Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime (review)

Reviewed by: Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime Peter Carino (bio) Jean Hastings Ardell. Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005, 278pp. With Breaking into Baseball, Jean Ardell offers a useful compendium of baseball history about women from a woman's perspective. The strength of this book is that Ardell examines the topic from multiple perspectives, each treating one of the various ways women have struggled and succeeded to engage and experience a game that has been slow to welcome them. After an introduction that establishes Ardell's own lifelong passion for the game and a chapter detailing women's early responses to the game (and it to them), she organizes the book through the various roles they have taken: as fans, groupies, players, umpires, front office personnel, and journalists. In total, the book offers a wide variety of viewpoints and provides a solid foundation in the history of women and baseball. Many of the roles Ardell examines could be the topic of a book itself, and she admits the same, noting in her introduction that space would not allow "detailed histories of the game's female pioneers" and directing readers to the work of others for more specific treatments of particular people and topics. This is not to point out a flaw. Indeed, providing an exhaustive analysis of a single or small number of women is not Ardell's purpose. Rather the strength of the book is its breadth, and even while covering wide terrain, Ardell provides a strong sense of already well-known baseball women, such as Effa Manley and Toni Stone, while introducing the reader to a number of lesser-known but equally interesting figures. In the chapter on umpires, for instance, she concludes with an account of the attempt to crack the Majors by Pam Postema, a name known to many fans. However, few fans know of earlier aspirants such as Bernice Gera, a thirty-five-year-old Brooklyn housewife who decided one day in 1966 that she wanted to be a Major League umpire and eventually reached the New York–Penn League, after a lengthy and enervating court battle with the National Association of Baseball Leagues. Though Gera's career ended abruptly, she paved the way for others, such as Christine Wren who umpired in the Midwest League in the 1970s. While most dedicated fans have heard of Ila Borders, the first female collegiate pitcher who had a three-year career in the Northern League, Ardell's relationship with this remarkable young woman (developed in the course of writing the book) enables her to provide more thorough information on Borders's battle to make it in the game than heretofore known. Even the most informed fans will be surprised to learn how difficult her attempt to crack the lineup was, including her fending off an attempted rape by college [End Page 127] teammates. Adding to Ardell's account, Borders wrote a short forward to the book and combined with Ardell's cogent analysis of her career, the two provide the readers with a strong sense of the socio-cultural complexity of Borders's attempt to break into one of the most recalcitrant male institutions in America. Ardell is also perhaps the first author to address the subject of baseball Annies. Lifting the curtain of secrecy on this topic is no easy task. While Ardell draws some information from player exposés by womanizers such as Bo Belinsky and Joe Pepitone, an extended case study of an anonymous ex-groupie, called "Betty" for the book, uncovers the psychology of the women who choose this shady path to the game and the players who take advantange of them. For fans who already know something of women in baseball, this book will provide even more information on lesser-known figures. For those whose knowledge of the topic is limited to A League of Their Own, this book will be a thorough education. The book is well researched with scholarly depth and by combining material from interviews, library research, and a personal tone, Ardell creates an engaging voice throughout. Indeed, her commitment to both baseball and the women who...

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