Photo: David Berkowitz, Flickr Creative Commons
The Reds Hall of Fame & Museum will debut a Women in Baseball exhibit on Feb. 24, 2023.
An upcoming exhibit at the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame & Museum will highlight the women who have played big roles in baseball history.
The Women in Baseball exhibit will debut Feb. 24 and will highlight players, fans, coaches, managers, owners, executives, broadcasters and writers in the sport. According to a Feb. 1 press release, the exhibit will explore "the many obstacles that women and girls have overcome and still struggle against to be a part of the game they love, and highlights many of the groundbreaking individuals, achievements and events that serve as inspiration to all those striving to make a dream come true."
According to the release, the exhibit will feature more than 200 items.
The exhibit is curated by John Kovach, a longtime historian who also produced a Women in Baseball exhibit for the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in 2022. He is the author of Women's Baseball and Baseball in South Bend and has received awards from the National Women's Baseball Hall of Fame, American Baseball Coaches Association and the All-American Girls Baseball League Players Association for his advocacy for women and girls in the sport.
More information about the exhibit can be found on the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame & Museum website.
Against societal norms for the time, girls and women began organizing baseball teams in the late 1800s, with semi-pro teams added around the 1920s. During World War II, the All American Girls Professional Baseball League was formed to keep the sport going while male athletes were drafted; the league's 11 years were the basis for the 1992 film A League of Their Own and subsequent Amazon Prime Video series of the same name. Between various bans on women playing ball in the second half of the century and the 2000s, a few women finally were signed to MLB or MLB-adjacent contracts as professional players or coaches.
But baseball has a long way to go when it comes to representation and equity through the ranks. According to a report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, only 24.1% of MLB's central office employed women in director or managerial roles at the start of the 2021 season. The same report said that women held just 22% of vice president roles, 28.5% of senior administration roles and 25.5% of professional administration roles across the league. The report gave the MLB system an overall grade of "C" on hiring practices regarding gender, with a C- for team senior administration, D+ for professional administration and an F for hiring in the executive suite and umpires.
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