There’s No Crying in Baseball: Feminization, Sport, and Spectacle in the All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League

My thesis focuses on the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). Specifically, I explore aspects of femininity within the league and why Phillip Wrigley, the league’s first owner, and other league owners chose to accentuate femininity. In my research, I focus on certain features of the league, such as the league’s beauty school, player’s uniforms, sexuality, and race. I believe these and other factors played a role in how the league decided to market itself to Americans. Additionally I focus on how different members of the media wrote about the league. In writing about the AAGPBL, journalists from local outlets often focus and different aspects of the game than journalists from national outlets. Finally, I also address how players themselves reacted to the league’s emphasis on femininity. AAGPBL players had to submit to rules and regulations that would never exist in a male baseball league. Examining these aspects of the AAGPBL in my thesis helped me to uncover more about the meaning of femininity and how the AAGPBL affected female athletes