Educational and Sporting Opportunities for Women
10-15 Senda Berenson
The new women's colleges provided opportunities for recreational play and instruction.Vassar College5 fielded women's baseball teams as early as 1866，and the women of Mills College6 in Oakland，California，were playing the game by 1872.Three years later，two women's teams in Springfield，Illinois，competed in a baseball game before paying spectators.Such activities challenged the traditional feminine passivity assigned to women and generated widespread debate that would persist through the next century regarding the propriety of sporting activity by women.
Educators and physicians fulminated over the advantages and disadvantages of sport and education for women.Dudley Sargent7，a medical doctor and Harvard professor，began offering physical culture（an early term for physical education）classes towomen and opened his own school in 1881，using numerous weight-lifting machines and training teachers.Mary Hemenway's Boston Normal School of Gymnastics（BNSG）8，opened in 1889 also trained a multitude of women as teachers.Many graduates of Sargent's and Homan's programs assumed leadership roles in the women's sports movement over the next half century，including Senda Berenson9，who adapted basketball rules for women's play.
10-16 First Basketball Game for Women