No League of Their Own: Baseball, Black Women, and the Politics of Representation

This article examines the experiences and representations of three black women who played baseball in the Negro Leagues in the 1950s. The article demonstrates the way the Negro League owners, the black press, and black male sportswriters used varying representations of athletic black womanhood to sell game tickets and generate business for a league in decline. Ultimately, the article argues that the recovery of the women in the 1990s romanticizes their civil rights–era athletic participation and obscures the physical and symbolic labor they performed as professional athletes.