Author Jennifer Ring Talks Women’s Baseball

The history of women and girls in the sport of baseball, though it goes back to the time of the game’s development in the U.S., has been largely absent from most books, documentaries and other baseball scholarship.

Jennifer Ring, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Reno, and author of Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball (Univ. of Illinois Press, 216 pps.), took some time recently to talk to BaseballDigest.com to reveal some of that history, as well as discuss her motivations for writing the book, the first to delve into this topic.

BBD:  In the introduction to Stolen Bases, you discuss how as a youth you were one of the best ballplayers in your neighborhood, boy or girl, but that by the fourth grade, you were excluded because you were a female.  Was this memory your motivation for writing this book?
JR: The memory was stirred up when my younger daughter developed a love for baseball when she was tiny – about 3 years old – and turned out to be quite a natural at the game. She joined the local Little League when she was six, and was always one of the very best players on her team (of all boys). One coach called her “the best pure hitter in the league.” But when it came time to move up to the next level when she was eleven (twelve in Little League age calculations), she encountered mighty resistance from the coaches in her community. It was clear she wasn’t supposed to take baseball seriously, no matter how good she was, and how much she wanted to continue to play. I discuss this story in the prologue to my book…I couldn’t understand how it was possible that in the U.S. in the 21st century, girls STILL were excluded from baseball…just as I was decades earlier, in a pre-Title IX era. That’s what prompted me to write about it. Why is the nation withholding the national pastime from half the nation?

BBD: Can you give us a quick history lesson – how did American girls go from playing baseball in large numbers before the turn of the 20th century, to being moved towards softball?
JR: It’s not that there were so many girls and women playing compared to how many men played, but that girls were enthusiastic about the sport and interested in playing baseball from the time it first arrived in the U.S. in the early nineteenth century. An early version of baseball had actually been played in England by girls. It was called stool ball and was invented by English milkmaids. Later girls played rounders in England, another early version of baseball. So it was natural that American girls would want to play when the sport became popular here. And they played on many levels…from the Seven Sisters Colleges in the mid-nineteenth century, to Big 10 Midwestern universities in the early twentieth century, to semi-pro “Bloomer Girl” traveling teams…mixed teams with men, African American women’s teams, who sometimes used a white woman as a pitcher so people would pay to see the novelty of a mixed race team. Then when the sport became professionalized at the end of the nineteenth century, and baseball became associated with American national identity – the “national pastime” – men felt it had to be taken seriously as a “manly” sport. They didn’t want the national identity to appear feminine. Albert Spalding, who was involved with the formation of the National League at the end of the nineteenth century, and who took a team on an international tour to showcase the “new” American game (the British were not impressed…they had already seen the game in England, and called it “rounders”), insisted in his 1911 history of baseball that it was “too strenuous” for American women. At about the same time, softball was created by men as a way to play baseball indoors during winter months. Softball was regarded as less strenuous and more appropriate for girls and women. During the early decades of the twentieth century, softball became “girls’ baseball.” In 1973 when girls successfully sued Little League Baseball for the right to play baseball with boys, Little League Baseball’s response was to organize Little League Softball for girls. Apparently integrating baseball was not regarded as an option. So softball became the segregated version of baseball: “separate but equal.” Whatever it took to keep girls away from the national pastime. Why baseball men went to such lengths to separate women from baseball is the subject of Stolen Bases.

Albert Spalding

BBD: If Albert Spalding wanted to spread the game of baseball, even if primarily to increase sales of his sporting goods, why do you think he was so adamantly against women’s competing?
JR: The United States at the turn of the twentieth century was undergoing enormous economic and social changes. Masculinity was being redefined, as middle-class white men felt pressured by their changing economic role, and the changing racial and class demographics in the rapidly developing nation. Albert Spalding discovered his love of baseball as an early adolescent when he was enduring a painful separation from his mother and siblings after the death of his father. The boys with whom he played baseball became his surrogate family, his “band of brothers.” The emotional solace he found in that all-male environment dovetailed with the nation’s concern with redefining masculinity for the new century. As the psychoanalysts say, it was “over-determined.” Baseball was newly associated with American national identity, and it was feared that femininity would undermine the nation’s manly stature. Spalding embodied that concern, and was able to take measures that cemented baseball’s association with exclusively male, and white, American identity.

BBD: Why do you think Ken Burns gave women’s baseball very little coverage in the Baseball documentary series?
JR: For the same reason that most people don’t think that excluding women from baseball is an issue. We tend to just assume that baseball is for boys…because it was intentionally presented, or marketed, as a “maker of men” throughout the twentieth century. As Zane Grey wrote, “All boys love baseball. If they don’t, they’re not boys.” I don’t think Ken Burns was particularly interested in documenting the history of women in baseball…it didn’t occur to him, or he didn’t know the history existed, and didn’t go looking for it. Bottom line: he didn’t put it in the documentary because he didn’t care about women’s baseball.

