So one spring afternoon, my mother and I marched into the gym at my elementary school to sign me up for Little League. I don't know for a fact that I was the first girl in Roseville, Minnesota, to attempt such a thing, but the reaction we got makes me think the males in the room had little to no experience with girls signing up for baseball. The wall of resistance which met my mother and me was truly shocking. Other parents (it was mainly fathers in the gym that day) stared, making it okay for their sons to indulge in the same rude behavior. But that ogling was nothing in comparison to the registrars. To a man (and they were all men), they questioned my motives, grilling an eight-year-old girl as to why in the world she wanted to play baseball. My mother remembers the main registrar telling me that the softball registration table was on the other side of the gym, to which I replied, "But I want to play baseball." My mother says the conversation quickly devolved into a rhetorical loop.
Little Girls Blue (1978)
The two little girls are calling themselves NeNe and TeTe, she explains, her arms around both of them, giving each a little pat or two on the tum as they're introduced. The girls are wearing lavender coveralls; Miss NeNe is a vigorous and self-assured young lady who has lived with Mrs. Williams for several months, while TeTe, her sidekick and shadow, is a recent arrival, and slender. ``I hope she can stay, because she's very delicate and undernourished,'' says Mrs. Williams. ``So was NeNe when she came, and look at how plump she is now....''
``I had twin girls in the summer ... they were 15 months old. You couldn't reach for them or caress them. It took me about three weeks before I could pick them up. Oh, it would frighten them almost to death. They had been drifting from one home to another. They were two beautiful little girls, two beautiful little girls....
Also back in 1894, a social worker named Elizabeth Williams made a poignant discovery that is still talked about today: While she was interviewing a widow on Goodell Street about her children's needs, one of the little girls, age 10, spoke up and said she wanted "nuthin' but books" for Christmas.
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