The All American Girls Professional Baseball League

Women don’t receive the spotlight in sports very often. Usually, the men in baseball, football, basketball, and soccer have higher salaries and are paid attention to more. This wasn’t the case with a special league of female baseball players. These ladies sparked a thought in peoples’ heads in the mid 20th-century. Could women really play a professional sport instead of staying home to do the housework? From 1943-1954, women in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League helped to change the rights women were believed to have in society and in the workplace as they began playing a professional sport as a form of entertainment. Men, who would usually fulfill this role, were drafted into the military with the responsibility to serve during the war. The AAGPBL quickly became a world-winning group of women athletes and kept baseball and peoples' hopes alive during a time of weakness in American history.

In 1941, the United States entered WWII. Young men all over the country were being called to serve in the war. That doesn’t exclude professional sports players either. High profile MLB players, like Joe DiMaggio, were responsible for signing up for the draft also at the age of 18; so when duty called, they had to answer(Teitelbaum, 14). Baseball was an extremely popular form of entertainment. President Roosevelt called on Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to keep the sport alive, even if the quality of a game was not as high(Galt, 10). At the same time, over 40,000 hometown women’s softball teams had already been formed. Teams were being sponsored by breweries, bakeries, taverns, big industries, and little individuals who wanted to be a part of the success(Galt,11). Women were going to take on the responsibility to ...

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...dge stated, “To do what we did and get paid for it was like a dream,”(Galt, 81). Lou Arnold told a Rhode Island newspaper, “Believe me, it’s something. Those girls play real ball. It’s fast, colorful and real interesting. It was all a big surprise to me,”(Galt, 77). These weren’t the only comments made about the league. Many people spectators enjoyed the league and made it possible to fill the stands for eleven seasons.

The WWII time period was a hard time for American families. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League helped to change the rights of women in the industrial world. Men took care of their responsibilities and served their time in war, but in the meantime, the world-winning women of the AAGPBL stormed the country by surprise. This league was a major success in our history and will leave its legacy among baseball fans for years to come.