Stolen Bases

by Ring, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9780252032820
• ISBN10: 0252032829
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-13
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

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 Basesalso 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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Prologue: Entitlement and Its Absence	p. 1
Introduction: A Quick and Dirty History of Baseball	p. 15
The Girls' Game	p. 31
A. G. Spalding and America's Needs	p. 47
Enter Softball	p. 59
How Baseball Became Manly and White	p. 73
American Womanhood and Athletics	p. 91
Cricket	p. 102
Stolen Bases	p. 116
Collegiate Women's Baseball	p. 134
The Invisibility of Bias	p. 151
Epilogue: What Does Equality Look Like?	p. 169
Notes	p. 183
Index	p. 197
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