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This autobiography is great because it includes the autobiography of the oldest living member of the AAGPBL. She describes how growing up, she would play and win against the boys in her neighborhood, to their dismay. But this is evidence that these women were not athletically inferior, nor were their accomplishments added up to any less than the men they "substituted" for.

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Autobiographical Sketch - By Mary Pratt:

I was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and my family moved to Quincy, Massachusetts, my father's birthplace, in the height of the depression years. My Father was a draftsman during the World War II years and was employed by the Lake Torpedo in New Haven, Connecticut.

It had always been my desire to go to college and major in Physical Education. I did so in 1936 when I entered Boston University. I graduated in 1940 and started a teaching career that lasted 48 years. My advanced degrees were awarded to me from Boston University and the University of Massachusetts.

My athletic competition through most of my growing up and teaching years was limited. I competed with and against boys. Competition at the high school and college levels for girls was limited to intramural and class competition. I did, however, have the opportunity to compete in a local church basketball league and with both the Boston Field Hockey and Lacrosse Associations.

A tremendous void was filled with 50 years of officiating Basketball, Softball, Field Hockey and Lacrosse. A great deal of that competition in those early years was in the private school sector.

With the advent of Title IX, in the1970s, competition in girls' athletic programs increased, and I became very active in the local and state associations, serving in leadership roles, at every level.

It was in 1943 that I had the opportunity to become a member of the AAGPBL. In June of that year, I was contacted by personnel in Chicago and flew out to Chicago after the close of school. I was met by Mr. Ken Sells, appointed by Mr. Philip Wrigley as President of the AAGPBL. I was escorted to Rockford and joined that team. That evening, Rockford was in the process of playing a league game at the 15th ave. Stadium. That was my introduction into the All-American and the start of five wonderful summers as a member of the league, 1943-47. I was fortunate to have particated during those eras when so many changes took place within the structure of the League.

Prior to competing in the ,my only experience in competitive softball was during 1939-40 when I played on the Boston Olympets out of the Boston Garden. Walter Brown, then the owner of the Garden, organized the team as a means of having a weekly sports program during the summer months. Games were scheduled with teams from the New England area, the highlight being a game scheduled with teams from the New York area at Madison Square Garden.

Players that I met in 1943 from Canada and California were surprised at the lack of opportunities for girls to compete in Softball if they resided in the East Coast areas. I pitched for the Olympets during those years and brought that limited experience into the AAGPBL. Prior to this, my limited experience in Baseball was playing with and against. boys.

It was during the years that I participated in the AAGPBL when many changes were made in the game. In 1943 the game was basically Baseball with Softball style pitching. Baserunners took leads and were not required to "hold the base," until after the delivery. Additional changes occurred until 1948 when the delivery became completely overhand. As the changes were made from underhand to sidearm to overhand, the pitching and basiline distances were lengthened.

There was a league rule, rather unique at the time. In order to maintain a high level of competition within the structure of the League, players could be shifted or traded at the discretion of League officials. It was that ruling that resulted in my being sent from Rockford to Kenosha during the early season of 1944. Two pitchers in Kenosha were handicapped with injuries at the time. Although Rockford at the time was "on the road," I was reassigned to Kenosha. I recall it being an adjustment at the time because all of my clothes were back at the Nyquist's where Dottie Green and I rented our room. The move to Kenosha will always be remembered because I had the opportunity to play for Marty McManus on the championship team for the first half of the 1944 season. Kenosha lost in the playoffs to Milwaukee. It was an honor to play with so many of the girls who signed up for the League in those first years, among them Ann Harnett and Shirley Jameson.

I returned to Kenosha for the 1945 season. Having resigned my teaching position in order to play there was little likelihood that I would be offered the opportunity to return to my teaching position in Quincy. I did return and retired in 1986, a career that lasted 48 years, 42 in Quincy, three in Braintree, and three at Salem State.

I have been honored to have been elected to the AAGPBL Board of Directors and served from 1999-2000. During those years, I initiated an "Out and About" project in which I kept a record and responses I received from any former players, Associate members, and officials who accepted invitations to meet and speak with groups about their experiences associated with the AAGPBL.

I like to reaffirm the statement that was made by Patty Berg, a renowned professional golfer. She spoke at the AAGPBL's firs players' reunion in Chicago in 1982. She reminded us that we were pioneers. As of this date(2007), "there has been no venture in female professional sports to equate to Mr. Wrigley's venture adopted in 1943."

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Autobiographical Sketch - By Mary Pratt: I was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and my family moved to Quincy, Massachusetts, my father's birthplace, in the height of the depression years. My Father was a draftsman during the World War II years and was employed by the Lake Torpedo in New Haven, Connecticut.

