Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

98 Separate but Equal: Feminism Divides the Game associating cricket with feminism was a way of delegitimising the sport, of yoking it to the undeserving and irritating agenda of ‘extremists’. As a result, feminism in women’s sport went underground. Yet the Association contained active feminists at the very top of the organisation. Frances Heron-Maxwell (1855-1955), the WCA chairman between 1926 and 1939, and thereafter the president, had been an active suffrage campaigner. She was spoken of very highly by her peers for being a strong, determined warrior for women’s rights and ‘a great power in women’s affairs.’ Although never a militant activist, she had campaigned for the vote by co-founding the Liberal Women’s Suffrage Society in 1913. The Society was intended to act as a rival organisation to the Women’s Liberal Federation which had supported Prime Minister Herbert Asquith despite his continued intransigence on the issue, but was dissolved after just a year following the outbreak of war. 13 An active local figure throughout her life, Heron-Maxwell was awarded an MBE for her wartime work as chairman of the West Kent Women’s Land Army between 1917 and 1918, and had been admirably aided by Vera Cox MBE (1883-1973), her housemate and secretary of the WCA, taking over the chairmanship in 1946. Although not directly aligned to the feminist movement after 1918, their reformist zeal continued as administrators in the All-England Women’s Hockey Association, where Heron-Maxwell assumed the presidency until 1923. Beyond sporting bodies, Heron- Maxwell was also on the Executive Committee of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, operating her own sub-committee on domestic craftwork from 1919. 14 For both Heron-Maxwell and Cox, women’s cricket and hockey represented a continuation of their conviction to improve the opportunities available to women in all aspects of their lives. Whereas before the First World War this had largely been political, after it they soon turned to the physical and cultural emancipation of their sisters. Another great feminist force within the WCA was Betty Archdale (1907- 2000). The daughter of militant suffragette Helen Archdale, Betty visited her mother in Holloway prison from a young age after being convicted for window smashing at Whitehall. Infused by her mother’s politics and raised in close proximity to leading Suffragettes, Betty even claimed to have gathered the stones used to smash the windows herself. Throughout her life she was good friends with leading interwar feminists, who helped raise her after her father’s death in the First World War. Lady Margaret Rhondda (1883-1958), who founded the Six Point Group in 1921 to campaign for greater legal equality, had lived with her as a child and remained in close contact in her adult life. Between 1920 and 1926 Helen Archdale edited Rhondda’s popular left-wing, feminist weekly Time and Tide , and the newspaper occasionally covered women’s cricket and sport. 15 After playing cricket at Bedales and St. Leonards schools, Betty quickly involved herself with the WCA after returning from studying Economics and Political Science at McGill University, Canada. Not only did she captain the first international tour in 1934/5 and other representative matches, but as a qualified lawyer she had codified the WCA constitution and other