Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball - Hardcover

Ring, Jennifer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252032829 ISBN 13: 9780252032820

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2009

Synopsis

Far from being strictly a men's sport, baseball has long been enjoyed and played by Americans of all genders, races, and classes since it became popular in the 1830s. The game itself was invented by English girls and boys, and when it immigrated to the United States, numerous prominent women's colleges formed intramural teams and fielded intensely spirited and powerful players.

Jennifer Ring questions the forces that have kept girls who want to play baseball away from the game. With the professionalization of the sport in the early twentieth century, Albert Goodwill Spalding--sporting goods magnate, baseball player, and promoter--declared baseball off limits for women and envisioned global baseball as a colonialist example to teach non-white men to become civilized and rational. And by the late twentieth century, baseball had become serious business at all levels, with female players perceived as obstacles to rising male players' stakes of success.

Stolen Bases also looks at American softball, which was originally invented by men who wanted to keep playing baseball indoors during cold winter months but has become the consolation sport for most female players. Throughout her analysis, Ring searches for ways to rescue baseball from its arrogance and exclusionary entitlement and to restore the great American sport's more optimistic nickname: the people's game.

About this title

About the Author

Jennifer Ring is a professor of political science and former director of women's studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her previous publications include The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt, as well as works in political theory and gender and identity politics.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by SPORTS Throwing "like a girl" is an age-old taunt, and Jennifer Ring has had enough of it. Setting out to examine the "forces that try to keep . . . girls who want to play baseball away from the game," she cites her own history. Until about age 9, she was often one of the first kids on her street to be picked when they got together to play: She was known as "the neighborhood slugger who could also pitch." Then suddenly the boys joined Little League teams, and the pitching slugger couldn't get to first base. She criticizes Ken Burns's documentary "Baseball" for ignoring women, although they played baseball in the 19th century and have "attempted to gain access to America's diamonds for as long as baseball has been played here." Twentieth-century baseball, she points out, evolved into a ritualized confirmation of the power structure, as well as a way for a boy to allay anxiety about his masculinity. White boys and men played together, males of color played separately, and females played the rather different game of softball. At the root of it all, Ring argues, was the notion that "it is an utter disgrace for a boy to be 'girly,' or feminine in any way, and that diminishes the value of being a girl at all."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0252032829
• ISBN 13: 9780252032820
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216