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My Mother the Feminist Would Never Drop the Ball on Purpose

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My Mother the Feminist Would Never Drop the Ball on Purpose

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This is a great article from not only a nephew, but the son of two women that had played in the league. The film's two main characters -- Dottie and Kit -- were inspired by them. In this article, Kelly Candaele answers some questions about the ending scene of the movie, but more importantly talks about how much his mother and aunt cared for the game, and how it was just as real of an occupation as anybody could hope for, and they took great pride in their athletic talents.

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Helen Callaghan, the author's mother

My mother and aunt were two of the girls of summer, recruited from Canada by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League to play pro baseball in the 1940s as the United States sent many of its best male ballplayers to fight in World War II. Twenty-five years ago this month, the league became famous when the Columbia Pictures film, A League of Their Own, starring Tom Hanks, Madonna and Geena Davis, became a home-run comedy hit. A few years prior, I had produced a PBS documentary film of the same name about my mom and aunt's years in the league that was the inspiration for the feature movie.

People still ask me questions about the film that usually start with, "Did you meet Madonna and Tom Hanks?" and end with, "Did your mom drop the ball on purpose at the end of the movie to let her younger sister win the game?" In the Penny Marshall-directed film, Dottie, a great hitting catcher played by Davis, drops the ball when she is run over at the plate in the last inning by her sister Kit, played by Lori Petty. Kit's team wins the World Series and the sisters finally reconcile after spending most of the film squabbling in ways that only siblings can.

One writer recently observed about that crucial scene that "the internet is filled with painstaking did-she-or-didn't-she analyses " about the dropped ball. Thousands of movie and baseball fans have weighed in over the years, some arguing that Dottie boosted her sister's confidence by "letting her win," with others asserting that the film's "narrative arc" clearly dictates that Kit must win the game fair and square.

In my household the answer is simple: My mother - who passed away the year the film came out - would never have dropped the ball on purpose to let her sister win. No way - not a chance. And there are good moral, psychological and even philosophical reasons for why.

Dropping a ball on purpose to let a relative or friend win a game is a betrayal on several levels. It is a betrayal first and foremost of your teammates, who are fighting hard to win the game and expect that you are doing the same. It is a betrayal of your own integrity, assuming that you have a clear understanding of what constitutes fair play. Letting someone win is also condescending, retaining for yourself the power to determine the other person's fate, thereby denying them any unmitigated satisfaction. And purposefully losing a game is a betrayal of both the game itself and the spectators.

As social critic Christopher Lasch pointed out in The Culture of Narcissism, watching those who have mastered a sport can provide exacting standards by which we can measure ourselves. There is an "illusion of reality" that players and spectators participate in by accepting the rules and rituals of the games they play. What should bind the spectator and the athlete, Lasch writes, is recognition of this "representational value" of serious athletics when not degraded by spectacle or trivialization. If someone drops a ball on purpose or misses a basketball shot intentionally, whatever positive symbolic value sports might have vanishes.

My mother was an athletic warrior who took her baseball skills seriously. She was fiercely competitive, driven to win and, like many great athletes, was capable of a measure of anger against her opponents.

A lot of anger is expressed in the movie. The sisters fight about whether one of them is receiving special treatment from team owners. The players express their appropriately targeted anger towards their manager (Hanks), who refuses to recognize them as gifted athletes. "I don't have ballplayers, I've got girls," he says early in the film.

And when the male team owners tell the women it's time to go back home and into the kitchen, they band together in sisterly and class solidarity to save their league. (My mother worked in an armaments factory before joining her team, the Fort Wayne Daisies.)

My mother understood that anger, when properly expressed, is a form of self-assertion and can transform relationships with others in positive ways. This is especially true on the baseball diamond, where an intensity of effort can overcome a mismatch in talent.

Geena Davis recently said that back in 1992, when the film came out, reporters would sheepishly ask if she thought it was a "feminist" movie. She always responded assertively that yes, as feminism was about equal rights and opportunities, then A League of Their Own was feminist.

I'm sure my mom would have agreed with her. Especially if the definition of feminism would include having the opportunity to knock your sister on her rear in a close play at home to win a World Series. What could be more fun - and egalitarian - than that?

