If the women faced financial exploitation and indignities like playing against men in women's clothing, they and countless ballplayers like them nonetheless staked a claim to the nascent national pastime. Entrepreneurs, meanwhile, packaged women's teams as entertainment, organizing leagues and barnstorming tours. Her fascinating social history tracks women players who organized baseball clubs for their own enjoyment and found roster spots on men's teams. Shattuck pulls from newspaper accounts and hard-to-find club archives to reconstruct a forgotten era in baseball history. Yet all-female nines took the field everywhere. Though baseball began as a gender-neutral sport, girls and women of the nineteenth century faced many obstacles on their way to the diamond. Odd theories about the effect of exercise on reproductive organs.
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