My brother sent me a link to this post at Cry It Out about 45 minutes before I ended up seeing it at three other blogs, which leads me to believe he's secretly reading up on his feminist bloggers. Good on you, Liberal Brother!
The post is "Girls kick ass, or the saga of Joltin’ Jo", and it's a little about a stay-at-home dad's struggle to find something unslutty for his daughter to wear on Halloween and a little about his research into women's baseball leagues from the 40s and 50s and a little bit more about dads just generally being rad with sports and their daughters. I got to this part before I got all misty-eyed and had to bounce from my desk:
Wilson never made it back to the majors. He kicked around the Pacific Coast League for the next decade. When he stopped playing ball, he started selling Lincolns in Portland, Ore., taking the record with him into anonymity. A closer look at some history books will say he’s the last ball player to hit .400. While it’s nice to see him get the credit, it’s not entirely true.
There was someone else.
Over the span over 100 years, no one had a higher batting average for the season. Not Williams. Not Wilson. Not the Great Dimaggio or Cobb or Shoeless Joe or Moonlight Graham.
Nobody.
Nobody hit better than Joanne Weaver.
Joltin’ Jo, they called her.
Seriously. Read it. If you're from the kind of background that I'm from, where sports are so gigantic that your dad will threaten to fist fight the coach of the Little League team if you don't get to play ('cause you're a girl, and not over play time), then ... wow. Tell me you're not getting choked up over this.
So, can I make this personal (more personal?)? I have two much older brothers. By the time I came along -- happy accident! -- I think my dad was lost to the idea of having a daughter. When I came into the world as not another boy, I think my parents were pretty much set on raising me in the same way as they'd raised my brothers. I was never told that I couldn't, I just did. And it wasn't a statement about gender or feminism or whatever on the part of my mom and dad, that's just what they knew.
One of my earliest memories is of going to a Steelers scrimmage/exhibition game with my dad and my uncles. We went down onto the field after for autographs, and I remember how impossibly huge the players were. Another early memory: getting taken to see my Conservative Brother play a high school football game and dislocating my shoulder 'cause Conservative Brother was swinging me around like a maniac afer the game.
That I loved anything related to throwing and catching a ball was probably a huge relief to my mom and dad. Yay! We don't have to do anything differently! And so my dad was Mr. Sports Advocate for me. Want to play Little League when you're 7 and the coach won't let you? Fine, I will Have A Talk With Him (my dad is pretty imposing, and I got to play, so ... do the math?). Want to play football and your mom thinks it's weird? Fine, I will Sign The Papers Behind Her Back.
My dad, despite being kind of gruff and conservative and surly, managed to be the most feminist dad ever when it came to sports. He liked (and still does like) competition, winning and smack talk. That I could excel at sports in a way that my brothers never could was a HUGE DEAL for him. Seriously, what a fucking rad lesson to learn as a kid. He was never pushy or weird or stage dad about it, but the fact that he let me do a ton of cool stuff as a kid -- and let me learn how to compete, win and talk smack -- made me a much better adult.
On top of it all, all of the I Want My Kid To Compete stuff that he did when I was growing up has turned into really great bond between my dad, my brothers and me. In my house, there is football, and everything else falls to the side. Any disagreement we have ever had been erased by something awesome on the part of the Steelers, or Pitt, or Penn State.
So, thank you, football. Thanks, sports. Thanks for rad dads who share their love of whatever that's allegedly masculine with their daughters. You make a huge difference, I swear.