Kelly Candaele produced the PBS documentary A League of Their Own about his mother's years as a professional baseball player in the 1940s and wrote the story for the Columbia Pictures feature film.
Copyright Capital & Main

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Baseball: My Mother the Feminist Would Never Drop a Ball on Purpose | Capital & Main

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My mother and aunt were two of the girls of summer, recruited by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League to play pro baseball during World War II. Twenty-five years ago this month, the league became famous when the film, A League of Their Own, became a hit. BY KELLY CANDAELE

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Although this journal is relatively based around the stigma of emotions as feminine on the political scene, I also think that it's useful in analyzing certain quotes said by men in the film. "There's no crying in baseball," is a great one to start with, alongside, "I haven't got ballplayers, I've got girls! Girls are what you sleep with after the game, not what you coach during the game." These two quotes from the character Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) put into perspective the dehumanization that women often fell victim of due to their "sensitive" nature, when perhaps the imbalance came from the lack of emotions or sensitivity of the men of this time. My purpose with this journal is to observe how this movie may have been different if this was the case in this time of political upheaval in the United States.

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A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: A Nostalgic Comedy That Still Knows How To Play The Field

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A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: A Nostalgic Comedy That Still Knows How To Play The Field

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I plan to use this article to interject into the analysis some other perspectives regarding certain things that happened throughout the film. I liked this review, and it happened to be the most popular film critique I had found as well. A quote I had taken note of while watching the movie was, "Are you crying? There's no crying in baseball!" and this person's observation of the quote was really beneficial to some of the points that I am trying to communicate.

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I was ten years old when was released, but probably didn't watch it until a year later, on VHS. Or at least, I think so. The problem is with films that you watch when you're a kid is that you know you saw them, but you're not exactly sure when or how, or even how you felt about them. Over my teen years I watched A League Of Their Own a number of times- it even became a side note in my dissertation on the representation of women in WWII films. But now, a whole twenty-five years on from its release and I find myself faced with a film I feel is important to me but don't quite know why, and haven't even watched in years.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, A League Of Their Own is a fictionalised account of the founding of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which was set up in the US during WWII. While the men were over in Europe, women were brought in to fill their roles in the workplace, and eventually on the sporting field. Based on fictional characters, the film stars Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Tom Hanks- and yes, Madonna. The film was Penny Marshall's follow-up to Awakenings and was quite successful. Not least because A League Of Their Own was ahead of its time.

The whole concept of women playing sport, and being badass at it, was something of a new phenomenon. But more than this the film reached back into time and showed how a generation of women we view as housewives were in many ways further along in subverting gender norms than we were. A film this rare and special is worth returning to, to discuss how important it was and should be in the representation of women on screen. And for me it's time to wonder, what is it about this film that has stuck to me like glue for all these years?

"I Haven't Got Ballplayers, I've Got Girls"

A League Of Their Own's major selling point is that it's a little known but sensational part of recent history. I love a baseball movie, and I'm a sucker for a WWII film. But this film isn't really about baseball or the war, it's about women living in a particular time and how they were viewed when they tried to move outside of the boxes they had been assigned. It goes without saying that WWII offered many opportunities for women to move outside of their defined roles, and this movement had a dramatic impact on how we live and work today. A League Of Their Own is a tribute to these women, but while it's inspirational it's also fun.

The film uses a pair of competing sisters as its main focus. Older sister Dottie ( Geena Davis) is tall and beautiful, she's a fantastic baseball player but is content to stay at home and wait for her husband Bob ( Bill Pullman), who is fighting in Europe. The only reason she goes to join the league is for her kid sister, Kit ( Lori Petty). Kit is wild and passionate, she's the quintessential tomboy. She wants to escape from her small town, and the league is her way out.

Dottie's grown-up concern for her kid sister and Kit's more adventurous personality are the instigated factors of and some could say the undoing of the film's central narrative. Governing over them is Tom Hanks as their manager Jimmy; an alcoholic, washed-up baseball player, he is the girls' most immediate barrier in their efforts to be taken seriously. Around these central narratives are a number of supporting scenarios performed by a variety of different 'types' of women. Mae (played by Madonna) is a taxi driver, Doris ( Rosie O'Donnell) is a bouncer at her father's nightclub, Marla ( Megan Cavanagh) is 'the ugly one', Shirley ( Ann Cusack) is uneducated, and Ellen Sue ( Freddie Simpson) is a former Miss Georgia.

The girls are different but all possess one uniting factor: they have been hemmed in by their determined roles. They are prized for their looks, or dismissed because of them. They are wives, or mothers. Whatever they are they have been slotted into roles created for them by the male dominated society. But when they play baseball and when they play together, they hit hard outside these roles.

This is what makes this film unique; the girls fight and they bitch, they throw balls at sexist hecklers, and they rebel when they're told how to dress and how to act. Though ultimately they're no fools and they know that to keep their newly found roles they have to play up to and manipulate the male field they're playing on. That's what makes this film, it shows real girls (or real women, if you prefer) being smart and being tough.

