Baseball, Fathers and Feminism

The sport of baseball famously has many founders. Among them were physicians and public health reformers who led a national movement to convince our notoriously pallid and sedentary ancestors that exercise would improve and prolong their lives. In the first half of the 19th century they experimented with boxing and gymnastics before settling on baseball — a game that until the late 1850s was played almost exclusively in New York — as the sport that would appeal to the widest cross-section of Americans. The story of the 1850s and 1860s is how they converted Philadelphia and Boston to the New York game, and ultimately succeeded in creating our first national sport.

A young woman working out with Indian clubs, which were imported by British soldiers from South Asia. Early 19th century feminists were divided on whether women should practice light exercise like calisthenics or compete in more strenuous sports like baseball. Emma Willard, Mary Lyon and other founders of the first women’s colleges stood in the latter camp.

Dr. Jones was not the only prominent member of the American sports movement to fly in the face of Victorian mores by advocating exercise for female as well as male Americans. This was politically risky. After opening Brooklyn’s first gym worthy of the name in 1849, Jones hired trousers-wearing English feminist Madame Beaujeu Hawley to teach exercise classes for females. This provoked a controversy that sounds like something out of modern Tehran or Riyadh. Defending himself from a storm of criticism from Brooklynites who considered it indecent for women and girls to work up a sweat, and especially for men to see them, Jones reassured the public that he would keep the sexes strictly separate at his facility. To cover his glutes, he also published a statement in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper from Abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher and other free-thinking Brooklyn mullahs attesting to the moral probity of gymnastics for women and girls.

Newspaper publisher Thomas Fitzgerald, also a committed Abolitionist, co-founded the Athletics club in 1859 and played a central role in spreading baseball to the city of Philadelphia. Among his friends and allies were the feminist writer and editor Sarah J. Hale, who co-founded Vassar College and supported physical education and sports for women and girls. Students at Mount Holyoke and other women’s colleges formed some of the earliest collegiate baseball clubs. The first Harvard baseball club was founded by the class of 1866; Vassar had two clubs in 1866.

Anne Fitzhugh Miller and Susan B. Anthony

Another important baseball proselytizer, Gerrit Smith Miller was a 16-year-old student at a Boston prep school when he became an original member of the Lowells, Boston’s second baseball club, in 1861. Born in Peterboro, New York, Miller was named after his grandfather Gerrit Smith, a 19th-century land reformer, station master on the Underground Railroad, Temperance activist and supporter of the vote for women. Gerrit Smith was also a friend and ally of political radical Thomas Ainge Devyr, the father of Brooklyn baseball star Tom Devyr. Gerrit Smith’s daughter and Gerrit Smith Miller’s mother, Elizabeth Miller was the first woman to appear in public in bloomers, the baggy pants worn as a political statement by 19th-century feminists, and co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

In August 1868, Thomas Fitzgerald’s Philadelphia City Item ran the following story.

“At Peterboro, writes Mrs. [Elizabeth] Cady Stanton, there is a baseball club of girls. Nannie Miller, a grand-daughter of Gerrit Smith, is the captain, and handles the bat with a grace and strength worthy of notice. It was a pretty sight to see the girls with their white dresses and blue ribbons flying, in full possession of the public square, while the boys were quiet spectators of the scene.”

Nannie Miller, who grew up to be the famous feminist Anne Fitzhugh Miller, was Gerrit Miller’s sister.