Bloomer Girls

Debra A. Shattuck has spent three decades studying the participation of girls and women in baseball, producing the most thorough study of women's participation in the sport during the nineteenth century. In her much-awaited study she argues that baseball evolved from a gender-neutral child's game and demonstrates that playing baseball was not exclusively a male activity since girls and women “actively (although not always consciously) resisted this gendered narrative by playing the game” (p. 1). Shattuck argues that baseball's institutional structures, its culture (or creed), and social interactions shaped the formation of “baseball that privileged male participation and accomplishments by mischaracterizing and marginalizing female participation” (p. 4). She also asserts that the process of gender formation was critical to her study “because it was in the process of trying to define and redefine masculinity and femininity that ... men and women transformed baseball from a gender-neutral game to a deeply gendered sport” (p. 11

Art · Creed · Femininity · Gender relations · Literature · Masculinity · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · American Sports and Literature · Gender Studies · Law · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society

• Sportswomen’s Apparel in the United States

  Linda K Fuller•Sportswomen’s Apparel in the…•2020

  Add to list