"There's No Crying In Baseball"

Baseball films are an enjoyable genre, because by nature they are about great successes and great losses. A League Of Their Own is a brilliant baseball movie. It's got the highs and lows, it's got the drama. However, while it's an excellent sports movie, its strength as a narrative rests on the variety of its characters and their arcs. It is to the credit of the film's screenwriting partners Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel that these women are interesting and entertaining as they are.

A League Of Their Own is a fine script. Don't get me wrong it does have a thick filling of 'types' (mentioned above), but if you excuse this shorthand method you'll find great enjoyment in relating to these women and their relationships. These women don't fit together, and Ganz and Mandel's decision to unite them through fights, and humour and heartbreak shows a canny but blatant truth. That women don't always get along, but we can work together. The further concerted effort of this writing pair to celebrate the girls' hopes and aspirations for a different life really makes this a optimistic affair (well almost, more on that later).

Penny Marshall's directing is effortless, as always, and her characters (and actors) are relaxed and natural. They are easy going, however, there is something in the tone of their expression or body language that hints at the worries underneath. Davis and Hanks are masters of this kind of acting, and it is the work they put into underpinning their characters that brings this film down to earth. Lori Petty is equally expert at this kind of suppressed worry and plays the put upon kid sister incredibly well. In fact if it were not for the performances of the main cast, and the depth they and Marshall brought to their characters this may easily have ended up as some frothy comedy.

"You've Got Plenty Of Time To Make Babies"

While A League Of Their Own is a real crowd pleaser of a film, there is one pessimistic part of it that I've never appreciated, where the character of Dottie verges on deflating the film's premise. Dottie is the anchoring point of the whole narrative yet we never understand why she doesn't go all in on a chance to readdress her role in this male dominated society. She has the looks, the talent, the smarts, but she's happy to just go home and 'make babies'. Each to their own, but you can't help wondering whether her lack of devotion to the cause (the changing role of women during and after WWII) is to do with the fact that the male dominated society she lived within, worked for her?

Dottie is wanted, respected and appreciated by all the men in A League Of Their Own. They see her as someone that can be worked with and trusted upon, so why didn't she do more? We ask a lot of questions of women, and ask a lot of questions of ourselves, even in this day and age, about our choices. Should we feel bad for not wanting kids? Should we stay at home while they're growing up? What comes first, career or family? So many questions, and all the time the 'feminist pressure' is bearing down on us. What do we want? What should we want?

The answer is whatever we damn well please! A League Of Their Own has always made me sad over the years because I feel like Dottie was never really a part of it, and I never knew why she didn't want in. But ultimately, as fictional as she is, it was her choice. Dottie wanted to get her sister into the baseball league, then she wanted to go home and have kids, and we should let her have that. Dottie was above the suppression the other girls felt, or maybe she could just get by with it, and if she'd wanted it different the door was wide open. Though ultimately, I'll always be sad for her because I feel like she regretted her choices.

A League Of Their Own: Conclusion

A League Of Their Own is a part feel good, part sports, part comedy, part drama film. But more than anything it's a film which revels in the differences between women. It is a film which recognises that girls play sports, drink and smoke, and are stupid and mean. It is a film which sees us all differently and respects us. While it can be a little sentimental it can also be true to life, and it has my respect for that.

The women who played for the All American Girls Professional Baseball League were pioneers- they were part of the change we needed in our society. I'm not going to get sad about the longing and regret the film hangs on Dottie. We all make our own choices, some of us will make better ones, some of us will never see what's possible. A League Of Their Own is all about those choices, the doors we walk through and the ones we don't. You might think that I'm getting a bit deep here but I've had twenty-five years to think about this film, so give me a break.

I was ten years old when A League Of Their Own was released, but probably didn't watch it until a year later, on VHS. Or at least, I think so. The problem is with films that you watch when you're a kid is that you know you saw them, but you're not exactly sure when or how, or even how you felt about them. But I've always known that A League Of Their Own was important, and I now know why. It's as simple as this: these fictional women are smart, talented and real. In a culture where women are still taught to look good, and act a way to please the male dominated society we live within, the women of A League Of Their Own were, and still are, the rebels needed and the risk-takers we should look up to.
Have you seen A League Of Their Own? How do you feel it contributes to the representation of women on screen? A League Of Their Own is available on DVD. A 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-Ray was also released earlier this year.
Opinions expressed in our articles are those of the authors and not of the Film Inquiry magazine.

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A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: Knows How To Play The Field

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I was ten years old when was released, but probably didn't watch it until a year later, on VHS. Or at least, I think so. The problem is with films that you watch when you're a kid is that you know you saw them, but you're not exactly sure when or how, or even how you felt about them.

