SYMHC Classics: All American Girls Professional Baseball League

only one season on Amazon Prime. The documentary A Secret Love, which we mentioned at the very end of this episode, is also indeed available on Netflix, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fryne. I am sure you've seen a League

of their Own? I have. I feel like it's safe to say most of our listeners have either seen a League of their Own or at the very very least have heard someone say there's no crying in baseball, which is probably its most quoted line. I think you could come to my house and hear it once a week out of my husband's mouth. If you want to just hang out. So this is a nineteen ninety two film that tells the story of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. It is a work of fiction, but it

also gets some of the highlights correct. The league was founded during World War Two, as many of Major League Baseball's male players had joined the military, but the movie also kind of makes it seem like this was a temporary diversion that ended when the war did. There's a line basically about continuing on with it, but it's not

really explored beyond that. In reality, though these women were athletes, some of them thought they were starting a lifelong career in professional baseball that would last as long as they were able to play. The league itself also went on for years after the war was over. And this is

also a listener request. We've heard about it at various points over the years, but the one that I wrote down was from listener morev So, by nineteen forty three, when this league was founded, baseball was considered both the national pastime in the United States and a man's game, but it didn't start out that way. As the game of baseball was developing in the nineteenth century, it wasn't just for men and boys. Children played together in neighborhood

games regardless of their gender. Semi professional and professional leagues included women players and women's teams, and there were also teams at women's colleges, the first being at Vassar in eighteen sixty six. An all black women's team called the Dolly Vardens was established in Philadelphia in eighteen sixty seven.

During baseball's earlier years, the rules weren't particularly standardized, and there were all kinds of variations and things like the size of the playing field, the size of the ball, and the style of pitching, and a lot of places everyone played by the same rules regardless of their gender. Although it was not uncommon for women to be expected to play in floor length dresses. It was also common, though, for girls baseball teams specifically to have modified rule sets that,

for example, made the playing field a little smaller. Barnstorming became an important part of baseball's development starting in eighteen sixty Teams would go on the road to play exhibition matches outside of official league play. By the eighteen nineties, barnstormers included all women teams known as Bloomer Girls because of their billowy uniform legs, so they resembled the loose

trousers advocated by dress reformers in the nineteenth century. That's not underwear, imagining that when they said bloomer girls, it meant playing in their underwear. Maybe giggle a little bit, but that's not what it meant. Over time, one set of baseball rule modification morphed into its own distinct sport, and that sport was softball. These two games have a

lot of similarities. They both involve hitting a throne ball with a bat and then rounding a set of bases that are arranged as a diamond, but softball uses a larger, softer ball, thus the name. That ball is pitched underhanded rather than overhand or sidearm, the pitching distance is shorter and the overall field of play is a little smaller. Initially, the game that developed into softball was meant as a baseball alternative that could be played indoors in bad weather.

Sometimes it was even called just indoor baseball. It became particularly popular in places where space was limited or were the only place to play was indoors. It was also played outdoors in places with limited space In the late nineteenth century, settlement houses in the US started establishing playgrounds and encouraging active play in urban areas, especially among boys.

Softball became so closely connected to the settlement movement into these playgrounds that some sources have erroneously credited Chicago's Hull House with inventing it, and we talked about Hull House and its founder, Jane Adams in a previous two parter on the show. Did not invent softball, No, did play it a whole lot, though The overlap between baseball and softball and who was playing it continued until about nineteen

thirty three. That is when the Amateur Softball Association was founded as that sports governing body and the name softball was formally adopted for it, and at this point girls baseball teams that had been using some kind of modified rule set generally moved over to playing softball. It did not take long before people took for granted that baseball was for boys and softball was for girls, a distinction

that persists in a lot of places today. When Little League Baseball was founded in nineteen thirty nine, it was intended for boys, although that did not become an official rule until nineteen fifty one, in response to Kay Johnston of New York cutting her hair to join a team under the name Tubby. The Tubby rule remained in place until nineteen seventy four, after a series of court cases and a ruling by the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights.

