The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was founded in 1943, and it went on for years after WWII. These women were athletes, some of whom thought they were starting on a career in professional baseball.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Holly, I
am sure you've seen a league of their own. I have.

(00:21):
I feel like it's safe to say most of our
listeners have either seen a league of their own, or
at the very very least have heard someone say there's
no crying in baseball, which is probably its most quoted line.
I think you could come to my house and here
at once a week out of my husband's mouth, if
you want to just hang out. So this is film

(00:43):
that tells the story of the All American Girls Professional
Baseball League. It is a work of fiction, but it
also gets some of the highlights correct. The league was
founded during World War Two, as many of Major League
Baseball's male players had joined the military, but the movie
also kind of makes it seem like this was a
temporary diversion that ended when the war did. There's a

(01:06):
line basically about continuing on with it, but it's not
really explored beyond that. In reality, though these women were athletes,
some of them thought they were starting a lifelong career
in professional baseball that would last as long as they
were able to play. The league itself also went on
for years after the war was over, and this is
also a listener request. We've heard about it at various

(01:28):
points over the years, but the one that I wrote
down was from listener morev So, by ninety three, when
this league was founded, baseball was considered both of the
national pastime in the United States and a man's game,
but it didn't start out that way. As the game
of baseball was developing in the nineteenth century, it wasn't
just for men and boys. Children played together in neighborhood

(01:50):
games regardless of their gender. Semi professional and professional leagues
included women players and women's teams, and there were also
teams at women's college is, the first being at Vasser
in eighteen sixty six, and all black women's team called
the Dolly Vardens was established in Philadelphia in eighteen sixty seven.
During baseball's earlier years, the rules weren't particularly standardized, and

(02:14):
there were all kinds of variations and things like the
size of the playing field, the size of the ball,
and the style of pitching, and a lot of places
everyone played by the same rules regardless of their gender.
Although it was not uncommon for women to be expected
to play in floor length stresses. It was also common, though,
for girls baseball teams specifically to have modified rules sets that,

(02:37):
for example, made the playing field a little smaller. Barn
Storming became an important part of baseball's development. Starting in
eighteen sixty, teams would go on the road to play
exhibition matches outside of official league play. By the eighteen nineties,
barn stormers included all women teams known as bloomer girls
because of their billowy uniform legs, so they resembled the

(03:00):
loose trousers advocated by dress reformers in the nineteenth century.
That's not underwear, imagining that when they said bloomer girls,
it meant playing in their underwear. Maybe giggle a little bit,
but that's not what it meant. Over time, one set
of baseball rule modifications morphed into its own distinct sport,
and that sport was softball. These two games have a

(03:22):
lot of similarities. They both involve hitting a throne ball
with a bat and then rounding a set of bases
that are arranged as a diamond, but softball uses a larger,
softer ball, thus the name that ball is pitched underhanded
rather than overhand or side arm, the pitching distances shorter,
and the overall field of play is a little smaller. Initially,

(03:44):
the game that developed into softball was meant as a
baseball alternative that could be played indoors in bad weather.
Sometimes it was even called just indoor baseball. It became
particularly popular in places where space was limited or were
the only place to play was indoors. It was also
played outdoors in places with limited space. In the late

(04:04):
nineteenth century, settlement houses in the US started establishing playgrounds
and encouraging active play in urban areas, especially among boys.
Softball became so closely connected to the settlement movement into
these playgrounds that some sources have erroneously credited Chicago's Hull
House with inventing it, and we talked about Hull House

(04:25):
and its founder, Jane Adams in a previous two parter
on the show. Did not invent softball, did play it
a whole lot, though The overlap between baseball and softball
and who was playing it continued until about nineteen thirty three,
that is when the Amateur Softball Association was founded as
that sports governing body, and the name softball was formally

(04:48):
adopted for it, and at this point girls baseball teams
that had been using some kind of modified rules set
generally moved over to playing softball. It did not take
long the four people took for granted that baseball was
for boys and softball was for girls, a distinction that
persists in a lot of places today. When Little League