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Toxic Masculinity Might Help Us Justify War

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Toxic Masculinity Might Help Us Justify War

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This article will really help me drive the point that rather than blaming the women for "stealing" men's jobs while they were out fighting, maybe the problem was based in the methods that the men were using. This will give me a good basis to describe that the women were not at fault here even though it seems to be the case, and this can be a usage of the false dichotomy fallacy since the only two causes the press released were pinned on the wrongs of women, and not the wrongs of the men that began the war.

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Violence often occurs as a response to real or perceived threats, insults, or provocation, and an individual's beliefs about how their culture expects them to react to such threats often dictate the level of aggression in that response. As evident in the research below, there are cultural components that may condition individuals to behave more aggressively when threatened or provoked. Likewise, the aggressive response to an individual threat seems to translate into support for more aggressive policy or war. In the study detailed below, the authors use the example of the American South, where a culture of honor exists that is associated with greater rates of peer-to-peer aggression compared to the rest of the United States. As such, people in this culture are more sympathetic to the use of violence to defend or protect their loved ones, country, or way of life and more likely to believe that "aggression, by men, is both appropriate and necessary in response to insult, threat, and provocation." However, the cultural and behavioral components that comprise honor beliefs, argue the authors, likely extend beyond the geographic boundaries of regions thought to possess "cultures of honor."

Past research has identified a connection between cultures with strong beliefs in this type of honor and the support for violent responses to foreign attacks, and for war more generally. In this study, the authors are interested in the role honor beliefs play in an individual's attitude towards collective violence-thus extending past research on the subject by measuring honor as an individual rather than a cultural difference. Specifically, this study asks if a person's beliefs on how individuals use aggression to protect themselves or their families, communities, and reputations impact their views on issues of war, peace, or aggressive security policies. It also examines to what extent individual beliefs about masculinity and honor influence their behavior.

In an attempt to answer these questions, the authors created a two-part study to identify and analyze relationships between an individual's honor beliefs and their perceptions of war, aggressive security policies, peace, and human nature as a whole. First, the authors used an established behavior model that identifies and measures masculine honor beliefs (MHBs). Individual MHB levels were measured through a series of questions where respondents were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as "a man should protect his wife." The respondents were then given a different survey asking about their views on aggressive behavior or traits, and certain real or hypothetical policy decisions regarding war, use of a military, or decisions to resolve conflict through more peaceful means (diplomacy). Both studies administered surveys to groups of around 140 male and female undergraduate students from a university in the United States.

In the first study, the respondents began with a survey measuring their individual MHB levels. Next, a different survey measured their levels of aggression; their political views; their perceptions of war as an appropriate response to hypothetical scenarios such as revenge, gaining territory, protecting one's own country, ally, or an oppressed people, or spreading worldviews or democracy; their perceptions of whether the US role in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was justified; and their views on various examples of aggressive or restrictive policy: domestic spying, torture, foreign military action, government-sanctioned assassinations, and laws about immigration, airport security, and gun control. In the second study, the respondents similarly began with the assessment of their individual MHB levels, and then were asked questions about their beliefs on whether the world, or the people in it, can be "pure evil" or "pure good"; their perceptions of the world as a competitive, dangerous, or unpredictable place; and their views on a series of hypothetical US responses to terrorism including extreme and preemptive force to attack terrorism around the world, the use of torture to get information, and the use of diplomacy to address the causes of terrorism.

