Women’s Baseball in Nineteenth-Century New York and the Man Who Set Back Women’s Professional Baseball for Decades

 

New Yorkers love baseball. Their passion for the national game (and its bat-and-ball precursors) can be traced back into the earliest decades of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, scores of juvenile and adult teams in New York vied for bragging rights or trophy balls on emerald fields and dusty lots.1 Boys and men weren’t the only ones reveling in the excitement of smacking hard grounders past pitchers or putting runners out by catching a lofty fly ball (or on the first bounce by some early rules); girls and women were playing too — in cities large and small and in villages scattered across the rolling hills of upstate and western New York.

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• Related link: Click here to view the appendix, “Female Baseball Teams in New York, 1850-1898”

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In 1859 a 27-year-old dentist, Francis Guiwits of Steuben County, New York, informed Harper’s Weekly that baseball had been a popular game “in nearly all the villages and among the rural districts of Western New York” for at least twenty years. He added that baseball was “the game at our district schools during intermission hours, and often engaged in by youths of both sexes.”2

Earlier that year, newspapers in Albany, Troy, and Genesee County had debated the propriety of women playing baseball. One individual argued that “there seems nothing violent in the presumption that ball playing would prove as agreeable and useful to ladies as to gentleman,” while another retorted, “Bosh! Just think of looking for the ball every minute or two under the circumference of crinolined players.”3

Criticizing the assumption that women had to wear cumbersome clothing while playing baseball, the Troy Daily Times responded: “Humbug! As if a woman must at all times and under every circumstance, be arrayed in the stiff and conservative propriety of drawing room attire.”4 When an unnamed advocate suggested that women could wear bloomers while playing, the Troy editor countered: “We are no advocates of the Bloomer costume, but we can imagine that there are occasions on which short dresses, minus the outlandish pantaloons — in brief, a rig permitting the free and natural exercise of the lower limbs — would be worth[y], healthful and proper.”5

Fashion constraints weren’t the only thing deterring women from playing baseball in the nineteenth century. They also had to decide whether playing baseball was worth risking their fertility and their lives. Girls and women were inundated with warnings from physicians that they would be irreparably harmed if they overexerted themselves physically or mentally — particularly during or after puberty.

In October 1867 newspapers around the country reprinted an (erroneous) story that a 21-year-old woman in Allen’s Prairie, Michigan, had died after playing baseball.6 (Amaret Howard actually succumbed to typhoid fever.)7 That same year the Reverend John Todd warned about the dangers of encouraging women to ape men in their intellectual pursuits: “If it ministers to vanity to call a girl’s school ‘a college,’ it is very harmless; but as for training young ladies through a long intellectual course, as we do young men, it can never be done — they will die in the process.”8

Each girl and woman who threw herself into her academic studies or decided to pick up a baseball bat and dash around the basepaths in the mid-nineteenth century had to weigh the potential consequences of her actions. For the thirty-six young women at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, who organized three baseball clubs in 1866 and 1867, and for those who organized a junior and senior nine in Peterboro the following year, love of baseball outweighed warnings about infertility or death.9

In 1875, scores of students at Vassar College organized seven or eight baseball teams with the frightening pronouncements of Harvard Medical School physician Dr. Edward H. Clarke ringing in their ears. In his bestselling book, Sex in Education: Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), Clarke explained that youth needed to carefully regulate both “muscular and brain labor” so that their bodies had sufficient “force” available to manufacture their “reproductive machinery.”10 He ominously warned that young women who ignored his counsel risked “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system.”11

Fortunately for girls and women who loved to play baseball and to engage in other rigorous activities, there were also voices challenging Clarke’s proscriptions. Dr. Helen Webster was resident physician at Vassar College 1874–81. She encouraged students to keep playing baseball even after one of them injured her leg running the bases.12 Webster, like a growing number of physical fitness experts, understood the positive correlation between robust health and vigorous exercise. By the 1880s and 1890s, colleges across the country were hiring physical fitness instructors like Dudley Sargent and Senda Berensen, as well as building gymnasiums, swimming pools, and sports fields to promote athleticism and robust health in male and female students.

The new emphasis on athletics for women inspired more girls and women than ever before to try their hand at baseball — especially in New York state. During the 1870s, girls and women in Rhinebeck, Poughkeepsie, Brooklyn, Erie, Kingston, Auburn, Rochester, Phoenix, Syracuse, and New York City played on baseball teams. In the 1880s and 1890s, dozens more female teams sprang up in at least two dozen New York communities.13 Players came from all social strata. There were immigrants, like Maud Nelson, playing on New York-based barnstorming teams, black women, like Mary E. Thompson and Mary Jackson, playing on pick-up teams, and upper class girls and women, like those at Mrs. Hazen’s School in Pelham Manor and “society buds” in Greenwich, playing on scholastic and civic teams.14