(05:09):
Baseball was founded in nineteen thirty nine, it was intended
for boys, although that did not become an official rule
until nineteen one, in response to k Johnston of New
York cutting her hair to join a team under the
name Tubby. The Tubby rule remained in place until nineteen
seventy four, after a series of court cases and a

(05:30):
ruling by the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights. I
guess that's it's such a good illustration of how it
was assumed to be for boys, so much so that
it wasn't even in the rules until after a girl
cut her hair to join a team. Like Yeah, it
was just taken totally for granted. So by the nineteen forties,

(05:51):
both softball and baseball were well established in the United States.
They were two separate sports, one for men, and boys,
the other for women and girls. Both had the amateur,
semi professional, and professional teams and leagues. And that brings
us to World War two, if you remember our October
episode on the Black Sox scandal. During World War One,

(06:11):
the idea of Major League Baseball continuing on in spite
of the war was deeply controversial. Secretary of War Newton D.
Baker issued a work or Fight order which required any
man eligible for the draft to either work in a
war critical industry or join the military. Men who continued
to play baseball were viewed as abandoning their patriotic duty,

(06:34):
and after the US joined the war, Major League Baseball
shortened the nine eighteen season. As war once again started
to spread through Europe in nineteen thirty nine, people feared
that the sport of baseball would be disrupted, as it
had been a couple of decades earlier. These fears escalated
after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December of nineteen

(06:55):
forty one, and the United States entered the war at
that point. In January of nineteen four A two Kenna
saw Mountain Landis, the Commissioner of Baseball, wrote to President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt to ask, quote, what you have in
mind as to whether professional baseball should continue to operate?
On January Roosevelt, who was a fan of baseball, responded

(07:17):
with what has become known as the green Light Letter.
It read, in part, quote, I honestly feel that it
would be best for the country to keep baseball going.
There will be fewer people unemployed, and everybody will work
longer hours and harder than ever before, and that means
that they ought to have a chance for recreation and
for taking their minds off their work even more than before.

(07:39):
And his letter, the President stressed that players who were
of an age to join the military should do so,
but that they might be replaced with older players who
could still play an exciting game. The President also advocated
for more night games so that day shift workers at
wartime factories could go The President ended the green Light
Letter by saying, quote, here's an their way of looking

(08:00):
at it. If three hundred teams used five thousand or
six thousand players, these players are a definite recreation asset
to at least twenty million of their fellow citizens, and that,
in my judgment, is thoroughly worthwhile. So even though baseball
had the President's seal of approval, Roughly half of the
regular players in Major League Baseball wound up serving in

(08:23):
the military. Some of its best and most popular players
were drafted. Of course, that trend also applied to the
minor leagues and to other baseball teams as well. So
even though the President himself had given the okay for
baseball to continue, there were people worried that the sport
was going to struggle, and that this might even lead
to the closure of some of the nation's ballparks. One

(08:45):
of these concerned people was Philip K. Wrigley. His father,
William Wrigley Jr. Had died in nineteen thirty two, leaving
Philip the William Wrigley Jr. Chewing Gum Company, a fortune
and the Chicago Cubs baseball team. We will get to
what he did after a quick sponsor break. About three

(09:10):
million women joined the workforce in the United States between
nineteen forty and ninety two, and Philip K. Wrigley thought
that maybe the same trend could apply to professional ball.
Women's teams could play in ballparks where the home teams
were on the road, keeping the sport in the parks
going while so many men were away at war. These
teams of women could also help boost the national morale

(09:34):
and help the war effort with things like fundraising and
recruitment drives. Wrigley teamed up with Ken Cells, who had
previously worked for the chewing gum business but had become
assistant general manager of the Chicago Cubs. On February seventy three,
they issued a press release announcing the creation of the
All American Girls Softball League. Their plan was to recruit