I guess that's such a good illustration of how it was assumed to be for boys, so much so that it wasn't even in the rules until after a girl cut her hair to join a team. Like Yeah, it was just taken totally for granted. So by the nineteen forties, both softball and baseball were well established in the United States. They were two separate sports, one for men and boys, the other for women and girls. Both had amateur, semi professional,

and professional teams and leagues. And that brings us to World War Two, if you remember our October twenty nineteen episode on the Black Sox scandal. During World War One, the idea of Major League Baseball continuing on in spite of the war was deeply controversial. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker issued a work or Fight order which required any man eligible for the draft to either work in a

war critical industry or join the military. Men who continued to play baseball were viewed as abandoning their patriotic duty, and after the US joined the war, Major League Baseball shortened the nineteen eighteen season. As war once again started to spread through Europe in nineteen thirty nine, people feared that the sport of baseball would be disrupted, as it

had been a couple of decades earlier. These fears escalated after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December of nineteen forty one, and the United States entered the war at that point. In January of nineteen forty two, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball, wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to ask, quote, what you have in mind as to

whether professional baseball should continue to operate? On January fifteenth, nineteen forty two, Roosevelt, who was a fan of baseball, responded with what has become known as the green Light Letter. It read, in part, quote, I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.

There will be fewer people unemployed, and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before, and that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before. And his letter, the President stressed that players who were of an age should join the military should do so, but that they might be replaced with older players who

could still play an exciting game. The President also advocated for more night games so that day shift workers at wartime factories could go The President ended the green light letter by saying, quote, here is another way of looking at it. If three hundred teams use five thousand or six thousand players, these players are a definite recreation asset to at least twenty million of their fellow citizens, and that,

in my judgment, is thoroughly worthwhile. So, even though baseball had the p President's seal of approval, roughly half of the regular players in Major League Baseball wound up serving in the military. Some of its best and most popular players were drafted. Of course, that trend also applied to the minor leagues and to other baseball teams as well.

So even though the President himself had given the ok for baseball to continue, there were people worried that the sport was going to struggle, and that this might even lead to the closure of some of the nation's ballparks. One of these concerned people was Philip K. Wrigley. His father, William Wrigley Junior, had died in nineteen thirty two, leaving Philip the William Wrigley Junior Chewing Gum Company, a fortune and the Chicago Cubs baseball team. We will get to

what he did after a quick sponsor break. About three million women joined the workforce in the United States between nineteen forty and nineteen two, and Philip K. Wriggley thought that maybe the same trend could apply to professional ball. Women's teams could play in ballparks where the home teams were on the road, keeping the sport in the parks

going while so many men were away at war. These teams of women could also help boost the national morale and help the war effort with things like fundraising and recruitment drives. Wriggly teamed up with Ken Cells, who had previously worked for the chewing gum business but had become assistant general manager of the Chicago Cubs. On February seventeenth, nineteen forty three, they issued a press release announcing the

creation of the All American Girls Softball League. Their plan was to recruit players from the women's softball teams that had been established all over the country at the beginning. Jim Hamilton was the lead talent scout in the US, and Johannes Gottselig, known as Johnny, headed up recruitment in Canada. But Wriggly also wanted to make the game a little closer to what spectators might expect from a baseball game, so they worked out a rule set that had elements

of both baseball and softball. Like softball, it used a larger ball and an underhanded pitching style, but like baseball, the teams had nine players per side rather than softball's ten. The playing field would also have a longer pitching distance and running path than softball did, but it was still shorter than what was being used in baseball. Players in this game would also be allowed to steal bases, something

that was not allowed in softball. These changes caused some controversy about exactly what sport was being played out there on the field, and the league changed its name to the All American Girls Baseball League part way through the nineteen forty three season. As recruiters visited softball teams to look for players. Hundreds of women and girls expressed interest

in playing professionally. About two hundred and eighty were invited to the final tryouts, and sixty players from the US and Canada were ultimately selected to play in the nineteen forty three season. Some of these young women were as young as fifteen, although most of them were between eighteen and twenty two. As was the case with Major League Baseball at the time, the newly established Women's League excluded

black players. These players were arranged into four teams of fifteen players each, the Rockford Peaches of Illinois, the South Bend Blue Socks of Indiana, and the Racing Bells and the Kenosha Comets of Wisconsin. Each of these was not far away from a much larger major city. They were also close enough together to allow the teams to travel from one city to the next for games while still

conserving fuel and rubber during wartime rationing. The league setup was significantly different from Major League Baseball or most other leagues at the time. The league itself was a non profit organization, with Philip Wrigley, Paul Harvey, and Branch Rickey as trustees. Much of the initial funding came from Wrigley himself. It's been about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars getting the whole project started, and he contributed to the team's

maintenance costs, especially in the first year. The player's contracts were also centrally owned by the league, rather than being owned by one of the four teams. This meant that the players pay was set by the league. There were no bidding wars with teams trying to entice the best players to sign on with them. That first year, the players made between forty five dollars and eighty five dollars

