In 1941, nineteen-year-old Margaret “Marnie” Danhauser of Racine began working as a book binder at Western Printing and Lithographing—a good, if unglamorous, job with an average salary of about thirty-two dollars a week.1 She was a 1938 graduate of St. Catherine’s High School, where she had played intramural basketball.2 She also had two state championships under her belt as a member of the 1936 and 1937 Pugh Coal Company girls softball team. Danhauser bowled and golfed to round out her athletic pursuits.3 Thousands of women around the country shared Danhauser’s love of sport and participated in athletics for fun, likely never dreaming of doing so professionally. Yet, world events would soon unfold that would alter the lives of a select few, including Danhauser’s, in unprecedented ways.
During this same year, the American men’s game of Major League Baseball had a banner season. Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees had a fifty-six-game hitting streak and Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox ended the season with a .406 batting average. No one has yet topped DiMaggio’s streak and no hitter has batted .400 since. With such remarkable accomplishments in the same season, expectations must have run high for the 1942 season. Professional baseball had been entertaining Americans since 1876. It had weathered World War I and was bouncing back from the Great Depression with attendance at games surpassing nine million people a year, as robust as it had been before the economic downturn.4 But with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the United States’ entry into World War II, Americans’ attention was again diverted. The war cast doubt on whether there would be a 1942 baseball season at all.
More than ten million men joined the US military during the war years, including some of the biggest names in baseball. Household names such as DiMaggio, Williams, Bob Feller, and Stan Musial, as well as hundreds of lesser-known big leaguers and minor league players, all left baseball to serve during the war. Chicago Cubs owner Phillip K. Wrigley feared that baseball would wane in popularity as the talent pool became shallower or if the season were canceled altogether. President Franklin Roosevelt ensured that the game would go on, as he declared in a letter to MLB commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis on January 15, 1942, that the national pastime was critical for morale and should continue during the war.5 Men’s baseball did, indeed, continue throughout the war years, but Wrigley put a plan into action to cement the popularity of the sport nonetheless. In order to keep fans coming to ballparks during the war and to provide entertainment for war production workers, he established the All-American Girls Softball League—a professional league paying women for the first time to play ball. The experiment would ultimately outlast the war that spawned it and run for twelve noteworthy seasons.
Softball owes its origins to a small group of Chicagoans who wanted to play baseball during the city’s inhospitable fall season. In November 1887, members of the Farragut Boat Club modified the game for indoor play. They used a boxing glove tied into a ball, which had limited flight when struck with the broom handle they used for a bat. In the relatively small indoor space, they set the base paths at just twenty-seven feet, compared to the standard ninety-foot base paths of professional baseball. The game caught on in Chicago, and within a couple years, more than a hundred amateur indoor baseball teams had been formed in the city. People also adapted the game to small outdoor lots and playgrounds in
