Quote of the Day (Jimmy Carter, on Jesus, ‘Liberator of Women’)

“Jesus Christ was the greatest liberator of women in a society where they had been considered throughout biblical history to be inferior.” —Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power (2014)

This Day in Baseball History (First Lady Ump Wins First Legal Round)

January 13, 1972— The New York Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Bernice Gera in her attempt to become the first female professional umpire. The victory was short-lived, however, as five months later, the former housewife was subjected to such abuse from players and fans--and lack of support from male umpires--that she quit after her first game.

I first came across the story of Gera in a marvelous essay collection by Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women. Forget about her derivative, often snarky work as screenwriter and director: Ephron’s real calling is as an essayist. Her January 1973 piece on Gera, written shortly after the latter’s failed attempt at breaking into the game, is shadowed by irony: i.e., the would-be feminist icon who somehow failed the movement. Yet, for all Ephron’s wishes that everything would have turned out differently for Gera and women’s liberation, you can’t help but like this baseball lover.


Four decades later--and two decades after Gera’s death--it’s even harder not to feel sympathy for her. Reading her story, you might wish that she had succeeded as a rule-breaking pioneer, but then might have been glad that she did not, when you consider the physical and psychic toll that prolonged disrespect might have exacted on her.

What Gera was facing was probably best described by a later woman who got closer--but still didn’t fulfill--her dream of becoming a major-league umpire, Pam Postema. “Almost all of the people in the baseball community don’t want anyone interrupting their little male-dominated way of life.,“ she wrote in her 1992 memoir, You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League. “They want big, fat male umpires. They want those macho, tobacco-chewing, sleazy sort of borderline alcoholics.”

It was even worse for Gera. Two and a half decades after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, Art Williams was having a tough time becoming the first black umpire in the National League (a situation recounted in Lee Gutkind’s 1975 The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand). If a black umpire seemed difficult for many to accept even at that late date, the concept of a female umpire was impossible.

By Gera’s own later account, she didn’t really want to be a revolutionary, or disrupt the game she had come to love so well. She would have been content to have been a goodwill ambassador for baseball, serving in some sort of community relations program.

But matters took a turn for the worse when, after graduating from a Florida umpire-training school, she applied for a job with the New York-Penn League, near her Jackson Heights, N.Y. home. The league’s agreement to offer her a contract was rejected by the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, who unsuccessfully invoked a minimum-size requirement to try to keep her out.

The courage of Robinson, Curt Flood, and Roberto Clemente in breaking down racial, ethnic and labor barriers is not to be underestimated. Gera, however, was virtually isolated. The opposition of the male mossbacks of baseball, such as the now-justly-forgotten commissioner, General William Eckert (she would become an umpire “over my dead body," he vowed), was to be expected.

Less well known, however, was that Gera was taking her case through the courts without the help of the feminist movement, which was just then emerging as a significant political and legal force. According to a Craig Davis profile of Gera in a 1989 South Florida Sun-Sentinel article, not one women’s organization assisted her in her court battle. This made doubly ironic the later contention of many feminists that she had set back the movement when she quit her job.

Many were chagrined when Gera resigned after a single New York-Pennsylvania League game in Geneva, N.Y., in June 1972, less than six months after she won in court. It seemed as if she had one fight with a manager who didn’t like one of her calls, then threw in the towel. But it wasn’t that simple.

Gera had spent four years in court only to find that, the closer her dream was coming to fruition, the harder became the resistance to it. She continued to receive threatening letters and late-night calls, and the portents for her first game proved particularly ominous: Not only were fans taunting and abusing her, but the other umpire refused to speak to her as the game started. His behavior was startling and unprofessional, as it meant that these game partners would not know the elementary signals that would allow them to function as a working team.

That’s what happened in the sixth inning of the game, when Gera, momentarily confused by a play, immediately reversed herself. When the manager of the team suffering the reversed call rushed out to protest, Gera let him jabber on and on, feeling he had a legitimate gripe because she had initially blown the call. Finally, she felt compelled to act when he called into question her basic authority: “You made two mistakes. The first was leaving the kitchen; you should have been home peeling potatoes.” Gera ejected him, completed the last few innings, then, before the second game of the double-header, resigned.

Sportscaster Dick Schaap, echoing a comment made by an interviewee about Gera, noted, perhaps ironically, “She committed the cardinal sin of baseball--she admitted she made a mistake.” How times have changed! A year and a half ago, major-league umpire Jim Joyce manned up and admitted he had blown a call that cost a pitcher a perfect game. Even his teary greeting of the pitcher, the next time they encountered each other, was regarded as the epitome of honesty, even a guide to politicians on how to behave after a mistake has become all too public.

In contrast, reactions to Gera at the time for similar behavior amounted to, “What do you expect?” from the antediluvian crowd, and “She let down the movement” from the presumably more enlightened. And so, even though she vowed to Ephron, “Don’t count me out; I expect to be in baseball next year,” she would never umpire a professional game again.

The New York Mets have been taking it on the chin lately for the Wilpons’ financial misadventures. However, even a team that is otherwise horribly run can have real moments of grace. I’m speaking, in this case, of the Mets regime under M. Donald Grant. The team board chairman did succeed in, among many other sins, driving away star Tom Seaver and manager-to-be Whitey Herzog, but the team did during that time employ Gera for five years as part of its community relations and promotions team.