a week. That does not sound like much, but it is significantly more than most of them had been making an agricultural or factory work, or maybe playing in a paying softball league. Players in the league were prohibited from doing any other work during the season. The centrally owned player contracts also meant that the league had the right

to trade players from one team to another. One of the league's goals was for all the games to be as evenly matched and exciting to watch as possible, so player trades happened throughout the season as they tried to get keep this balance. Each team had a manager who also acted as a coach. These were typically men who had experience in major league or minor league baseball. Every team also had a business manager as well as a chaperone who was a woman and was a paid part

of the staff during the league's history. Most of the chaperones had some experience in working with women's athletic teams. The chaperones who were responsible for making housing arrangements for the team, handling money, and approving any housing and dining accommodations that the team was going to use. In some ways, they were a little like athletic trainers. As well, being trained in first aid and responsible for the team's first aid kit and the treatment of injuries. They were also

ultimately responsible for the player's conduct, behavior, and appearance. That last point was a lot. Most of the players came from working class and agricultural communities that didn't really regard women's participation in softball as unusual in any way. A lot of them had been playing on teams that had been organized by their employers, with that involvement being seen as pretty normal and fun. But that wasn't necessarily true among the middle class, which was a big part of

the audience that the league was hoping to attract. The idea that women were playing baseball, which was considered to be a game for men, also raised some suspicions about the players. A common stereotype was that women athletes were lesbians. That's a stereotype that still exists today, but without nearly the level of stigma that was attached to it in the nineteen forties. So the league went to great lengths to reinforce the idea that these players weren't just women,

they were ladies, specifically patriotic, wholesome, middle class, heterosexual ladies. Outwardly, the league described all its rules and training about things like beauty and conduct as a service teaching working class girls to be middle class ladies, which of course suggested that to be middle class was better than to be working class. And on top of that, a lot of the rules and standards in place were also meant to

reduce suspicions of lesbianism. This included the player's uniforms. These were one piece pastel colored tunic like garments with a flared skirt, which were worn with satin shorts and knee socks. They were designed by Wrigley's wife, Ada, along with poster artist Otis Shepherd and softball player An Harnett. They were

also patterned after women's figure skating and tennis attire. These uniforms were meant to set the players apart from the barnstorming bloomer girls that we referenced earlier, and to reinforce the idea that the players on the field were feminine women. These skirts did not really do much to protect the player's legs from scrapes and other injuries, but the players were also expected to look pristine at all times and not really have any visible injuries. Perfectly prim athletic lady.

It's the whole kind of convoluted tangle. Yeah. The specific rules varied over the league's history, but the general idea of players being the right kind of woman was part of it. Throughout each player was issued a guide for all American girls how to look better, feel better, be

more popular. In the nineteen forty three season, Helena Rubinstein's Beauty Salon taught charm and beauty lessons for the players that included hygiene, personal appearance, etiquette, and things like how to gracefully get in and out of a car or go up and downstairs. The Ruth Tiffany School provided these lessons the next year. Formal charm lessons ended after that point, but a focus on appropriate feminine behavior continued. Players were also issued a beauty kit that they were expected to

keep stock. It included cleansing cream, lipstick, rouge, deodorant, astringent, face powder, hand lotion, and hair remover. They were required to be attractive and presentable at all times, and they had to wear a dress or a skirt any time time they were seen in public. Most of the players wore trousers on the bus for the sake of comfort, especially during nighttime road trips between games, but kept a skirt with them to change into if they stopped for

something like a restroom break or a meal. Some of the other rules from the player's code of conduct no boyish bobbed hair, no smoking, no drinking alcohol, and no social engagements unless they were approved by a chaperone. Lipstick was mandatory at all times, and there were also more

mundane rules about things like punctuality. The player's Code of Conduct specified a five dollars fine for the first offense, a ten dollars fine for the second offense, and suspension for the third, but there were players that faced harsher penalties. Josephine DiAngelo, known as Jojo, was cut from the Blue Socks in her second year from the team after she got a bobbed haircut that was described as too short

and butchy in some accounts. Frida and Olympia Savona, who were star players from the New Orleans Jackson Brewing Company softball team, were passed over for the All American Girls League because of their masculine appearance. There were definitely some news stories that made disparaging comments about the Savona's appearance, but Frieda wrote to a reporter to say this had nothing to do with why she was not in the league. She said she was just happier and better paid where

she was. Fraternizing with members of other teams was also forbidden within the league. The league framed this as a way to keep the level of competitiveness high, but many of the players interpreted it as a way to discourage romantic relationships between them. So that's kind of an overview of what the league was like. When spring training started its first season on May seventeenth of nineteen forty three.

