165. c.1890’s Black Stocking Nine Women’s Baseball Team Cabinet Photograph MINIMUM BID: $150
nine on-field coaches with various major and minor league organizations. Most fans, at this point, have embraced the idea of women in such roles, not just in baseball but in professional sports in general. More elusive, however, is the concept of women as players. Baseball has long had the “sister” sport of softball for female athletes, and since the level of play in competitive softball is unquestionably advanced, sports fans generally do not consider the possibility of women playing baseball - hitting 95 MPH sliders, gunning out baserunners from deep shortstop, stealing bases against today’s quick catchers (skills not all major league players possess, by the way). It wasn’t always that way. Games with bats and balls have been played for thousands of years, by men, women and children alike. It was not until the mid-19th Century when the National Association of Base Ball Players began to codify rules to make baseball a more “masculine” pastime. In fact, “softball” was not developed until 1926, its rules not codified until 1934. Prior to 1926, “softball” was generally thought of as a modified form of baseball for people to play indoors during the winter months. In 1860, though, none other than Henry Chadwick wrote “players must possess the characteristics of true manhood. Baseball to be played thoroughly, requires the possession of muscular strength, great agility, quickness of eye,
readiness of hand, and many other faculties of mind and body that mark the man of nerve.” This generally ignored the fact that until then, young women were just as involved with bat and ball games as young men. Author Debra A. Shattuck, in her incredibly-researched book Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers (Sport and Society) writes “Even as the NABBP and adult male baseball players and their supporters in the media crafted and honed a masculine storyline for baseball that persists to present day, athletically inclined girls and women problematized that narrative by continuing to participate in a wide variety of outdoor sports and games, including baseball.” The book explains how the popularity of baseball spread across the country during and after the Civil War, but also how antebellum baseball grew as a primarily male sport. Indeed, early female baseball tended to be more performative, evolving as much out of burlesque as out of athleticism. Throughout this time, women continued to play, some - like Alta Weiss of Ragersville, Ohio, who pitched for men’s semipro teams and drew crowds wherever she went - gaining some degree of celebrity. Late in the 19th Century, female barnstorming teams became common, clubs like the Female Blue Stockings of Philadelphia and Female Red Stockings of New York drawing thousands of spectators per game on an
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