
Breaking Into Baseball
Women and the National Pastime
Jean Hastings Ardell(Author)
Southern Illinois University Press
Will be published approx. on 28. February 2005
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-0-8093-2627-3 (ISBN)
Description
While baseball is traditionally perceived as a game to be played, enjoyed, and reported from a masculine perspective, it has long been beloved among women-more so than any other spectator sport. Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime upends baseball's accepted history to at last reveal just how involved women are, and have always been, in the American game. Through provocative interviews and deft research, Jean Hastings Ardell devotes a detailed chapter to each of the seven ways women participate in the game-from the stands as fans, on the field as professionals or as amateur players, behind the plate as umpires, in the front office as executives, in the press box as sportswriters and reporters, or in the shadows as Baseball Annies. From these revelatory vantage points, Ardell invites overdue appreciation for the affinity and talent women bring to baseball at all levels and shows us our national game anew. From its ancient origins in spring fertility rituals through contemporary marketing efforts geared toward an ever-increasing female fan base, baseball has always had a feminine side, and generations of women have sought-and been sought after-to participate in the sport, even when doing so meant challenging the cultural mores of their era. In that regard, women have been breaking into baseball from the very beginning. But recent decades have witnessed great strides in legitimizing women's roles on the diamond as players and umpires as well as in vital management and media roles. In her thoughtfully organized and engagingly written survey, Ardell offers a chance for sports enthusiasts and historians of both genders to better appreciate the storied and complex relationship women have so long shared with the game and to glimpse the future of women in baseball. Breaking into Baseball is augmented by twenty-four illustrations and a foreword from Ila Borders, the first woman to play more than three seasons of men's professional baseball.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Carbondale
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
24
Dimensions
Height: 208 mm
Width: 142 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
413 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8093-2627-3 (9780809326273)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jean Hastings Ardell frequently writes and lectures on women's contributions to baseball. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Sporting News, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, and in the anthologies Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball and Growing Up with Baseball: How We Loved and Played the Game. In 1999, she earned the Society for American Baseball Research/USA Today Baseball Weekly Award for Research for her article, ""Lefthander Ila Borders: Crossing Baseball's Gender Line from Little League to the Northern League."" Ardell lives in Corona Del Mar, California, with her husband, a former first baseman for the Anaheim Angels.