That happened in Chicago, the first pitch of the season was thrown on May thirtieth of nineteen forty three, and we'll talk about how things grew and evolved from there after we first have a little sponsor break. The All American Girls Baseball League's first season included sporting events as well as wartime patriotism. Teams made appearances at recruitment drives and fundraisers, and they visited wounded soldiers that had returned stateside.

On July first, they held an all Star game against a team from the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, which was played under the lights at Wrigley Field. This event was part of a recruitment drive, held free of charge and at night so that working women could attend. Some of the league's patriotism was more symbolic, like having the two teams that were going to be competing lined up in a V for victory during the national anthem at the

beginning of every game. The nineteen forty three season ended with a five game championship series in which the Racing Bells defeated the Kenosha Comets. More than one hundred and seventy five thousand fans attended games in that first season. Then in nineteen forty four, the league expanded to sixteen. Another competing league was founded that same year, the National

Girls Baseball League, established in Chicago. This league continued until nineteen fifty four, although its history and activities aren't nearly as well documented as the All American Girls League. At the end of the nineteen forty four season, Philip Wrigley sold the league to Arthur Meyerhoff for ten thousand dollars, which was a fraction of what he had put into

getting it started and operating it. In those first two seasons, it had become clear that the sport of men's baseball was not in any kind of actual peril from the war, But apart from that, Wrigley was just not really interested in being so heavily involved in the league anymore. Meyerhoff had also been a big part of the league since its inception, and Wrigley was confident that he would maintain the same standards that Wrigley had established in terms of

quality and entertainment. The biggest change at this point was that the league went from being a nonprofit to a for profit entity. Otherwise, the player's contracts were still cently owned, and each team continued to have paid managers and chaperones. Meyerhoff put a big focus on marketing and promoting the league. He also organized postseason exhibition tours to Cuba and South America, mainly to countries where Wrigley chewinghum had a presence thanks

to the rubber and chickle industries. Over time, the style of play within the league continued to shift and become more and more like men's baseball. The ball gradually got smaller and harder, pitching and infield distances got longer. Sidearm pitching was introduced in nineteen forty six, and overhand pitching

in nineteen forty eight. Some players that had been recruited from softball teams had a little trouble adjusting to these changes, and Meyerhoff established a junior league in farm teams to cultivate new talent. Although the All American Girls Baseball League had started out with the idea of being a substitution for men's baseball during World War Two, its popularity really

peaked after the war ended in nineteen forty five. In nineteen forty a July fourth double header in South Bend, Indiana, drew a crowd of between ten thousand and twenty thousand people, Attendance peaked in nineteen forty eight, with nearly a million fans in attendance that year. The league had ten teams from Rockford, Peoria, Chicago and Springfield, Illinois, Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, South Bend and Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Grand Rapids in Muskegan, Michigan.

Most of the team names were distinctly feminine, including the Peaches, Chicks, Millarets, Daisies, Lassies, Colleen's, Sally's, and Bell's. Although the league grew between nineteen forty five and nineteen forty eight, it also faced some struggles in those years. The idea of women playing baseball had drawn suspicion since the beginning, but that increased when there was no longer a wartime patriotic need for women to take

up what was seen as men's work. Individual teams also folded for various reasons from time to time, and then that put a strain on the rest to the league as it tried to absorb those other players. After a while, friction started to develop between individual teams in Meyerhoff's management company. While the league owned the player's contracts, the teams all had their own owners who started to object to the requirement to send some of their ticket revenues back to Meyerhoff.

Meyerhoff was putting most of the proceeds back into the league, but even so, a perception grew that Meyerhoff was making money off of the team's work. As attendance started to fall off. In nineteen forty eight, Meyerhoff embarked on some ambitious plans to try to revive the league. This included an attempt to start an International women's Baseball League, which would play in Florida, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Cuba during

the winter and early spring. Although an international league was formed very briefly, it never really got off the ground. At the end of the nineteen fifty season, the teams bought out Meyerhoff and became self governing and decentralized. The league's name had been through slight tweaks through the years, and at this point it became the American Girls Baseball League or AGBL, although most people still use the word all.