There were so many women playing baseball by the mid-1880s that the New York World commented that sports like cricket and baseball were helping to “enlarge the sphere of the contemporaneous woman.” The World described the transition of the female athlete it was observing: “When the [contemporaneous woman] first took to base ball she was a little limp on the pitch and scattered a little on the home base. She caught a ball with her head over her shoulder, and had an abnormal fear of being struck below the belt. But these absurd things have passed away with development.”15

Girls and women played on the same types of teams as boys and men. In addition to school, college, civic, business, and pick-up teams, girls and women played on professional teams. The first women’s professional team was organized by men in Springfield, Illinois, in 1875, but many nineteenth-century women’s professional teams originated in New York City. They sported names like the Young Ladies Champions of the World Base Ball Club, the American Stars, the American Female Base Ball Club, the New York Giants, the Young Ladies Base Ball Club of New York, the New York Champion Young Ladies Base Ball Club, and even the deceptively named Cincinnati Reds.16

 

Sylvester Wilson Promotional Publication, The Young Ladies’ Athletic Journal, September 1890.

 

The earliest of the New York City-based female ball clubs was Sylvester F. Wilson’s short-lived American Brunettes and English Blondes, organized in late March of 1879.17 The team was short-lived because Wilson and his business partner, William Powell, were both arrested for “engaging girls under 16 for immoral purposes” and for having sexual relations with girls under 16.18

Wilson was the most notorious female baseball manager of the twentieth century. He was a narcissist, career criminal, and pedophile, and organized female baseball teams between 1879 and 1903 in places including New York City, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, and Cincinnati. James William Beul called New York City “the Great Maelstrom of Vice” in 1879 and Sylvester Wilson felt right at home in its seediest neighborhoods.19 Because he was continually running afoul of the law, Wilson used multiple aliases like H.H. Freeman, Harry Richmond, W.S. Franklin, and Frank W. Hartright to hide his identity from the police and child protective agencies like the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC).20

Agents of the NYSPCC kept tabs on Wilson after his arrest for sexual impropriety in 1879 and were successful in bringing Wilson to justice on several occasions, including his arrest in August 1891 for allegedly abducting 15-year-old Libbie Agnes Sunderland from her home in Binghamton to join his barnstorming troupe. The Society not only brought the charges against Wilson in the Sunderland case but also compiled testimonies from individuals around the country detailing how Wilson had duped, defrauded, or ruined them.21 NYSPCC agents were delighted when Wilson received a five-year sentence to Sing Sing and $1,000 fine in 1892.

Two months after Wilson’s release from prison in August 1898, Society agents began receiving reports that Wilson was making unwanted advances on a 17-year-old store clerk. The following May, Manager Fred Smithson of the St. George cricket grounds in Hoboken, swore out an arrest warrant against Wilson (using the alias, William S. Franklin) and his partner H.A. Adams when they absconded with the gate receipts from a baseball game between their female baseball nine and the Hudson Athletic Club.22

Narrowly avoiding incarceration, Wilson headed for Philadelphia where he quickly attracted the attention of the Pennsylvania Society for the Protection of Children from Cruelty (PSPCC) on suspicion of being a “procurer” and enticing young girls from home. In its Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, the NYSPCC noted that it was “the pleasure of this Society to furnish from its records the complete criminal history of Wilson” to the PSPCC so it could prosecute Wilson.23 Just over a year after walking out of jail in New York, Wilson was imprisoned in Pennsylvania’s Moyamensing Prison for a year. His whereabouts between his release and December 1902 are unknown, but in January 1903 he was back in New York City advertising for a partner to put up $500 to help fund another female baseball team. He was using the alias Frank W. Hartright and using 23 Manhattan Avenue as his contact address. In April, agents of the NYSPCC spotted one of Wilson’s ads soliciting young ladies to join a basketball club. The girls were to report to the stage entrance of the Bon Ton Music Hall — a seedy theater located at 112 West 24th Street. Society agents sprang into action, immediately opening another investigation on Wilson that bore fruit in June when Max Bracklow — an employee of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel — claimed that Wilson had defrauded him out of $200 he invested in Wilson’s “woman’s base ball team and vaudeville show.”24 Bracklow reported that he had accompanied Wilson and a group of young women to Peekskill where they had played basketball for a week to get conditioned for the upcoming baseball season. He testified that Wilson’s plan was to hold baseball games in the afternoon and vaudeville performances in the evening.25

Bracklow’s charges of fraud against Wilson paled in comparison to the NYSPCC discovery that Wilson had not only lured underaged girls from their homes to join his entertainment troupe, but that he had also had sexual relations with some of them and shown them pornographic photographs.26 NYSPCC detectives Pisarra and Fogerty gathered enough evidence against Wilson that he agreed to plead guilty to a first offense rather than go to trial. (Conviction on a second offense could have brought a 20-year sentence.) Wilson received a 9-year sentence to Sing Sing that ended up being a life sentence.27 The 1910 federal census indicates that Wilson was a “patient” in Dannemora, New York — location of the State Mental Hospital where state prisoners were sent; he was still there in 1920 and died there on December 7, 1921. He was 69 years old.28

