Jennifer Ring
My love of baseball dates back further than my academic career, which began in 1979 with a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and continues today at the University of Nevada, where I am Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies. I have loved the game since I was a girl in the 1950’s, before even the Dodgers were in Los Angeles, where I was born. This was also a time when girls weren’t allowed in Little League or anywhere else that baseball was played. With no obvious incentive to fall in love with the game, my passion must have been the result of genetic endowment. When my younger daughter, who inherited the baseball gene, was pressured at age twelve to quit youth baseball, I had flashbacks to my own exclusion from the game, and began writing about girls and baseball in the United States. That might have been the end of the story except that my daughter didn’t quit baseball: she battled her way through high school and college baseball, and onto the Women’s National Baseball Team. While this was happening, I wrote two books about girls and women and baseball in the United States: Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball (University of Illinois Press, 2009) and The Shutout: American Women and the National Pastime (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2014). Stolen Bases traces the history of women’s baseball in the United States to the nineteenth century, and before that to an English girls’ game centuries ago. Women have played and loved the game from its very beginning, and probably had a hand in inventing it. So where did “No Girls Allowed!” come from? My new book, The Shutout, is based on oral histories I conducted with eleven members of the USA Baseball Women’s National Team of 2010.
If girls have been pushed out of baseball in the United States, how did the players who compete on the national team manage to stay in the game and become good enough for international competition? And why doesn’t anybody in the United States know that there is a Women’s National baseball Team? The mystery unfolds, and so do the politics of baseball and softball in The Shutout. The eleven ballplayers in the book who describe their baseball journeys are a diverse group of accomplished athletes and women: smart, honest, introspective, funny. They describe the passion and courage it takes to stick with the national pastime as an American girl.
If girls have been pushed out of baseball in the United States, how did the players who compete on the national team manage to stay in the game and become good enough for international competition? And why doesn’t anybody in the United States know that there is a Women’s National baseball Team? The mystery unfolds, and so do the politics of baseball and softball in The Shutout. The eleven ballplayers in the book who describe their baseball journeys are a diverse group of accomplished athletes and women: smart, honest, introspective, funny. They describe the passion and courage it takes to stick with the national pastime as an American girl.
