[...]... gains in access to resources, power and prestige, including access to amateur and professional sports, baseball lags behind other sports in the inclusion of girls and women The ideological justification for exclusion based on cultural presumptions of female physical inferiority that emerged in the nineteenth century remains strong, justifying the bifurcation of the sport into softball for girls and baseball. .. experiences.27 The majority of women participating in baseball have been White However, the participation of women of color has been erased by racist exclusion by the White male-dominated media who did not 16 PART I: THE EXCLUSION FROM PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL cover their games, by racist policies that excluded women of color from playing on all–White female teams, and by patriarchal exclusion of Black women from the. .. seclusion, the exclusive upper-class men’s club provided the model for baseball rather than the popular but rough professional sport Elite college women benefited from the shifting discourse relating to the role of exercise in women s health in the late nineteenth century Poor and working-class women were excluded from the construct of hegemonic femininity as they were engaged daily in physically demanding... Hastings Ardell, Breaking into Baseball; Merrie A Fidler, The Origins and History of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League; Leslie Heaphy and Mel Anthony May, Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball, many articles published in scholarly journals and in the popular press, the commercial success of the film A League of Their Own, and the subsequent exhibit devoted to women and baseball at the Baseball. .. was linked with a rejection of feminist political goals They did not adopt the bloomer due to its association with feminist activism and did not perceive a link between playing baseball and an extension of women s rights to include the franchise or work opportunities Rather they sought to assure themselves and others that participation in baseball did not conflict with prevailing ideas of femininity... Times Calling the game “a base-ball burlesque” he described the skills of the girls: “They played base-ball in a very sad and sorrowful sort of way, as if the vagaries of the ball had been too great for their struggling intellects At the bat most of them preferred to strike at the ball after it passed them the girls displayed an alarming fondness for making home runs on three strikes often when the fielders... pitching four innings, collecting two hits and playing second base for the Philadelphia Reserves in their victory over Richmond, a baseball representative at the game, Edward Grant Burrow, signed Arlington to an of cial minor league contract with Reading Arlington again played second base and pitched the ninth inning The game was won by Reading 5–0, and among the 1,000 paying spectators were 200 women. .. coaches, symbolic representations of female athletes, ideologies of inclusion and exclusion and subjective identities of players in the social settings of amateur and professional baseball in the United States 1 2 PREFACE The theoretical perspectives offered here to explain women s exclusion from baseball are informed by social science perspectives, principally critical feminist theory, anthropology, and sociology... in addressing the social consequences of past and present sex discrimination In this book, I have limited the sources used and the analysis to girls and women who play(ed) baseball Although umpiring and sports announcing are as exclusive of women as baseball teams, they have been covered by Jean Hastings Ardell Also the theoretical perspectives offered here are equally relevant to these other settings... gender is the central axis of analysis in feminist theory, I also include the intersections among gender, social class, race/ethnicity, age and sexuality since these social locations are significant in differentiating the experiences of women baseball players Sports are a core institution in our society’s unequal sex/gender system No single social institution, with the exception of the military, has in uenced . y0 w0 h0" alt="" No Girls in the Clubhouse This page intentionally left blank No Girls in the Clubhouse The Exclusion of Women from Baseball MARILYN. II: THE EXCLUSION OF GIRLS AND WOMEN FROM AMATEUR BASEBALL 8. He-Sport and She-Sport: The Origins and Infrastructure of Gender Exclusion in Amateur Baseball