Author Marilyn Cohen, an Associate Professor and Director of Women’s Studies at St Peter’s University, New Jersey, has written an accessible account of the problems faced by American women seeking to play what has been perceived as a male sport. While the content does not require specialized academic knowledge and the writing is clear and unaffected, a stronger editor might have eliminated what appear to be frequent redundancies. Absent notes, indices, front matter, and illustrations, content amounts to less than 200 pages.
Though the chapters and discussions proceed chronologically, this is not an account seeking to document the role of women in American baseball. That work, Marilyn Cohen observes, has been ably completed by a host of previous researchers, allowing her to focus more on theory and analysis. Her methodology is that of most theorists - reading lots of books and articles. Her principal sources are journalistic accounts and legal documents relating to cases of sex discrimination. She says she also conducted interviews, through with whom is not clear.
Her analysis is “informed by social science perspectives, principally critical feminist theory, anthropology, and sociology.” She sees sport as vital to the understanding of the process of the encoding of biological differences with symbolic meaning. "No single social institution, with the exception of the military, has influenced the cultural construction of masculinity more strongly or has justified in biological terms more directly the inferiority of the female body resulting in the acceptance of gender-based discrimination.” (I’d say religion has been far more damaging for a far longer time than modern sport, but that’s another book.)