For both studies, the survey responses to foreign policy questions were analyzed in relation to individual MHB levels, revealing that individuals with higher MHB levels had more positive perceptions of war, higher levels of support for aggressive security policies, lower support for peacebuilding and diplomacy, and a more pessimistic perception of the world-including the capacity for "pure evil." The first study found that high MHB levels were directly related both to a person's belief that war is an appropriate way to seek revenge, protect one's country or others, and spread worldviews; and to a person's support for restrictive policies such as spying, immigration restrictions, torture, and assassination. Individual MHB levels were not, however, associated with political conservatism, the justifiability of US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, or support for an increase in foreign spying, airport security, or gun control. The second study found that individuals with higher MHB levels were more likely to hold pessimistic worldviews and to endorse the use of violence to protect their place in the world; showed greater support for extreme or preemptive militarism and torture; and exhibited lower levels of support for peacebuilding, diplomacy, or other nonviolent efforts to reduce war and manage conflict. MHB levels were not related to an individual's support for humanitarian wars.
CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE
In the past decade, especially during more recent years, public attention has shifted towards examining many of the norms and institutions that protected much of the "toxic masculinity" that has plagued our workplaces, universities, classrooms, homes, and broader society. Recent movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, and many more less-popularized but equally important movements throughout history, have brought attention to the way some men, as well as antiquated conceptions of masculinity or excuses of manly banter or "locker room talk," have created toxic environments where inequality and sexual harassment have become commonplace. Additionally, as society begins to acknowledge the widespread mistreatment of women, past behavior deemed acceptable under the pretense of chivalry, protection, or honor can begin to be addressed as well. Often overlooked or underappreciated, compared to the more blatant acts of sexual assault/harassment/discrimination, is behavior attributed to seemingly "benign" masculinity that can also function in destructive ways. The author's MHB question of "a man should protect his wife" may seem harmless to some, but it perpetuates the belief that women are in need of constant protection by men-and provides a rich cultural resource for justifying war. As this research has shown, masculine beliefs about protection and honor can carry over from the individual level to the global level, through increased support for aggressive policy and war.
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
This research leads us to critically examine a common belief that the capacity for violence, military might, nuclear weapons, etc., is necessary to maintain safety and security. By identifying the connection between an individual's masculine honor beliefs (MHBs) and support for war and aggressive security policies, these findings teach us more about why some individuals support violence and war, and why others are more opposed. With this new understanding, concerned parties can work towards identifying traits associated with MHBs and address their causes. We can then begin to reshape the cultural and individual belief systems around honor and masculinity by directing attitudes away from violence and sexism, towards the constructive qualities of equality and strength found in all people. Many of these problems begin with how masculinity is defined as the possession of certain qualities or traits traditionally associated with men-and then how these traits are generally valued more highly than those so-called feminine traits traditionally associated with women. Instead, our qualities and traits should be ungendered, non-binary, not associated with men or women. The further we can untether personal traits (negative and positive) from their associations with masculinity and femininity, and in the process re-value those traditionally associated with femininity, the more likely it will become that people of all genders will feel free to endorse behaviors like empathy and diplomacy and nonviolence in the face of threats-behaviors that have as much of a chance, if not a greater chance, of providing safety and security. We will then also take away one more cultural resource for the justification of war, what Iris Marion Young calls the "logic of masculinist protection," by pulling conceptions of "honor" away from the masculine protector/feminine protected dynamic.
Published in collaboration with the Peace Science Digest, which summarizes and reflects on current academic research in the field of peace and conflict studies. To subscribe or download the full piece, which includes additional resources, visit their website.

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Toxic Masculinity Might Help Us Justify War

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Violence often occurs as a response to real or perceived threats, insults, or provocation, and an individual's beliefs about how their culture expects them to react to such threats often dictate the level of aggression in that response. As evident in the research below, there are cultural components that may condition individuals to behave more aggressively when threatened or provoked.

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Why World War II Still Defines American Masculinity For Joe Scarborough And Other Baby Boomers

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Why World War II Still Defines American Masculinity For Joe Scarborough And Other Baby Boomers

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I plan on using this article as either a reference or a backdrop in my mind as I work through some of the toxic masculinity portrayed in this film. I thought that this article was really helpful in painting a scene of what masculinity was idealized as in the 1940s, and why some people still hold that WWII ideal high in their minds as a value for all men to strive towards.

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According to an NYU history professor

Earlier this week, grumpy Florida man Joe Scarborough posted a tweet with a link to an American Conservative article about how smartphones are turning teens into isolated misanthropes.

Our smartphone culture impacts young men in the most profound way. It is often younger women who suffer the most. https://t.co/cagBUD9rUE

- Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 7, 2017

He followed it up with another tweet comparing today's Xbox-addicted youth to the Greatest Generation, who came to Europe and Asia's rescue during World War II.

Young men in the 1940s liberated Europe from Nazism and the Pacific from the Japanese Empire. Today, too many stay home playing video games. https://t.co/e7FTe0O20P

- Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 7, 2017

Backlash on Twitter was swift and thorough. Some expressed relief for living in a world of video games over war.

Others noted the hypocrisy of Scarborough's penchant for playing Call of Duty and history of avoiding active combat.

We were more curious, though, about the broader notion of nostalgic masculinity. Namely, why have we come to view World War II as the golden age of American manhood, and why are the men who served in the conflict the benchmark against which all other males (no matter the generation) are measured - especially for boomers like Scarborough, and especially compared to the veterans of more recent wars such as Vietnam and Iraq?

For answers, I called up Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert on the fascist and authoritarian rulers American soldiers were fighting in Europe and the Pacific.

These are some of her thoughts...