At this point, players started contracting with teams for their rates rather than the league, which increased paid disparities as teams tried to attract and keep the best players. The only paid position in the league at this point was the commissioner, and without a central league organization that was promoting and marketing the games, attendance continued to drop. The league also faced increased competition from other forms of entertainment

in the fifties, including televised men's baseball games. The American Girls Baseball League dissolved in nineteen fifty four. During its history, about six hundred women from the United States, Canada, and Cuba had played for teams in fourteen Midwestern cities. During baseball season. They played six or seven games a week, with doubleheaders on Sundays and holidays, sleeping on buses overnight

as they traveled from one city to the next. This was a grueling schedule, which may be one reason why about a quarter of the players only played for one season or less. Although Major League Baseball had started to desegregate in the late nineteen forties and President Harry Truman issued an executive order to desegregate them armed forces in nineteen forty eight, the All American Girls Baseball League was

segregated throughout its history. Although two black women practiced with the South Bend Blue Sox in nineteen fifty one, neither of them wound up signing a contract with the league. However, there were three black women who played on men's teams in the Negro Leagues in the nineteen fifties, Mamy Panut Johnson, Connie Morgan, and Marcinia Lyle, who used the name Tony

Stone professionally. All three started with the Indianapolis Clowns. Tony Stone replaced Hank Aaron there and her contract was sold to the Kansas City Monarchs before the nineteen fifty four season. There are reports that Tony Stone tried out for the All American Girls League as well, but those are not concretely document After the All American Girls League was dissolved, many of the players adopted what's been described as a

self imposed silence. Most of them did not really talk about their time playing professional baseball, even among their families. Reasons why are not entirely clear, but stigma may have been one factor. According to one survey that was conducted in the nineties, about twenty percent of players reported facing discrimination because of their history as an athlete. However, many used the money that they'd earned playing baseball to go to college or to start a career, with some attending

college and graduate school during the off season. One researcher who interviewed players later in their life found that about thirty five percent had graduated from college, compared to less than ten percent of women in the general population in the same era. This has been described as a precursor to Title nine's effects on women's college enrollment, giving women

educational opportunities that they didn't have access to otherwise. When the women's liberation movement started nineteen sixties and seventies, historians and other researchers started unearthing the league's history, and the players started reconnecting with each other and documenting their own history. At the same time. In the late seventies, Dorothy Camney, Camischeck, and Marge Winzel and June Peppys all met up and

started talking about organizing a reunion. In October of nineteen eighty, Peppa sent a letter to the few players whose addresses she had been able to find and started trying to track people down. By January of nineteen eighty one, this had morphed into a newsletter, which grew from a handful of addresses to more than one hundred within a month. This also coalesced into a player's association that still exists today.

The first of many reunions was held in Chicago in nineteen eighty two, and the newsletter became part of an effort to establish a league archive and to get some kind of recognition in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. It was during this process that the league's name became formally finalized as the All American

Girls Professional Baseball League. The player's efforts for recognition came to fruition on November fifth of nineteen eighty eight, with the formal unveiling of a permanent Women in Baseball exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame. The league's players had been an active part in this exhibit's creation, including donating their photographs, uniforms, equipment, and memorabilia. A league archive was established at the Northern Indiana Historical Society Museum now called

the History Museum in South Bend, Indiana. There was also an exhibition through the Smithsonian. The league was also the subject of a short documentary called A League of their Own that aired nationally on public television on September thirtieth, nineteen eighty seven. And of course, there's the nineteen ninety two feature film directed by Penny Marshall, which was a blockbuster and was actually when many people first heard about

women's baseball. Another documentary tells the story of Terry Donahue and pat Henschel. Donahue was recruited from Saskatchewan, Canada, and played for the Peoria Red Wings for four seasons. After these two women met. In between seasons, Henschell left her life in Canada behind to join Donahue in the United States. Although the two of them described themselves at the time as cousins and roommates, they were really a couple and the documentary tells the story of their lives together. The

film is called A Secret Love. It was supposed to premiere at south By Southwest in March of twenty twenty, but of course, because of the pandemic, south By Southwest has been canceled. So I'm not sure what the status of the film's debut is at this point, but at some point I think it might come to Netflix, because there is a page for it in the Netflix Media Center. Exciting. Henschell is also one of the people Brittany de la Creda interviewed when reporting her article The Hidden Queer History

behind a league of their own. At that point, both Donahue and Henschell were still living, but Donahue died in twenty nineteen. At that time, she and Henschell had been together for years. The All American Girls Professional Baseball League's website for the player association also has a wealth of information on the individual players, including their photos, their team histories, their biographies, and for those who are no longer living,

many of their obituaries are there as well. It is really a ton if you want to go read about some women baseball players, lots and lots to look at their Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.