Females have been playing the various games known as “base ball” since their inception in England and antebellum America. In her presentation “Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers,” Shattuck will describe the early roots of America’s national pastime and demonstrate that girls and women have been playing bat and ball games since Medieval times.

Sunday, Jin Peterboro, Debra Shattuck, author of the article “Women’s Baseball in the 1860s: Reestablishing a Historical Memory” (published in Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture) will unravel part of the mystery of 1868 women’s baseball in Peterboro. Nannie Miller, a grand-daughter of Gerrit Smith, is the Captain, and handles the club with a grace and strength worth of notice.” Conflicting information in the anonymous report, and a misleading date on a newspaper photograph at the Baseball Hall of Fame, created a mystery for many years on just what happened with women’s baseball in Peterboro.Īt 2 p.m. During a three week visit in August 1868 at the Peterboro home of her cousin, abolitionist Gerrit Smith, Stanton wrote three letters for her women’s rights publication The Revolution.Ī letter written on August 1, and published on August 5, included a description of a female baseball club that began with this statement: “We were delighted to find here a base ball club of girls.

Thanks to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and an anonymous reporter, the baseball club in Peterboro was the best documented of the women’s teams in the 1860s. At least twenty-six newspaper articles published around the nation in 1868 reported the existence of women’s baseball clubs.

Bloomer Girls by Debra A. Shattuck