Women have been starring on the baseball field since the game started in the 19th Century. We look back at the history of baseball and the best women to ever play the game.
Girls participated in baseball from the beginning, playing alongside the boys at least as early as the 1830s, according to baseball scholar Dorothy Seymour Mills, well before the adoption of baseball as the national pastime.
Baseball became an increasingly popular recreational activity for all in the late 19th century. Here, women and men play a co-ed baseball game near Milwaukee circa 1890. Ladies, don’t let those bustles keep you from rounding the bases!
A women’s baseball team poses circa 1870. Check out those baseball caps!
By the 1860s, the girls entering newly formed women’s colleges like Smith and Mt. Holyoke already knew how to play the game, writes baseball expert Dorothy Seymour Mills. They took their knowledge to the diamond, forming and joining baseball clubs and teams like the Laurel and Abanakis Base Ball Club at Vassar College.
In this photo, the Vassar College baseball team poses for a portrait in 1876. Their nickname, the Resolutes, says it all.
Smith College catcher Elizabeth Lewis during spring training in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1927.
Students from the University of California at Los Angeles playing baseball in bloomers.
Professional women’s baseball teams, known as “bloomer girls” for their distinctive uniforms, proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here, the A-Star women’s baseball team of New York pose for a portrait in 1890.
Women baseball players in 1919: Francis Bloome, Mary Cook, Lucile Boyd, Gertrude Cherry, and Ruth Jane Bauske.
Women play baseball near the Washington Monument in 1919.
Amateur baseball clubs for girls and women were popular around the country. The girls baseball club of the Sac and Fox Indian Reservation in Oklahoma pose for a team line-up portrait about 1910.
Two members of a women’s baseball team pose for a portrait circa 1925.
The girls of the Phyllis Wheatley Intermediate Diamond Ball Team pose for a team photo during the summer of 1926. Founded in 1924, the Phyllis Wheatley House provided social services and recreational activities for young black women in Minneapolis.
She’s small but fierce. Could this little girl playing baseball in 1932 be one of the future stars of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League?
Early Baseball Stars
Maud Nelson (1881–1944)
Nelson began pitching professionally at the age of 16 and played for several clubs including the Boston Bloomer Girls, American Athletic Girls, and the Cherokee Indian Base Ball Club. In 1911, she became a scout for several male and female teams, as well as owner of the Western Bloomer Girls Base Ball Club team. After decades of playing, managing, and owning teams, she retired to Chicago in the 1930s, settling into a house near Wrigley Field.
The Western Bloomer Girls Base Ball Club circa 1915. Could that be Maud Nelson in the back row?
Jackie Mitchell (1913–1987)
The teenage pitching phenom had a short but history-making stint with the Chattanooga Lookouts. On March 25, 1931, Mitchell signed with the men’s minor league team. One week later, on April 1, 1931, she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, back to back, during an exhibition match. The following day, she became only the second woman to pitch in a men’s pro baseball game. And a few days after that, her minor league career came to an end when baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis voided her contract, declaring women unfit to play the “too strenuous” game of baseball.
Lizzie Arlington (1877–1919)
The first woman to play for a professional men’s team, Arlington was a sensation in late 19th-century baseball, pitching for the men’s minor league team in Reading, Pennsylvania. In 1899, more than a thousand fans came to watch her pitch against Allentown in black stockings and a knee-length skirt, according to baseball scholar Dorothy Seymour Mills, and pitch she did. “She is a success,” one reporter grudgingly wrote, “for a woman.”
Lizzie Murphy (1894–1964)
In 1922 another Lizzie became the first woman to play Major League Baseball when her barnstorming team, Ed Carr’s All Stars of Boston, played an exhibition game against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway. Murphy was known as the “Queen of Baseball.”
Edith Houghton (1912–2013)
Houghton began playing professional baseball at the ripe old age of 10. A phenomenal short stop, she played with the Philadelphia Bobbies girls’ team, traveling with the team to Japan in 1925 to play against men. Houghton enlisted with the WAVES during World War II, before returning to baseball as a Major League Baseball scout with the Philadelphia Phillies.
Effa Manley (1897–1981)
Though she didn’t play baseball, Manley was one of the most influential women in the game. As owner (with her husband Abe) of Negro league team the Newark Eagles, Manley was the only woman in an industry of male owners. She served as the team’s business manager, helping lead them to victory in the Negro League World Championship in 1946, and fulfilled many of her husband’s duties as treasurer of the Negro National League. After the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson away from the Negro leagues, Manley fought for compensation for team owners. In 2006, Manley became the first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Toni Stone (1921–1996)
The first of three women to play alongside men in the Negro leagues, Stone has been called “one of the best players you have never heard of.”