Nobody should ever have questioned the toughness of Gera, a product of a broken home in an industrialized region of Pennsylvania. Even to get to her one game umpiring, she had to endure a pioneer’s struggle, consisting, in Ephron’s words, “of the loneliness she will suffer if she gets the job, of the role she will assume as a freak, of the smarmy and inevitable questions that will be raised about her heterosexuality, of the derision and smug satisfaction that will follow if she makes a mistake, or breaks down under pressure, or quits.”

Two decades after her lawsuit and her exit from the game, Gera died after struggling against cancer, enduring at least 31 radiation treatments, medication that left her woozy, and an operation to restore the use of her right arm that only worsened matters. She was as tough and brave as they come--fully the equal of those who rejected her from the "summer game."

This Day in Film History (“Thelma and Louise” Premieres as Cultural Flashpoint)

May 24, 1991—Fresh from a triumphant reception at the Cannes Film Festival, Thelma and Louise was released to U.S. theaters. Other films made more money that year, but few sparked more water-cooler debates or critical commentary than this movie that dramatized unilateral female punishment of male violence.

(In addition to debates and commentaries, the female “buddy” movie starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis also inspired parody, in the form of an episode the following year of the TV dramedy Sisters. In this particular episode, Swoosie Kurtz’s Alex, traumatized by a mugging, seeks out the services of a female self-defense instructor with definite ideas on how to render the male of the species harmless. Her name--wink, wink—is Thelma Louise.)

The central dilemma of Callie Khouri’s Oscar-winning Best Original Screenplay—the fateful consequences of waitress Louise’s decision to shoot—execute, really—Thelma’s would-be rapist, might seem the product of the late 20th century, impossible to imagine without the social and legal revolution following Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.

But in many ways, the film is a throwback to films of the Thirties and Forties. I don’t mean simply the previously mentioned “buddy” film (at points, the farcical elements make the two female friends a distaff version of Crosby and Hope), nor the screwball comedy (the absurdities pile higher and higher the farther the women drive in their ’66 Thunderbird), nor even the more durable and adaptable “road” movie.

No, I’m talking about crime films early in the talkie era, years of desperation in which ordinary Americans, with no other recourse, took to a life of crime. Thelma, struggling to make sense of their experience, finally blurts it out to Louise: “You know, something’s, like, crossed over in me and I can’t go back, I mean I just couldn’t live.” If you want a good example of what I mean, catch sometime the 1937 Fritz Lang film You Only Live Once, starring Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney as doomed lovers forced to go on the run.

This type of movie, like the later Bonnie and Clyde, features escapes deep into the American Heartland. Danger bonds the two lovers ever more tightly together.

And so it is again, a half-century later, in this drama directed by Ridley Scott. Originally set simply to be executive producer, the creative force behind Alien took the helm of the film himself when he realized that nobody else shared his vision that this material formed, in a way, an American epic.

In the patriarchal America of this film, every man is found wanting in some way, either commitment-phobic (Louise’s eternal boyfriend, the musician Jimmy), infantile (Thelma’s husband Darrell, who likes his wife to stay quiet while he takes in football games on the TV), deceitful (Brad Pitt’s career-making role as easygoing bank robber J.D.), or exploitative and violent (Thelma’s attacker). The one sympathetic figure, Harvey Keitel’s law-enforcement officer, is, at least as far as his power goes to save the women from jail time, impotent.

And so, Thelma and Louise can only depend on themselves. Before they drive off the cliff, in their own version of Butch and Sundance’s decision to go out shooting against a Latin American posse waiting for them, the two longtime friends declare their mutual love—something they haven’t been able to enjoy in a world outside deeply inimical to their elementary desires.

This past March, Vanity Fair published a 20-year retrospective of the film, “Ride of a Lifetime,” by Sheila Weller. Among the juicy tidbits of trivia in the article:

* Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn were all considered for the two roles that went to Sarandon and Davis.

* Billy Baldwin beat out Pitt for two roles that year. He gave up his role in Thelma and Louise to take on the second of the two movies, Ron Howard’s Backdraft. When he saw what Pitt did with J.D.--and the film’s success--he was undoubtedly sorry for his decision.

* As he has continued to do with females the world over in the two decades since, Pitt had a discombobulating effect on Davis. She had performed perfectly well with a couple of actors who preceded him, but when he auditioned he was so cute that she kept flubbing her lines. Finally, as Scott and the casting director considered the choices, she couldn’t resist chiming in: “The blond one--duh!”

Thelma and Louise, as I indicated earlier, though it did well enough at the box office, with a gross nearly three times its estimated budget, was hardly the greatest blockbuster that summer (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Terminator 2 grossed five and ten times, respectively, its U.S. total).

But it was a much greater cultural landmark than those other movies. Later in 1991, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings would take up the issue of how far a male could go with a woman. But Thelma and Louise had already fired the first feminist shot across the bow.

Happy 250th Birthday to a Women’s Rights Pioneer

“I love my man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.”-- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

For many people today, the name Mary Wollstonecraft is short for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who, in Frankenstein, created what might be the first great horror story.

Mary Shelley made a lasting contribution to modern thought with her critique of the unintended consequences of science. 

But her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (who died in 1797 from consequences of giving birth to her daughter) just as admonitory: the price paid by both sexes for what John Stuart Mill, in his own powerful critique of the same phenomenon during the Victorian Era, called The Subjection of Women.

Like the American feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Wollstonecraft (whose 250th birthday occurs today) possessed a relentlessly logical critical intelligence and an incisive writing style that not only swept all before it but also still practically cries out for quotation. But, besides the quote above, over the years I’ve encountered more than one woman who’s echoed another thought of the great Anglo-Irish female radical philosopher:

“It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness.”