(09:57):
players from the women's softball teams that had been missed
down wished all over the country. At the beginning, Jim
Hamilton's was the lead talent scout in the US, and
Johannes got Sellig known as Johnny, headed up recruitment in Canada.
But Wrigley also wanted to make the game a little
closer to what spectators might expect from a baseball game,

(10:17):
so they worked out a rule set that had elements
of both baseball and softball. Like softball, it used a
larger ball in an underhanded pitching style, but like baseball,
the teams had nine players per side rather than softball's ten.
The playing field would also have a longer pitching distance
and running path than softball did, but it was still

(10:38):
shorter than what was being used in baseball. Players in
this game would also be allowed to steal bases, something
that was not allowed in softball. These changes caused some
controversy about exactly what sport was being played out there
on the field, and the league changed its name to
the All American Girls Baseball League part way through the season.

(10:59):
As You're cruiters visited softball teams to look for players,
hundreds of women and girls expressed interest in playing professionally.
About two hundred eighty were invited to the final tryouts,
and sixty players from the US and Canada were ultimately
selected to play in the nineteen forty three season. Some
of these young women were as young as fifteen, although

(11:20):
most of them were between eighteen and twenty two. As
was the case with Major League Baseball at the time,
the newly established women's league excluded black players. These players
were arranged into four teams of fifteen players each, the
Rockford Peaches of Illinois, the South Bend Blue Sox of Indiana,
and the Racing Bells in the Kenosha Comments of Wisconsin.

(11:43):
Each of these was not far away from a much
larger major city. They were also close enough together to
allow the teams to travel from one city to the
next for games while still conserving fuel and rubber during
wartime rationing. The league set up was significantly front from
Major League Baseball or most other leagues at the time.

(12:04):
The league itself was a nonprofit organization, with Philip Wrigley,
Paul Harvey, and Branch Ricky as trustees. Much of the
initial funding came from Wrigley himself. He spent about two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars getting the whole project started,
and he contributed to the team's maintenance costs, especially in
the first year. The players contracts were also centrally owned

(12:26):
by the league, rather than being owned by one of
the four teams. This meant that the players pay was
set by the league. There were no bidding wars with
teams trying to entice the best players to sign on
with them. That first year, the players made between forty
five dollars and eighty five dollars a week. That does
not sound like much, but it is significantly more than

(12:47):
most of them had been making an agricultural or factory work,
or maybe playing in a paying softball league. Players in
the league were prohibited from doing any other work during
the season. The centrally owned player contracts also meant that
the league had the right to trade players from one
team to another. One of the league's goals was for

(13:07):
all the games to be as evenly matched and exciting
to watch as possible, so player trades happened throughout the
season as they tried to keep this balance. Each team
had a manager who also acted as a coach. These
were typically men who had experience in major league or
minor league baseball. Every team also had a business manager,
as well as a chaperone, who was a woman and

(13:29):
was a paid part of the staff. During the league's history,
most of the chaperones had some experience in working with
women's athletic teams. The chaperones were responsible for making housing
arrangements for the team, handling money, and approving any housing
and dining accommodations that the team was going to use.
In some ways, they were a little like athletic trainers

(13:50):
as well, being trained in first aid and responsible for
the team's first aid kit and the treatment of injuries.
They were also ultimately responsible for the players conduct, behavior,
and appearance. That last point was a lot most of
the players came from working class and agricultural communities that
didn't really regard women's participation in softball as unusual in

(14:13):
any way. A lot of them had been playing on
teams that had been organized by their employers, with that
involvement being seen as pretty normal and fun. But that
wasn't necessarily true among the middle class, which was a
big part of the audience that the league was hoping
to attract. The idea that women were playing baseball, which
was considered to be a game for men, also raised

(14:34):
some suspicions about the players. A common stereotype was that
women athletes were lesbians. That's a stereotype that still exists today,
but without nearly the level of stigma that was attached
to it in the nineteen forties. So the league went
to great links to reinforce the idea that these players
weren't just women, they were ladies, specifically patriotic, wholesome, middle class,

