and in 2004 (Uozu-city, Japan). These Women's World Series events were organized by the American Women's Baseball Federation and the Women's Baseball Association of Japan. They paved the way for official International Baseball Federation sanctioned Women's World Cup competitions.EDELMAN, R. O. B. E. R. T., & Elsey, B. (2020). Sport in Latin America. In Oxford Handbook of Sports History (pp. 362–363). essay, OXFORD UNIV Press US. In 2004 five countries competed in the first Women's Baseball World Cup in Edmonton, Canada: the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. Subsequent tournaments have been held every two years, with the US winning the first two in 2004 and 2006, and Japan winning five consecutive gold medals from 2008 to 2016. In 2016, the field included twelve teams, more than had competed in any previous Women's Baseball World Cup: Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Cuba, the United States, Venezuela, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, Japan, and South Korea. The first Pan American Women's Baseball Championship (I Campeonato Panamericano del Béisbol Femenino) was played in Valencia, Venezuela, from 13 to 20 November 2009. Teams that competed were Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. Women's baseball was added to the Pan American Games in 2015. In the nineteen hundreds women in Latin America did in fact have involvement in sports, especially in baseball. Before society deemed sports as harmful to women's bodies and affected fertility, women were able to play as it was used as a way to get people involved in public participation. Major competition for women's sports started in 1900 when they were allowed to participate in the Olympic games but Latin America did not include a woman to represent their country until swimmer Maria Hulga Lenk in 1932. Later in the 1950s there was an international spread and they played tournaments which encouraged women in sports to play, especially Latin American women. The first tournament was held in Buenos Aires in 1951 where women populated about a third of the participants. Yet after a lot of breakthroughs, women's sports in Latin America were blocked from growing because of the Government not believing that women should be playing and should obey the gene rules and norms they had set for them. See also All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Japan Women's Baseball League North American Women's Baseball League American Women's Baseball Federation USA Baseball Women in baseball Notes