Had Wilson not been the crook he was, he might have made a positive contribution to the history of professional women’s baseball instead of giving it a reputation for debauchery that took decades to overcome. Wilson was a masterful marketer whose hyperbolic flimflammery rivaled that of P.T. Barnum. He knew how to attract crowds — as evidenced by the dozens of hometown newspapers across the country that noted that attendance at Wilson’s games were the largest to date in their locales. Approximately 65,000 individuals paid to watch Wilson’s Young Ladies’ Base Ball Club play its 37 games in 1883.29 His biggest triumph as a baseball manager came in 1890 when 7,000 to 10,000 spectators turned out to see Wilson’s Black Stocking Nine play the Allertons at Monitor Park in Weehawken, New Jersey. Wilson planned the grand event with future Tammany Hall leader Charles Murphy who was a big baseball fan and manager of Monitor Park at the time.30

Wilson’s marketing brilliance was to recognize and leverage the shift in attitudes about women’s physical fitness. Wilson launched his baseball enterprises just as the general public was acknowledging the connection between vigorous outdoor exercise and robust health. His oft-repeated pitch to reporters was that he was not organizing female baseball teams just to make money, but “to popularize open-air exercises among the Women of the land . . . as a Beautifying influence.” He pointed out that the ancient Greeks had “understood the value of open-air Gymnastics, and produced those beautiful and graceful figures which, as shown in their marble representatives handed down to us, the world of today cannot rival.”31

Wilson was drawn to female baseball teams because they provided easy access to young girls, but he also seemed genuinely interested in producing a financially viable entertainment commodity. He invested significant capital in his female baseball teams and military drill companies.32 For his first foray into women’s baseball in New York City, he obtained property at the corner of Madison Avenue and 59th Street and built “Wilson’s Amphitheatre and Ladies’ Athletic Grounds” complete with 400 feet of billboards for advertisers.33 He announced in advertisements:

[M]y object is to start a new thing, to develop women of America. I am going to open here a field for their physical perfection. There is to be base ball, lacrosse, archery, polo, walking, running, velocipede riding and everything. Ponies are now in training. The doctors tell me it will knock seven-eighths of their business sky high.34

The idea of “developing” the women of America was a theme Wilson trumpeted with every new team he established and many young women eagerly joined his baseball teams.

Over the course of his twenty-year involvement with female professional baseball, Wilson gave over 130 teenagers and young women the opportunity to travel the country and play baseball. Unfortunately, Wilson did not recruit highly skilled female baseball players; his focus was on physical beauty and most of his players were “well formed” actresses, former circus performers, and young runaways. He taught them only enough baseball to enable them to navigate on the diamond and make a show of pitching, hitting, and catching.35 His rhetoric about promoting baseball as a “Beautifying influence” for women was bunk. Though a handful of Wilson’s players, like Pearl Emerson and May Lawrence, were genuinely talented players, they were not Wilson’s chief drawing card; he was selling sexual titillation and entertainment novelty.36 The majority of his players saw through his false rhetoric and played only a single season or less, but a handful of them stayed for five seasons or more, sticking with Wilson through thick and thin and testifying on his behalf before numerous judges in courtrooms across the country.37

Sylvester Wilson undoubtedly harmed the reputation of professional women’s baseball teams and of female players in general. During Wilson’s 1891–92 trial for abducting Libbie Sunderland, New York State Assembly representative W. E. McCormick introduced a bill entitled “An Act to Prohibit Female Base-Ball Playing.” Though nothing came of the bill, the fact that a New York politician thought to introduce it in the first place indicates the extent to which Wilson had besmirched the reputation of all female baseball players.38

Fortunately for the future of women’s baseball, there were enough girls and women who continued to play baseball in New York and elsewhere that women were able to keep a foothold in the game. As Wilson headed off to Sing Sing for his first stint, the Young Ladies Base Ball Club of New York began operating. Two years later, its star, the highly talented pitcher, Lizzie Arlington, was wowing crowds and helping to rehabilitate the reputation of women’s professional baseball.39

As Wilson’s sentence dragged on, girls and women engaged in games in Central Park, Rhinebeck, and on schoolyards and college campuses across the state and the nation.40 These girls and women inspired others to play and passed their love of the game on to the generations who followed them. Over a dozen New Yorkers played in the World War II-era All American Girls Base Ball League and groups like the New York Women’s Baseball Association and USA Baseball promote the game for countless New Yorkers today.4142 The future of women in baseball is bright. No thanks to Sylvester Wilson.

DR. DEBRA A. SHATTUCK has been researching women baseball players since 1987. Her area of expertise is the nineteenth century and she recently published a first-of-its-kind history documenting the extent to which girls and women have played baseball from its earliest inception: “Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers” (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Deb is a retired Air Force Colonel and a long-time SABR member. She is Provost and Associate Professor of History and Leadership at John Witherspoon College in Rapid City, South Dakota, and, though far from her roots in northern Ohio, is still a proud fan of all things Cleveland.

• Read more: Click here to view the appendix, “Female Baseball Teams in New York, 1850-1898”

 

Notes