We celebrate WWII masculinity because it was a "morally righteous" war with a well-defined villain.
Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini were "undeniably bad," Ben-Ghiat says. This made it easier to decipher who possessed the moral high ground. "Young men fighting World War II were clearly on the good side of democracy versus totalitarianism," she explains. "Now things are blurrier because the outcomes of conflicts are as well. The Allies occupied some of Germany and Austria temporarily, but they eventually left." Obviously, things aren't as clear-cut now, she adds, especially since the death of Osama bin Laden, the contemporary Hitler equivalent. Scandals involving American contractors only serve to further complicate the moral landscape and contribute to a longing for a "simpler time," according to Ben-Ghiat.

A never-ending, ever-changing battlefield has made it nearly impossible to celebrate today's soldier in the same way.
No one likes to mention Vietnam, Ben-Ghiat says, because it didn't end well. Since the second Gulf War started in 2003, however, America has entered an era of "perma-war" that doesn't satisfy the need for a great confrontation between right and wrong. "World War II was so clearly good vs. evil, so it's a very convenient touchstone," Ben-Ghiat argues. "Nor is there a real battlefield in counter-insurgency warfare - just villages and civilians."

We now better understand the toll of war on the men and women who fight it.
People do recognize modern-day war heroes, Ben-Ghiat says, pointing to a story she wrote in 2015 about "American Sniper" for CNN. But today's heroes are less mythical and more human. "Kyle was a traumatized figure who ended up getting killed by another traumatized war veteran, so the happy ending is much more complicated. It's insulting that Scarborough didn't single out any of the many heroes we do have from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Counter-insurgency warfare is, in some ways, much more dangerous. You're much more exposed, and psychologically, it's much more difficult because you're engaging with civilians at close range. Because of long-range optical capacities, soldiers today have the capacity to see the tears on the cheeks of the enemy. You didn't have to deal with any of that in World War II."

Much of modern warfare is also seemingly as virtual as the video games Scarborough cites.
The largest increase in the military budget over the next 10 years is for drones. While drone warfare certainly isn't a video game, Ben-Ghiat notes, it is a virtual war experience. "With drones, you're sitting in Nebraska in a structure. You're killing real people, but through a screen. Increasingly, war is going to be at a remove. It's certainly not going to be an industrial strength army facing another army like in World War II.

"So in the future, all of our notions of heroism and combat on the battlefield are up for grabs."

Recommended Reading

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Why World War II Still Defines American Masculinity for Joe Scarborough and Other Baby Boomers

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Earlier this week, grumpy Florida man Joe Scarborough posted a tweet with a link to an American Conservative article about how smartphones are turning teens...

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I plan on using this article to represent why baseball is considered a masculine profession. This also includes the year that baseball was created in order for me to insert this into my article in the fallacy section.

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You may have heard that a young man named Abner Doubleday invented the game known as baseball in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 1839. Doubleday then went on to become a Civil War hero, while baseball became America's beloved national pastime.

Not only is that story untrue, but it's also not even in the ballpark. Baseball's real origins date back way further, to at least the 18th century.

Who Was Abner Doubleday?

Doubleday, who was born to a prominent family in upstate New York in 1819, was still at West Point in 1839, and he never claimed to have anything to do with baseball. Instead, he served as a Union major general in the American Civil War and later became a lawyer and writer.

In 1907, sixteen years after Doubleday's death, a special commission created by the sporting goods magnate and former major league player A.J. Spalding was set up to determine baseball's origins-namely if it was invented in the United States or derived from games in the United Kingdom. The commission used flimsy evidence-the claims of one man, mining engineer Abner Graves, who said he went to school with Doubleday-to come up with the origin story, which managed to stick.

Cooperstown businessmen and major league officials seized on myth's enduring power in the 1930s, when they established the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in the village.

What Are Baseball's Real Origins?

As it turns out, the real history of baseball is a little more complicated than the Doubleday legend. References to games resembling baseball in the United States date back to the 18th century. Its most direct ancestors appear to be two English games: rounders (a children's game brought to New England by the earliest colonists) and cricket.

By the time of the American Revolution, variations of such games were being played on schoolyards and college campuses across the country. They became even more popular in newly industrialized cities where men sought work in the mid-19th century.

In September 1845, a group of New York City men founded the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club. One of them-volunteer firefighter and bank clerk Alexander Joy Cartwright-would codify a new set of rules that would form the basis for modern baseball, calling for a diamond-shaped infield, foul lines and the three-strike rule. He also abolished the dangerous practice of tagging runners by throwing balls at them.

Cartwright's changes made the burgeoning pastime faster-paced and more challenging while clearly differentiating it from older games like cricket. In 1846, the Knickerbockers played the first official game of baseball against a team of cricket players, beginning a new, uniquely American tradition.

