Bloomer Girls

This book is the first to document the transformation of America’s national pastime from a gender-neutral sport into a highly-gendered “man’s game.” For decades, most modern scholars of sport have assumed that baseball was, and always has been, a man’s game. Yet baseball began as a gender-neutral “blank slate” upon which adult men and women wrote their gendered narratives and then taught those narratives to their children. Baseball’s gendered future was never inevitable nor was it quickly solidified or uncontested. Every decade of the nineteenth century saw more girls and women playing and watching baseball than in previous decades. Yet the narrative of baseball as a man’s game gained momentum in each successive decade well into the twentieth century. The book describes the process through which the history of women baseball players became distorted by myth and misperception even as girls and women played on the same types of teams that boys and men did, including scholastic/collegiate, civic/pick-up, amateur/professional and factory teams. The book places the evolution of baseball’s gendered characterization into the broader context of American sport and culture, and describes how professional interests wrested control of the game’s institutional structures, culture, and social interactions from amateur interests.