When it comes to the national pastime, female athletes find many doors closed despite laws designed to afford them equal opportunities.
Marilyn Cohen chronicles these issues in her new book, No Girls in the Clubhouse: The Exclusion of Women from Baseball (McFarland).
Although girls and women have played the game since the mid-19th century, their participation has never been on par with males. Title IX, a law passed in 1972, requires gender equity for boys and girls in every educational program that receives federal funding.
“With regard to baseball, it’s been useless,” said Cohen, a professor at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City and head of its Women’s Studies department. “Basically, the idea is that all girls can play, they’re going to be allowed to play. But the idea is that softball is the equivalent of baseball, so if there’s a girls’ softball team and a boys’ baseball team, everyone feels like they’ve done their part.
“If a girl wants to play baseball, the law will protect her, she will be [legally] supported in that choice. But she’s going to have a long, lonely road.”
Girls face ostracism from boys who were their friends outside the game. “When they were young, if the girl was really good enough, sometimes she would be accepted by her teammates,” Cohen said. “The older she got, the more hostility she would face because the stakes are higher.” Scouts from professional teams and colleges are looking for prospects “and boys still feel that their masculinity is threatened because they’re going to be struck out by a girl or woman…. There’s a lot of gender issues involved when it comes to accepting a woman athlete on par with a male athlete on male teams.”
In some cases, the enmity comes from an unlikely source: the mothers of the boys, who are reluctant to see their sons’ progress thwarted, particularly by girls.
Among the topics Cohen covers in her book are three women who played in the Negro Leagues in the 1950s; Ila Borders, who played with a minor league team in the late 1990s; and the difficulties faced by members of the fabled All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
Contrary to the happy portrayal in A League of Their Own, “they were like Rosie the Riveter,” Cohen said. “The men were away and women were needed at that time to fill in, whether they were making airplanes or playing baseball.”
One of the things the movie got right was the dichotomy of the rough-and-tumble arena of athletics and the cultural sensibilities of the era.
“They had to be feminine athletes, yet they were expected to play a game that was very taxing.” The uniforms were not conducive for the sport; short skirts and sliding into bases are a bad combination. “It was for their sex appeal,” Cohen said, comparing them to the “bloomer girls” of the late 19th century, who wore pants when they played. “In some respects, the All-American Girls was a step backwards.”
Marilyn Cohen
On the other hand, Cohen said, the World War II era offered a “golden age” for women to play on a larger stage. “A lot of these women were very good and they were recognized as such. It was a mixed bag.” Teams based in larger markets like Chicago and Milwaukee were not very popular, but smaller cities and towns like Racine, Wis. and Grand Rapids, Mich., “loved their teams and there was a big attachment.”
Despite the name, the AAGPBL was not totally inclusive: There were no African-American players. “They didn’t even allow dark-skinned Cubans. You had to be fair skinned,” said Cohen. “They had an image of the ‘all-American girl’ and that could be extended to be a kind of tomboyish type — although they were very sensitive about homophobia, too. They would allow for an athletic girl, but they weren’t going to allow for a black girl.”
When the male players returned after the War, the women’s game was shut down. “There was nothing between the All-American Girls and the [Colorado] Silver Bullets in the ’90s.” The Bullets was an exhibition team sponsored by the Coors Brewing Company.
Cohen’s work at St. Peter’s College makes her book, to borrow from a familiar title, a Natural, a way “to apply my love for history, my love for anthropology and women’s studies by looking at baseball, which I’ve always adored.”
Cohen grew up in Baltimore and followed the Orioles of Jim Palmer, Brooks and Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, Earl Weaver, and others. When she moved to the New York area — she currently lives in Upper Montclair and attended Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield — she began to follow the Yankees. “My father is rolling in his grave,” she said. The book is dedicated to her dad, Harold, who imparted his love for the game to her.
(This story appeared in the March 26, 2009 issue of New Jersey Jewish News.)
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