The Women Are All Right: ‘A League of Their Own’ and the Power of Belonging
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Vicki Rakowski
I’ve seen the film A League of Their Own more times than I can count. It came out in July 1992, when I was 12 years old, and I think I got the video (that’s right, the VHS tape, my friends) for a gift. I watched it until the tape got crinkled up and stuck in the machine. (Oh, the hardships we endured to watch our media back in the day, kids!)
I know more women roughly my age who can spout off lines from this film than not. Two sisters I grew up with could do an uncannily accurate impression of a drunk Marla Hooch singing “It Had to Be You” to her beloved Nelson. A cousin of mine hurt herself when trying to balance and flip a baseball bat like Doris. To this day, I frequently leave a room by saying, “I have seen enough to know I’ve seen too much,” just as the game announcer says during the playoff series between the Rockford Peaches and the Racine Belles.
Something about this movie always kept me and other girls I knew coming back again and again.
A Wonderland of Women Athletes
To set the scene, in 1992 feminism wasn’t a given. It would still be a couple of years before the Spice Girls started blaring the expression “girl power” all over TV and magazines. I personally didn’t know a single woman who would have called herself a feminist.
And yet, I grew up surrounded by women who were tough and capable as hell.
One of the things I remember about growing up as a girl in the time that I did was having to prove I was as good at things as boys I knew. Boys occupied the world fully, and girls were invited to occupy it if they acted correctly.
It’s possible the reason I loved A League of Their Own so much was that it was a wonderland of amazing female athletes who occupied their own fully formed world. There were boys in this movie—some of them mocking and jeering, some of them pining and longing. But they were the side story.
In this story, the women are expected to be excellent. And it may take a while for everybody to see it, but eventually it’s impossible to ignore.
Keep the things you love in your life
What does this movie tell us? That you can have chemistry with somebody outside of your marriage, and let that be its own beautiful, bittersweet unexplored story. That you can love your sister or your friend while also simultaneously despising her and wishing you could wring her neck. That it’s important to keep the things you love in your life, because no matter how they exist for you, they light you up.
These were all pieces of information a young girl needed. You’re good for you. You don’t need to prove yourself to anybody.
“In this story, the women are expected to be excellent. And it may take a while for everybody to see it, but eventually it’s impossible to ignore.”
This movie can’t be all things to all people, which is why it’s pretty cool that they’re giving it another go through the new Amazon Prime version of the story. Here are the missing women of color, the missing queer women.
Even where the original story leaves holes it does something important and tells something true about most women I’ve known: when we are together, when we are given freedom to try and do, we are invincible.
The Women Are All Right
In one of the most undersung, poignant moments of the movie, the Rockford Peaches are riding through the night on their bus. The women are gathered in small groups, weaving deftly between serious and light topics within sentences of each other.
Doris, a wise-cracking New Yorker, is showing the other girls a picture of her no-good boyfriend back home. Kit asks her why she’s with him, and Doris says:
“Why do you think? ‘Cause none of the other boys ever… they always made me feel like I was wrong, you know? Just because I could play. Like I was some sort of a weird girl, or a strange girl. Or not even a girl, just ‘cause I could play. I believed ‘em, too, you know? But lookit. There’s a lot of us. I think we’re all alright.”
We watched the tape hundreds of times, because it was good to hear what we knew to be true spoken out loud.
Vicki Rakowski is an enthusiastic consumer of all things art and literature, and a library director in the Chicagoland area.