(14:58):
heterosexual ladies. Outwardly, the league described all its rules and
training about things like beauty and conduct as a service
teaching working class girls to be middle class ladies, which
of course suggested that to be middle class was better
than to be working class, and on top of that,
a lot of the rules and standards in place were

(15:18):
also meant to reduce suspicions of lesbianism. This included the
players uniforms. These were one piece pastel colored tunic like
garments with a flared skirt which were worn with satin
shorts and knee socks. They were designed by Rigley's wife Aida,
along with poster artist Otis Shepard and softball player And Harnett.

(15:39):
They were also patterned after women's figure skating and tennis attire.
These uniforms were meant to set the players apart from
the barn storming bloomer girls that we referenced earlier, and
to reinforce the idea that the players on the field
were feminine women. These skirts did not really do much
to protect the players legs from scrapes and other injuries,

(16:00):
but the players were also expected to look pristine at
all times and not really have any visible injuries, perfectly
from athletic lady. The whole kind of convoluted tangle. Yeah,
The specific rules varied over the league's history, but the
general idea of players being the right kind of woman

(16:22):
was part of it. Throughout each player was issued a
guide for all American girls how to look better, feel better,
be more popular. In the season, Helena Rubinstein's Beauty Salon
taught charm and beauty lessons for the players that included hygiene,
personal appearance, etiquette, and things like how to gracefully get

(16:43):
in and out of a car or go up and downstairs.
The Ruth Tiffany School provided these lessons the next year.
Formal charm lessons ended after that point, but a focus
on appropriate feminine behavior continued. Players were also issued a
beauty kit that they were expected to keep stock. It
included cleansing cream, lipstick, rouge, deodorant, a stringent face powder,

(17:07):
hand lotion, and hair remover. They were required to be
attractive and presentable at all times, and they had to
wear a dress or a skirt anytime they were seen
in public. Most of the players wore trousers on the
bus for the sake of comfort, especially during nighttime road
trips between games, but kept a skirt with them to
change into if they stopped for something like a restroom

(17:27):
break or a meal. Some of the other rules from
the player's code of conduct no boyish bobbed hair, no smoking,
no drinking alcohol, and no social engagements unless they were
approved by a chaperone. Lipstick was mandatory at all times,
and there were also more mundane rules about things like punctuality.
The player's code of conduct specified a five dollar fine

(17:51):
for the first offense, a ten dollar fine for the
second offense, and suspension for the third, but there were
players that faced harsher penalties. Josephine d Angelo, known as Jojo,
was cut from the Blue Sox in her second year
from the team after she got a bobbed haircut that
was described as too short and butchy in some accounts.
Frieda and Olympia Savona, who were star players from the

(18:14):
New Orleans Jack's Brewing Company softball team, were passed over
for the All American Girls League because of their masculine appearance.
There were definitely some news stories that made disparaging comments
about the Savona's appearance, but Frieda wrote to a reporter
to say this had nothing to do with why she
was not in the league. She said she was just
happier and better paid where she was. Fraternizing with members

(18:38):
of other teams was also forbidden within the league. The
league framed this as a way to keep the level
of competitiveness high, but many of the players interpreted it
as a way to discourage romantic relationships between them. So
that's kind of an overview of what the league was
like when spring training started at its first season on
May seventeenthe that happened in Chicago. The first pitch of

(19:02):
the season was thrown on man, and we'll talk about
how things grew and evolved from there after we first
have a little sponsor break. The All American Girls Baseball
League's first season included sporting events as well as wartime patriotism.