Fact Check

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You may have heard that a young man named Abner Doubleday invented the game known as baseball in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 1839. Doubleday then went on to become a Civil War hero, while baseball became America's beloved national pastime. Not only is that story untrue, but it's also not even in the ballpark.

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Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974

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Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974

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The movie makes use of a scene that is seen rather cute and endearing, when a woman is looking for her name on the roster, but cannot find it. Another woman approaches her asking if she is able to read, when she responds "no," her new friend finds her name on the roster and they sit down together as members of the same team. However, I believe that this scene was placed into the movie to signify that at this time (1940s-50s), women did not have access to proper or equal education such as men did prior to '74.

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H.R.40 - 93rd Congress (1973-1974): Equal Educational Opportunities Act

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Equal Educational Opportunities Act - Declares it to be the policy of the United States that all children enrolled in public schools are entitled to equal educational opportunity without regard to race, color, sex, or national origin; and that the neighborhood is the appropriate basis for determining public school assignments.

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I plan to use this paper to advance my points that the male-driven entertainment industry dehumanization women as sex objects, especially prior to the basic Civil Rights Act. This will thoroughly enforce that based on research and statistical studies by three female psychologists, the exploitation of women's bodies in the AAGPBL was solely based on the expectations that the male audience had going into the agreement of women becoming a face in a masculine occupation.

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This is a source I plan to reference in the paper by explaining that civil rights were not completely inclusive until the mid-60s, and that women living in the time before the Civil Rights Act suffered greatly by having only one occupation be offered to them for the remainder of their lives: a housewife.

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In the 1960s, Americans who knew only the potential of "equal protection of the laws" expected the President, the Congress, and the courts to fulfill the promise of the 14th Amendment. In response, all three branches of the federal government - as well as the public at large - debated a fundamental constitutional question: Does the Constitution's prohibition of denying equal protection always ban the use of racial, ethnic, or gender criteria in an attempt to bring social justice and social benefits?

Related Primary Sources
Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.
Teaching Activities

The "Rights in America" page on DocsTeach includes other primary sources and document-based teaching activities related to how individuals and groups have asserted their rights as Americans. It includes topics such as slavery, racism, citizenship, women's independence, immigration, and more.

Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

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En Español In the 1960s, Americans who knew only the potential of "equal protection of the laws" expected the President, the Congress, and the courts to fulfill the promise of the 14th Amendment.

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"American Women 1940s" by Pop History Dig

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"American Women 1940s" by Pop History Dig

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https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/american-women-1940s/
This source shows several different examples of how women from the 1940s expressed themselves and their identities through pop culture references such as "Rosie the Riveter." This will be helpful towards my essay in being able to reference popular culture of that time period relevant to the women I'm addressing. Collectively, this should provide me with enough examples to work through some aspirations the characters in this movie may have had at the time.

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"Feminism During the 1940s" by Dee Shneiderman

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"Feminism During the 1940s" by Dee Shneiderman

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https://www.theclassroom.com/feminism-during-1940s-14003.html
Similar to "The Waves of Feminism, and Why People Keep Fighting Over Them, Explained" by Constance Grady, this article will help draw a broader frame of view for the conditions of this time era. It will give insights into the second wave of feminism and show how without this wave, women possibly wouldn't have a lot of the freedoms we enjoy today. I'll be able to pull examples of different heroic women of this time era, whether they be found in comic books, motion pictures, or real life.

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"Timeline: A Brief History of Women's Team Sports in America" by Mylène Moreno

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"Timeline: A Brief History of Women's Team Sports in America" by Mylène Moreno

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http://archive.pov.org/trueheartedvixens/timeline/
I will use this source to depict the change that the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League sparked in the sports industry since it was established. This shows all of the advancements that women have had in sports since the topic of the movie was created. This will be helpful in relating the roles women played during the different waves of feminism.

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"American Women in World War II" by History.com

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"American Women in World War II" by History.com

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https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/american-women-in-world-war-ii-1
During World War II, many women took the place of men in industries that men mostly dominated in prior to wartime. This article shows the trends and purposes that these women who were previously "useless housewives" had during the war. As it turns out, this movie shows one of the first instances in which women became involved in sports in the U.S.: the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

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"The Waves of Feminism, and Why People Keep Fighting Over Them, Explained" by Constance Grady

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"The Waves of Feminism, and Why People Keep Fighting Over Them, Explained" by Constance Grady

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https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth
I plan to use this article in my analyzation of the movie "A League of Their Own." I believe the most efficient way to make use of this article is to describe the time period and the wave of feminism that was relevant during the time period that this movie belongs in. The article will help gain perspective on the conditions of society in the movie's time period in addition to what treatment women expected from their peers in this time period.