November 7, 1972 - Girls Allowed to Join New Jersey Little League Teams

Maria Pepe, 1972

Over thirty years ago, a young girl named Maria Pepe changed Little League baseball forever. She was the first girl to ever step foot on a Little League baseball field and play a game with the boys in 1972. Little did she know she was about to become the center of national attention and a legal battle that would help shape the role of women in sports around the world.[1]

Protests begin because the parents of the Hoboken community believe girls should not play in Little League baseball and the matter is sent to Williamsport, New York, home of Little League baseball. The ruling is that the Young Democrats, Marias team, can't play anymore Little League games unless they take Maria off the team. The 12-year-old Hoboken girl started three games for the Young Democrats and pitched all three games until she was kicked off by her coach.[2] Revealing the prevailing social views on girls in sports, the little league stated that, “girls’ bone strength, muscle strength and reaction time were inferior to those of boys”.[3] That ends her Little League career, but the National Organization for Women sues Little League Baseball on her behalf that it is against equal rights. On November 7, 1973 Sylvia Pressler a Hearing Examiner for the New Jersey Civil Rights Division, ruled in favor of letting girls into Little League baseball. This ruling was later upheld in the Superior Court in early 1974; once passed it was a change that eventually allowed millions of girls on a global scale to participate in the largest organized youth sports program.[4] Maria is in high school and too old to play Little League baseball, but doesn't take long for the ruling in Maria’s case to start to make a difference in 1974 when Bunny Taylor another 12 year old girl becomes the first girl to pitch a no-hitter.[5]

Women in the 1970s dealt with major hardship of still not being equal to men. One great example of none equality rights was with girls like Maria being turned away from a male sport because of gender. The National Organization for Women gets involved in this case because of the gender problem and they were looking for strives in women’s rights during the 1970s. Women were striving in the 1970s to be a part of the Women Rights movement and Maria left her footprint in Women Rights history. [6]


- Frank F.





1. “Landmark Decision Allowed Girls to Play Little League. (n.d.). MomsTeam. Retrieved October 30, 2013, from http://www.momsteam.com/sports/baseball/general/landmark-decision-allowed-girls-to-play-little-league”

2. “ESPN top 10 Women sports movment. (n.d.). ESPN. Retrieved October 30, 2013, from http://espn.go.com/page2/s/list/moments/uswomen.html”

3.”ESPN top 10”

4. Settimi, Christina. "Before Title IX There Was Maria Pepe Waiting 'His Turn At Bat'." Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/christinasettimi/2012/06/24/before-title-ix-there-was-maria-pepe/2/ (accessed November 2, 2013).

5. “Women and their Roles throughout American History. (n.d.). : Women in the 1970's. Retrieved October 30, 2013, from http://womenrolehistory.blogspot.com/2011/09/women-in-1970s.html”

6. “Women and their Roles”

7. “Landmark decision Allowed”