In Tracy Everbach's Ebscohost article, "Breaking Baseball Barriers: The 1953–1954 Negro League and Expansion of Women's Public Roles" (2005), Everbach explains: "Three women won spots alongside men in the Negro Baseball League during the 1953 and 1954 seasons. Women's second basemen, Toni Stone and Connie Morgan, and pitcher Mamie "Peanut" Johnson" (Everbacli, p. 14). These three women played on a team called the Indianapolis Clowns, and Stone also played for another team called the Kansas City Monarchs. These women were recruited as novelties and given real spots after the racial integration of white organized baseball. These women performed well athletically and earned the respect of their teammates by taking the field to play with and against men. Everbach tells us: “News coverage shows that these three pioneers broke gender barriers two decades before the United States Congress approved Title IX” (Everbacli, p. 14). This was a huge deal because Title IX was a law intended to ensure that women had equal funding and facilities in sports. These women played a male sport at a time when there was no equality between sports. Eventually, women entered the public sphere, working in factories and the defense industry, to replace men who had gone to war abroad. Everbach describes that “in July 1944, nineteen million women worked outside the home, while in 1941 only five million women participated in the labor market” (Everbacli, p. 15). Thus, Stone, Morgan, and Johnson constituted a unique breed of women, not because they were African American, but because they played men's professional baseball for a living while other women were in the same category.