(19:25):
Teams made appearances at recruitment drives and fundraisers, and they
visited wounded soldiers that had returned state side. On July one,
they held an all star game against a team from
the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, which was played under the
lights at Wrigley Field. This event was part of a
recruitment drive, held free of charge and at night so
that working women could attend. Some of the league's patriotism

(19:48):
was more symbolic, like having the two teams that were
going to be competing lined up in a v for
victory during the National anthem at the beginning of every game.
The three season ended with five game championship series in
which the Racing Bells defeated the Kenosha Comments. More than
one hundred seventy five thousand fans attended games in that

(20:09):
first season. Then in ninety four, the league expanded to
six teams. Another competing league was founded that same year,
the National Girls Baseball League, established in Chicago. This league
continued until nineteen fifty four, although its history and activities
aren't nearly as well documented as the All American Girls League.

(20:30):
At the end of the nineteen forty four season, Philip
Wrigley sold the league to Arthur mayer Hoff for ten
thousand dollars, which was a fraction of what he had
put into getting it started and operating it. In those
first two seasons. It had become clear that the sport
of men's baseball was not in any kind of actual
peril from the war, but apart from that, Wrigley was

(20:50):
just not really interested in being so heavily involved in
the league anymore. Meyer Haff had also been a big
part of the league since it's an exception, and Wrigley
was confident that he would maintain the same standards that
Wrigley had established in terms of quality and entertainment. The
biggest change at this point was that the league went
from being a nonprofit to a for profit entity. Otherwise,

(21:12):
the players contracts were still centrally owned, and each team
continued to have paid managers and chaperons. Meyer Hoff put
a big focus on marketing and promoting the league. He
also organized postseason exhibition tours to Cuba and South America,
mainly to countries where Wrigley chewing gum had a presence
thanks to the rubber and chickle industries. Over time, the

(21:35):
style of play within the league continued to shift and
become more and more like men's baseball. The ball gradually
got smaller and harder pitching and infield distances got longer.
Sidearm pitching was introduced in ninety six, and overhand pitching
in Some players that had been recruited from softball teams
had a little trouble adjusting to these changes, and meyer

(21:57):
Haff established a junior league and farm team to cultivate
new talent. Although the All American Girls Baseball League had
started out with the idea of being a substitution for
men's baseball during World War Two. It's popularity really peaked
after the war ended in nineteen forty five. In nineteen
forty six, a July fourth double header in South Bend, Indiana,

(22:17):
drew a crowd of between ten thousand and twenty thousand people.
Attendance peaked in nineteen forty eight, with nearly a million
fans in attendance. That year. The league had ten teams
from Rockford, Peoria, Chicago and Springfield, Illinois, Racine in Kenosha, Wisconsin,
South Bend and Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Grand Rapids in Mouskegan, Michigan.

(22:40):
Most of the team names were distinctly feminine, including the Peaches, Chicks, Millarettes, Daisies,
Lassie's Colleens, Sally's, and Bells. Although the league grew between
nineteen forty five and nineteen forty eight, it also faced
some struggles. In those years. The idea of women playing
baseball had drawn suspend and since the beginning, but that

(23:01):
increased when there was no longer a wartime patriotic need
for women to take up what was seen as men's work.
Individual teams also folded for various reasons from time to time,
and then that put a strain on the rest of
the league as it tried to absorb those other players.
After a while, friction started to develop between individual teams
and meyer Hoffs management company. While the league owned the

(23:25):
players contracts, the teams all had their own owners who
started to object to the requirement to send some of
their ticket revenues back to meyer Hoff. Meyer Haff was
putting most of the proceeds back into the league, but
even so, a perception grew that meyer Haff was making
money off of the team's work. As attendants started to
fall off in meyer Haff embarked on some ambitious plans

(23:48):
to try to revive the league. This included an attempt
to start an international women's baseball league, which would play
in Florida, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Cuba during the winter
and early spring. Although an international league was formed very briefly,
it never really got off the ground. At the end
of the nineteen fifty season, the teams bought out Mayer

(24:08):
half and became self governing and decentralized. The league's name
had been through slight tweaks through the years, and at
this point it became the American Girls Baseball League or
a g b L, although most people still use the
word all. At this point, players started contracting with teams
for their rates rather than the league, which increased paid

