Girls of Summer

"Baseball is North America's favorite pastime. Millions of fans thrill to the sound, smell and electricity of the game; a game associated with men. But unknown to many, young women played the game, as hard and as well as most men, at a time when many men were away at war. They could routinely hit 240-foot home runs, slide into bases, skirts flying and bare thighs burning raw into the dirt. They were the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. In Girls of Summer, Lois Browne tells their story - a colorful chronicle of a forgotten league, as recalled by the very women and men who were a part of it all." "In 1943, it was Philip K. Wrigley, the great chewing-gum mogul, whose idea of women playing professional baseball grew into the All-American League. The women who answered his recruiters' call came from all over the U.S. and Canada; young women who normally would not work in jobs reserved for men, let alone play a "man's game." But this was war-time 1940s, when Rosie the Riveter - the symbol of a woman's ability to do a man's work - was all the rage. Baseball offered bankable money, and an escape from dead-end jobs and one-horse towns." "There was Mary "Bonnie" Baker, the well-groomed stylish player who embodied the virtues of the All-American; Alma "Gabby" Ziegler, the great morale booster and captain of the Grand Rapids Chicks; and Dorothy "Kammie" Kamenshek, who was rated the best all-round player in the League. They were all superb athletes, but their all-male managers expected them to be more. They were expected to be perfect ladies; they had chaperones directing their every move; feminine uniforms that included a knee-length skirt; and to top it all off - "Charm School," directed by none other than Helena Rubinstein, who, with her chain of beauty salons, was synonymous with the feminine ideal." "Through all this, the All-American was a magnificent success. In its heyday, stadiums packed in fans and players were shipped off to spring training in Cuba and Florida. But it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Like the phenomenon of women working at men's jobs outside the home during the war, women's professional baseball fell from favor after the war, and by 1954 had vanished. The All-American League lasted for eleven years, and during that time was transformed from softball to the purest form of baseball." "Girls of Summer is a surprising, true story about some very special women who made history, but who have been forgotten with the passage of time. It is about dreams and about the realities of this tumultuous time in our past."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.