BBD: How is your background as a political scientist a factor in the overall premise of the book?
JR: I’ve long been interested in American popular culture, particularly with regard to American sports, and I am a specialist in race and gender in American political history. So I suppose my interest in girls and baseball, was also “over-determined.” It was a case of my personal interests, my lifelong passion for baseball, and then my awareness of the suspicious absence of girls and women from the “national pastime” converging with my professional expertise in the history of American political and social culture.

BBD: Wouldn’t the increase in participation in baseball by women destroy the sport of softball, which many girls play?
JR: Why does it have to be one sport or the other? I’m pretty sure that organized softball would prefer not to encourage the growth of women’s baseball. In that sense, fear of women’s baseball “destroying” softball probably contributes to suppressing organized girls’ and women’s baseball. But that sort of “zero sum” mentality is paranoid, in my opinion. There’s enough athletic interest for both sports. When soccer became popular in the United States in the latter part of the twentieth century, did Americans stop playing football? When snowboarding took off as a sport, did people stop skiing? Skiing hasn’t lost its cache because people like snowboarding. If anything, snowboarding has democratized the mountain sports industry and brought more people out in the winters for both sports. If women participate in baseball because they prefer it to softball, then softball will have to figure out how to keep people interested. Isn’t that what we celebrate as the genius of free market economy?  Girls wouldn’t be forced to play baseball as they are currently forced to play softball. They would have a choice, which they do not currently have. The more ballplayers, the better!

Jennifer Ring

BBD:  Do you think that the movie A League of their Own has somehow done a disservice to women in baseball, or do you like it as at having portrayed at least a portion of the history?
JR: I love the movie, and I think it’s done a great service to women in baseball in the sense that it portrayed in a very flattering and easily accessible way, women’s involvement with the game at one moment in American history. The only possible disservice is that people wrongly believe that was the only time in American history that women played baseball. I’d like to see more movies like A League of Their Own made about the other wonderful stories about women’s baseball that I discovered when I was doing the research for my book. There are so many engaging stories about girls and women playing ball in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that would make wonderful screenplays. And then there’s always the story of the Little League Lawsuits of the 1970’s, and how the New Jersey Little League shut down in 1973 rather than let girls play with boys. Those are great stories. Somebody should make a movie about it…maybe I should!

BBD: Has women’s baseball in other countries developed differently than in the U.S.? If so, how?
JR: I think baseball is more available for girls in Japan, Canada and Australia because it isn’t so closely associated with their national identity…which of course is ironic. If the United States claims to have invented baseball, and if it’s America’s national pastime, why do we resist our girls’ participation in the sport? I don’t know the details of how girls’ and women’s baseball is organized in Canada, Japan and Australia…I’d like to look into that and compare those nations with the United States in a future book…but I do know that there is more baseball for girls in those countries. Japan has recreational youth leagues, school leagues, and college baseball for girls, as well as “A” and  “B” national teams, both of which are excellent. Japan also really supports its women’s baseball – they turn out in large numbers with television crews, banners, bands, and lots of noisy support for women’s baseball teams.

BBD: What to you think the future holds for women’s baseball in this country and internationally?
JR: I think girls’ and women’s baseball will grow, but it will be more difficult now that baseball has been denied as an Olympic sport. Having men’s and women’s baseball in the Olympics would have greatly accelerated the growth of women’s baseball in the U.S., which would have allowed girls’ organized baseball to flourish. I’m sad that women’s baseball wasn’t included in the 2016 Olympics. But I’m still optimistic that women’s baseball will continue to grow, even at a slower pace, because contemporary American girls expect to be able to pursue the sports they enjoy and won’t take “no” for an answer as easily as girls did a few decades ago. And there are many very accomplished women ballplayers to serve as role models. The existence of a US National Women’s Team is very important, even in the absence of Olympic baseball. USA Baseball needs to continue to support the national team. Girls need a goal to inspire them to keep playing their sport – just as every boy who plays ball dreams of playing in the big leagues. I’d like to see girls and boys playing together on the same Little League teams, or on separate teams – whatever a given community prefers – and girls’ baseball available at the youth level, ages 12-15. Allowing girls to develop their baseball skills when young would facilitate the existence of girls’ high school and women’s college ball. That’s all it would take – a national environment that encourages girls to play the national sport from the time they are young. The rest will then grow naturally. But there needs to be a goal at the top to inspire growth at the bottom. This will require a shift in the way the United States views access to the national pastime: baseball needs to become fully inclusive, welcoming girls and women as it has tried to welcome men of all races.

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Topics: 21st Century Girls, American Girls, Baseball Scholarship, Bbd, Documentaries, Fourth Grade, History Lesson, History Of Women, Illinois Press, Jennifer Ring, Little League, Motivations, National Pastime, Neighborhood Boy, Prologue, Stolen Bases, Title Ix, University Of Nevada, University Of Nevada Reno, Younger Daughter

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