(24:28):
disparities as teams trying to attract and keep the best players.
The only paid position in the league at this point
was the commissioner, and without a central league organization that
was promoting and marketing, the game's attendance continued to drop.
The league also faced increased competition from other forms of
entertainment in the fifties, including televised men's baseball games. The

(24:51):
American Girls Baseball League dissolved in nineteen fifty four. During
its history, about six hundred women from the United States, Canada,
and Cuba had played for teams in fourteen Midwestern cities
During baseball season. They played six or seven games a week,
with doubleheaders on Sundays and holidays, sleeping on busses overnight
as they traveled from one city to the next. This

(25:13):
was a grueling schedule, which maybe one reason why about
a quarter of the players only played for one season
or less. Although Major League Baseball had started to desegregate
in the late nineteen forties and President Harry Truman issued
an executive order to desegregate the armed forces in the
All American Girls Baseball League was segregated throughout its history.

(25:35):
Although two black women practiced with the South Bend Blue
Sox in nineteen fifty one, neither of them wind up
signing a contract with the league. However, there were three
black women who played on men's teams in the Negro
Leagues in the nineteen fifties, Maymie Peanut Johnson, Connie Morgan,
and Marsennia Lysle who used the name Tony Stone professionally.

(25:57):
All three started with the Indianapolis Clown. Tony Stone replaced
Hank Aaron there and her contract was sold to the
Kansas City Monarchs before the nineteen four season. There are
reports that Tony Stone tried out for the All American
Girls League as well, but those are not concretely documented.
After the All American Girls League was dissolved, many of

(26:18):
the players adopted what's been described as a self imposed silence.
Most of them did not really talk about their time
playing professional baseball, even among their families. Reasons why are
not entirely clear, but stigma may have been one factor.
According to one survey that was conducted in the nineties
about twenty percent of players reported facing discrimination because of

(26:39):
their history as an athlete. However, many used the money
that they had earned playing baseball to go to college
or to start a career, with some attending college and
graduate school during the off season. One researcher who interviewed
players later in their life found that about thirty five
percent had graduated from college, compared to less than ten
percent of women in the general population and in the

(27:00):
same era. This has been described as a precursor to
Title nine's effects on women's college enrollment, giving women educational
opportunities that they didn't have access to otherwise. When the
women's liberation movement started in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
historians and other researchers started unearthing the league's history, and
the players started reconnecting with each other and documenting their

(27:23):
own history. At the same time. In the late seventies,
Dorothy Camny, cam in Check, and Marge Winzel and June
Peppis all met up and started talking about organizing a reunion.
In October of nineteen eight, Peppi sent a letter to
the few players whose addresses she had been able to
find and started trying to track people down. By January

(27:44):
of nineteen eight one, this had morphed into a newsletter,
which grew from a handful of addresses to more than
a hundred within a month. This also coalesced into a
players association that still exists today. The first of many
reunions was held in chicag Go in two and the
newsletter became part of an effort to establish a league

(28:04):
archive and they get some kind of recognition in the
National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. It
was during this process that the league's name became formally
finalized as the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. The
players efforts for recognition came to fruition on November five
with the formal unveiling of a permanent Women in Baseball

(28:27):
exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame. The league's players
had been an active part in this exhibits creation, including
donating their photographs, uniforms, equipment, and memorabilia. A league archive
was established at the Northern Indiana Historical Society Museum now
called the History Museum in South Bend, Indiana. There was
also an exhibition through the Smithsonian. The league was also

(28:50):
the subject of a short documentary called The League of
their Own that aired nationally on public television on September thirtieth,
And of course there's the nine feature film directed by
Penny Marshall, which was a blockbuster and was actually when
many people first heard about women's baseball. Another documentary tells
the story of Terry Donahue and pat Henschel. Donahue was

