. With a gripping storyline and strong, clear prose, Stolen Bases contains some of the best sportswriting I have seen.”–Susan K. Cahn, coeditor of Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader
“This book blends history, political economy, sociology, and biography to form an engaging narrative about the place of women in baseball. Jennifer Ring offers fresh insights, focusing on the game’s maternity and the development of efforts to preclude women from playing baseball or acknowledging their place in the game’s past.”–Adrian Burgos Jr., author of Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line
Jennifer Ring is a professor of political science and former director of women’s studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her previous publications include The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt, as well as works in political theory and gender and identity politics.
Cloth
978-0-252-03282-0
$24.95
Pub Date: 2009
Pages: 224 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9 in.
Illustrations: 14 Black & White Photographs
Available as a pre-order on Amazon.com
It is a shame that the title will preclude many baseball fans from reading the book. Contained within the pages are numerous historical references to the game originally called base-ball when played in England in the 1740’s. As a student of the game, as well as a player for 45 years, I was humbled by my lack of knowledge of baseball history that I thought I knew. A thoughtful and well thought out chronicle of baseball, invented by milkmaids in 18th century England to pass the time between milkings, through the re-invention of the game in 1839 America, and up until the writing of the book. While it does include the history of sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding’s insistence that girls & women not play the game, as well as organized baseball’s continuing ban on women players, and other injustices in between, it is all presented in a factual and straight forward manner. With the International Olympic Organizing Committee’s requirements that baseball follow the same rules as all other sports, namely played by women in 40 countries on three continents, in order to return as an Olympic sport, combined with the International Amateur Baseball Federation’s March 2009 pledge to the IOOC that baseball’s proposal to return to the Olympics will include women’s baseball, this book debuts at the most opportune time. Perhaps America’s pastime will once again be enjoyed by the game’s inventors – girls and women.