Baseball for Cultured Young Ladies

Princeton University baseball player, a 1905 lithograph by Louise Clarke

Baseball was an intramural sport at many women's colleges, from Ivy League's Seven Sisters to private academies and state colleges. Fears that baseball was too violent for women forced upstart intercollegiate club teams, such as the one at Vassar, to disband in the 1860s, but by the early twentieth century, college administrators viewed the sport as a useful part of a well-rounded athletic curriculum for "a cultured young lady."