Sports, in general, tends to be an area where the sexes are segregated. You won’t find any women on a men’s baseball team, for example, and vice versa. But what about the officials? It turns out that there have been female umpires and referees, and for longer than you might guess.
Amanda Clement was born March 20, 1888 in the Dakota Territory, which is now the US state of South Dakota. When she was about 15, she traveled to Iowa to watch her brother pitch in a semi-professional baseball game. The man who was supposed to umpire the game never showed up, and Clement’s brother suggested that Amanda do the job. She played baseball (and other sports) and knew the rules, so she got the job. That made her the first woman ever paid to umpire a baseball game.
She did a pretty good job, too; she was hired on the spot to umpire more games. During that era baseball games only had a single umpire, and it was not the safest job — the umpire stood behind the pitcher (not behind the catcher, as is done today), and ruled on everything — strikes and balls, fair and foul hits, and judging whether runners were safe or out. All this while avoiding being smacked by a very hard ball that traveled around at very high speed. There were other issues with umpiring as well — the players and the fans would sometimes get abusive, and it wasn’t unusual for umpires to be bribed. Clement was treated respectfully though, and was known to be immune to bribes. She became so popular that crowds were bigger at games that she umpired.
Clement kept umpiring for six years, and the money she earned paid her way through college, where she also refereed basketball games. And she was a top athlete in her own right as well, captaining the women’s basketball team, ran track, competed in gymnastics, winning tennis championships, and setting world records in the shot put, sprinting, hurdling, and even baseball, where the record she set was throwing a baseball 275 feet — nearly the length of a football field.
After graduating, Clement taught physical education at various colleges and secondary schools, managed YWCA organizations, and when she lived in Hudson, she coached the men’s basketball team, worked at the town newspaper as both a reporter and a typesetter, served on the police force, was both the town’s justice of the peace and the city assessor. She moved to Souix Falls, South Dakota (a larger city) in 1932, and worked as a social worker for the next 34 years. She passed away in 1971 at 83. Her records are not widely known, partly because record keeping wasn’t very good at that time and place. It’s not even entirely clear when she first umpired a baseball game; it might have been 1903, 04, or 05. The South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame, which features a large exhibit about Clement, put it at 1904 and called it fair.