(29:13):
recruited from Saskatchewan, Canada, and played for the Peoria Red
Wings for four seasons. After these two women met. In
between seasons, Henschel left her life in Canada behind to
join Donahue in the United States. Although the two of
them described themselves at the time as cousins and roommates,
they were really a couple and the documentary tells the

(29:33):
story of their lives together. The film is called A
Secret Love. It was supposed to premiere at south By
Southwest in March, but of course, because of the pandemic,
south By Southwest has been canceled. So I'm not sure
what the status of the film's debut is at this point,
but at some point I think it might come to Netflix,
because there is a page for it in the Netflix

(29:55):
Media Center. Exciting Henschel is also one of the people
Britain Need de Lacreta interviewed when reporting her article The
Hidden Queer History behind a League of their Own. At
that point, both Donna Hue and Henschel were still living,
but Donna Hughe dine in twenty nineteen. At that time,
she and Henschel had been together for seventy one years.

(30:16):
The All American Girls Professional Baseball League's website for the
player association also has a wealth of information on the
individual players, including their photos, their team histories, their biographies,
and for those who are no longer living, many of
their obituaries are there as well. It is really a
ton if you want to go read about some women

(30:36):
baseball players. Lots and lots to look at there. Do
you have listener mail to close this one out? I
sure knew this is from Elizabeth. Elizabeth says, Dear Tracy
and Holly, I've been a listener for several years, and
yours is my favorite podcast. I saw your live show
in d C last year. I finally have a reason
to write. My ears perked up when I heard you
mentioned Alexandria, Virginia and specifically the Kate Waller Barritt Library

(30:59):
and a recent Six Impossible episodes. Kate Waller Barrett is
the namesake for my Alexandria chapter of the Daughters of
the American Revolution, and you might be interested in knowing
more about her. You can find a biography of her,
and UH provided a link in summary. Kate Waller Barrett
was an influential public figure in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. She advocated for women's political and social rights,

(31:22):
for compassionate care for unmarried mothers and their children, for education,
and for the interests of military veterans. Her personal style
merged progressive feminism and traditional femininity, and she had a
unique ability to speak unpopular truths to both the public
and the powerful, and to move them to her viewpoint.
She was a medical doctor and was the chief executive

(31:43):
of several national organizations, including the National Florence Crittenden Mission,
the National Council of Women, and the American Legion Auxiliary.
If she interests you is a podcast subject, I can
point you to some research I hadn't known about the
Alexandria Library sit in coincidentally, I was driving through old
Town Alexandria today and at the corner of Washington Street

(32:04):
and Queen Street. I spied a historic marker about the
sit in. I pulled over and snapped this picture of
the marker is around the corner from the library, so
the building in the background is not it, The text reads.
On twenty one August nineteen thirty nine, five young African
American men applied for library cards at the new Alexandria
Library to protest its white only policy. After being denied,

(32:25):
William Evans, Edward Gaddis, Morris Murray, Clearance Strange, and Auto L.
Tucker each selected a book from the shelves, sat down
and read quietly. The men were arrested and charged with
disorderly conduct despite their polite demeanor. Local attorney Samuel W. Tucker,
who helped plan the protest, represented them in court. The
judge never issued a ruling. In nineteen forty, Alexandria opened

(32:48):
the Robert Robinson Library for African Americans. Desegregation of the
library system began by nineteen fifty nine. Thank you for
educating me about my own local history. I do try
to read historical markers, but that is not what I
remember reading before Elizabeth continues on with a topic suggestion
and says, keep up the great podcast gals, and then says,

(33:11):
my favorite part of each episode is when one of
you says, do you have listener mail and the other
heartily replies, I do. I like this part of the
episode to Elizabeth. So thank you so much Elizabeth for
this email, for sending the picture of the historical marker.
If you would like to write to us, we're at
History podcast that I heart radio dot com, and we're
all over social media at miss in History. That's where

(33:32):
you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. You can
also subscribe to our show at Apple podcast, the iHeart
Radio app, anywhere else you get your podcast. Stuff you
missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart

(33:53):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. One