About this item
Disapproving scolds. Sexist condescension. Odd theories about the effect of exercise on reproductive organs. Though baseball began as a gender-neutral sport, girls and women of the nineteenth century faced many obstacles on their way to the diamond. Yet all-female nines took the field everywhere. Debra A. Shattuck pulls from newspaper accounts and hard-to-find club archives to reconstruct a forgotten era in baseball history. Her fascinating social history tracks women players who organized baseball clubs for their own enjoyment and found roster spots on men's teams. Entrepreneurs, meanwhile, packaged women's teams as entertainment, organizing leagues and barnstorming tours. If the women faced financial exploitation and indignities like playing against men in women's clothing, they and countless ballplayers like them nonetheless staked a claim to the nascent national pastime.
About the Author
Debbie Shattuck was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1959 and discovered her love of baseball in 5th grade after winning free tickets to a Cleveland Indians game. Watching televised games with her mom and joining pick-up games with the neighborhood boys, she dreamed of playing in the Big Leagues someday. At least until reality intervened. Shunted into softball along with other girls in her generation, Debbie wondered why America's "national pastime" was reserved only for boys and men. While researching the All-American Girls Baseball League for her Master's thesis, Debbie discovered a handful of articles about nineteenth-century women baseball players in the archives of the library at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and realized that baseball had not always been a man's game. After retiring from the Air Force in 2008, Debbie began researching nineteenth-century women baseball players full-time. Bloomer Girls is the first of what she hopes will be a trilogy on women baseball players.
