and ride a bus all night to the next town.

They were on the field seven nights a week with double-headers every Sunday and holiday, sometimes on diamonds that had gravel-strewn base paths that left their legs looking less than dainty. Their schedule was an unladylike grind of 115 games from May to September. “The smart looking teams invariably play smart ball,” it pronounced. The league’s player-conduct manual, “A Guide for All American Girls: How to Look Better, Feel Better, Be More Popular,” mandated chaperoned dating, no smoking in public and no slacks. Players were put through a Helena Rubinstein-run charm school in which the 22-year-old Jochum learned to glide down stairs gracefully. The uniforms, partly conceived by Wrigley’s wife, were modeled on figure skating and tennis dresses to give players a feminine appeal yet allow them to move. “Without the movie, nobody would have ever heard about us,” says Jochum, now 97 and a resident of South Bend, whose uniform resides in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Hired to coach in the All-American Girls Baseball League of 1943, while the male pros are at war, Dugan finds himself drawn back into the game by the heart and heroics of his all-girl team. The league disbanded, the demure 1950s took hold, and Jochum was a forgotten Indiana schoolteacher until the story of the Rockford Peaches, Racine Belles and all the rest was memorialized by director Penny Marshall in the popular 1992 film A League of Their Own. 296 to win the 1944 batting crown in the now-legendary league. A 5-foot-7 office girl with a quick bat, a long stride and a radiant smile, “Sockum” Jochum became the star slugger for the South Bend Blue Sox and hit. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League-founded 75 years ago, on May 30, during the manpower shortage of World War II by Chicago Cubs owner Philip Wrigley-allowed women like Jochum a brief, 11-year window in which to radically extend the acceptable range of female behavior.

With a short, flared, kicky hem disguising the athletic undershorts that were the real purpose of the rig, it was designed for a ballplayer who had to look like a girl but throw like a guy, who wore her hair in an upsweep but “hit the dirt in the skirt,” as Jochum and her teammates liked to say of sliding into home plate.Īny number of powerful consorts, witches, reformers and suffragists populate the history of women in the United States, but it took a handful of ballplayers to give them real muscle. Betsy Jochum’s 1940s baseball tunic was tailor-made for the American woman’s transition from the decorative to the active.

Radiant Girl by Andrea White