Connie Morgan (1935–1996)
Morgan became the third woman to play professionally in the Negro leagues when she signed with the Indianapolis Clowns in 1954. Here she poses with teammates Richard “King Tut” King and Oscar Charleston.
Mamie ‘Peanut’ Johnson (1935–2017)
Johnson could’ve been a star in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. According to MLB.com, she attended a league tryout in Alexandria, Virginia in the early 1950s, but was turned away by the all-white league. “They looked at me like I was crazy. They never even let me try out.” The AAGPBL didn’t know what they were missing … until Johnson signed with the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953, becoming the first woman to pitch in the Negro leagues. She would earn a 33–8 win-loss record and a batting average of .262 during her two years with the team.
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
In 1943, with hundreds of Major League Baseball players serving in World War II, baseball owners needed a way to keep fans in the seats. Enter Philip K. Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, who started the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Bringing together some of the best athletes from across the U.S. and Canada, the AAGPBL would entertain hundreds of thousands of spectators each year during its decade-long run. And, decades later, it would inspire the popular film, “A League of Their Own,” directed by Penny Marshall.
Dorothy Kamenshek (1925–2010)
Kamenshek, seen sliding safely into third base during an AAGPBL game in 1946, one of Sports Illustrated’s top 100 female athletes of the 20th century. Playing for the Rockford Peaches from 1943 to 1953, the left-handed infielder was a seven-time All-Star and one of the inspirations for the movie “A League of Their Own.”
Dottie Schroeder (1928–1996)
The stellar shortstop was the only woman to play all 12 seasons in the AAGPBL. A fan favorite for the South Bend Blue Sox, the Kenosha Comets, the Fort Wayne Daisies, and the Kalamazoo Lassies, Schroeder was a primary inspiration for Geena Davis’s character in “A League of Their Own.” A strong hitter with 431 RBIs (the most in the league), she set another record that has been hard to beat: Schroeder played 15 seasons of professional baseball, including her 12 seasons in the AAGPBL, the most of any woman.
Doris Sams (1927–2012)
Another inspiration for “A League of Their Own” was Sams, a Knoxville native who became a 5-time All Star during her 8-year career in the AAGPBL. Sams played for the Muskegon Lassies, later the Kalamazoo Lassies and, according to one sportswriter, was “calm and cool at all times.”
Sophie Kurys (1925–2013)
Known as the “Flint Flash,” Kurys is widely considered one of the best players in the AAGPBL. She won a world championship with the Racine Belles in 1946 and racked up over 1,000 stolen bases during her career. During the 1946 season alone, she stole 201 bases in 203 attempts (that’s 71 bases more than the MLB record of 130 set by Rickey Henderson in 1982).
Faye Dancer (1925–2002)
The Fort Wayne player inspired the Madonna character in “A League of Their Own.” A Los Angeles native, Dancer admitted to being the clown of the league and testing the rules. “I was forever having fun, raising my skirt up for the fans, doing the splits and handstands when the games got quiet,” she said in 1992 in an interview cited in her New York Times obituary.
Joanne Weaver (1935–2000)
Hailing from the tiny town of Metropolis, Illinois, Weaver was just 15 when she joined the Fort Wayne Daisies in 1951. Playing alongside her sisters Jean Weaver, 17, and Betty Weaver, 21, the youngest Weaver would become the top hitter in the AAGPBL with a .358 career batting average.
Helen Hannah Campbell (1915–2013)
As the daughter of a New York Yankees catcher, Campbell understood the demands of the game. In the 1940s, she served as chaperone for Michigan’s Muskegon Lassies, making sure the professional baseball players wore lipstick and properly modest uniform skirts. She also served more than 30 years with the Marine Corps Reserve. Read her obituary in the Los Angeles Times.
The National Girls Baseball League
The AAGPBL wasn’t the only women’s baseball league during the 1940s. Formed in 1944, the National Girls Baseball League featured teams like the Bloomer Girls, Rock-Olas, Queens, and Music Maids. The women of the NGBL used underhand pitching and, unlike their counterparts in the AAGPBL, they didn’t wear skirts. They also didn’t have chaperones.
Betty Chapman, Gwen Wong, and Nancy Ito
In comparison with the AAGPBL, the NGBL was racially and ethnically diverse. Its players included Chapman, the first Black woman to play softball professionally; Wong, a Chinese-American pitching phenom; and Ito, a Japanese-American softball hall of famer. Hispanic women played in both the NGBL and the AAGPBL.
Katharine ‘Kotch’ Kowell (1926–2017)
Kotch Kowell played for the Parichy Bloomer Girls in the National Girls Baseball League and was a stellar all-round athlete. In her 40s she could out-arm-wrestle high school football players and in her 50s fought off a would-be purse snatcher by punching him, her nephew told reporter Maureen O’Donnell of the Chicago Sun-Times.
