Document Type
Finding Aid
Collection Number
MSS-049.01.05
Publication Date
2022
Last Revision Date
9-16-2022
Description
The Edith Dennison Bloomer Girl Collection is part of the Kathleen Bertrand and Linda Lundin, Honoring Women in Sports Collection. The collection contains two items: one large, oval photograph of Dennison pitching in 1910, and one scrapbook of newspaper clippings possibly compiled by Dennison. This scrapbook tracks Dennison’s baseball career from 1911-1917. The large photograph may be found in smaller reproduction in articles within the scrapbook on pages 32 and twice on 43. Note that the pagination of the scrapbook begins on page 20.
Dennison was a star “bloomer girl” baseball pitcher in northern Massachusetts, playing from 1910 through retirement in 1917. She played for the Beverly Girls’ Baseball Nine (1912), the Meadow Park Bloomer Girls (1911-?), Little River Girls’ Team (1915), and later for the Boston Girls Base Ball Club (1916-?). Dennison openly challenged teams from prominent Massachusetts cities like Salem, Peabody, Manchester, Lowell, Concord, and Newton. Her confidence and talent garnered attention from local newspapers.
The leader of the Meadow Park team of Lynn, MA, Dennison acted as their captain, manager, and owner. In the middle of the decade, Dennison’s Meadow Park team drew crowds upwards of a few thousand fans. Fans particularly gathered to witness the Lynn baseballers play their rivals, the East End Bloomer Girls of Peabody, MA. In late August 1914, the Meadow Park team usurped the previous league champions of Peabody with a dominant score of 13-1. Local papers accredit that victory to the partnership of Edith Dennison on the pitcher’s mound and Bertha Shaw as catcher. Dennison and Shaw played together for multiple years. In 1915, as pitcher and captain for Little River, Dennison led her team to a championship victory over Meadow Park.
In 1916, under Dennison’s leadership as pitcher, the Boston Girls Base Ball Club was never defeated by another women’s team and only once by a professional men’s team. She is considered to be “the champion girl pitcher of New England” during her brief, but dominant, career. (Box 1, Item 2, Page 43)
Included in
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Library and Information Science Commons, Women's History Commons