With baseball season well underway, now’s a good time to consider the role of women, including Jewish women, in baseball. At both the professional and college levels, a growing number of women are now part of the sport—as players, coaches, sportswriters, broadcasters, and umpires.
But many people don’t realize that women have played baseball since the sport was invented in the mid-1800s—in all-women leagues and on teams with men, in amateur and professional leagues, with softballs and hardballs. Soon after the first women’s colleges were established in the 1860s, some of them—including Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke—fielded baseball teams. In the early 1900s, Jewish settlement houses, like the Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YWHA), encouraged girls to play baseball and sponsored teams.
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