On May 30, 75 years ago, the All American Girls Professional Baseball League was formed to fill the stadiums Emptied by World War II. Chicago Cubs owner Phillip Wrigley gave women a chance to enter the professional world of sports for eleven years.
It seems quaint to us now, as we live in the age of Venus and Serena Williams, and the All American Women's Basketball League, and big money drawing women golf stars, to think of a day when many if not most American citizens didn't think women could or should play professional sports.
In the world of "Where were you when___________happened," I can tell you I was in a bar in Philadelphia when Billy Jean King played Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tennis match. I was frightened to death. I didn't want to see Billy Jean King somehow defeated and humiliated and I didn't want to be humiliated by the loud and belligerent bar patrons that night.
Having grown up in the gritty world of blue-collar, brick row house culture in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50's I was already effectively and profoundly intimidated and did not challenge male power. Men were bigger, stronger, they made the money and called the shots. It was exilherating and unnerving to see Billy Jean King succumb to the publicity stunt challenge of Bobby Riggs, and though I knew she was young and strong and talented, it had never been my idea that we were physically stronger than men, only that we should have a fair opportunity to do what we could and equal pay for equal work. I didn't want to be my Dad, or be an Ironworker, or a sailor, which he had been. But I also didn't want to be my mother, though she was blissfully happy in her role as mother and housewife. I wanted to be an artist, a writer, a teacher. I wanted to go to college, and in the time that I reached college age, college acceptance for women was neither fair nor equal, nor was the distribution of tax money to support college athletics.
So, a lot has changed and it is good to look back and see how far we have come.
Talking about remembrance, June 5th is the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1968). Some people wish they could go back into the past and be young again. I am not one of them. We lived in interesting times, but I am quite content in the comfort and the progress of the present!
Since sports seems to be the subject of this post, it is worth mentioning that we saw the ghostly empty stadium of Patterson, New Jersey on Mother's Day when my daughter kindly drove me there to see the water fall. Factory towns are another item lost in time. We visited the Patterson Museum, also, and I couldn't help but wish I could see/hear/learn more about the individuals who worked in the factories. Factory work was another entry point into the world of independence and equality for women, some of the first labor strikes were women workers such as the silk girls strike and the shirt waist factory strike and the strikes of the mills in New England. I could almost hear the voices of the men in the stadium beside the water fall, shouting out encouragement to their fellow workers on their baseball teams, on their rare days off from the dark factories.
I worked in a mill myself, once, Alchester Mills in Camden, NJ. I was a college student earning money for tuition through summer work. It was tedious, exhausting, and the air was filled with what I am sure must have been dangerous fibers. But, I only had to work there for one summer. Other women had been there for decades.
Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
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