Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

100 Separate but Equal: Feminism Divides the Game the militant Women’s Social and Political Union. For Bergman-Österberg, sport not only promised to liberate women’s bodies but also free them financially and spiritually. She forged and feminised the profession of games mistress in schools, and stimulated ‘brave and noble thoughts’ in her pioneer generation, even if she focused heavily on producing perfect mothers and homes. 19 A large proportion of WCA administrators, regional officials, school teachers and players had studied at physical training colleges founded on this emancipatory mantra, and it was this idealism that led Kathleen Doman of Dartford College (previously Bergman-Österberg’s College) to formally propose the creation of the Association in 1926. Before 1914, sport gave wealthier women the opportunity to shake off their domestic shackles and gain public recognition independent of their function as mothers, daughters, wives or male appendages. 20 ‘We weren’t being trained to be young ladies,’ Archdale told interviewers in 1982, remembering her schooling at coeducational Bedales and St Leonards. ‘A girl was taught she can do anything she wanted; she wasn’t just trained to marry but be able to earn a living, be able to think about something and have her own views.’ 21 In the interwar years, this message of independent thought, financial autonomy and resoluteness was dispersed throughout the country through schools and girls’ organisations. Cricket was but one expression of this particular version of feminism which offered women self-determination and self-expression beyond the confines of the home. Like cricket, many women’s sports were founded by feminists as a realisation of their philosophy. Although suffrage campaigners have been characterised as wholly engaged with their politics, and consequently had little time for games and exercise, this was not always the case. Many suffragists noted their interest in sport and physical recreation before the First World War, with geographically liberating activities such as cycling and horse riding being particularly popular. In Australia, the Victorian Ladies’ Cricket Association was formed in 1905 and elected prominent suffrage campaigner Vida Goldstein to the presidency. Goldstein used the organisation to promote her politics and profile, becoming the first woman in the British Empire to stand in a national parliamentary election. 22 Back in Britain, the president of the All-England Women’s Hockey Association, Edith Thompson, wrote in 1905 that women should not have to apologise for playing the game and would continue to defy their vocal critics. Internally, the organisation recognised hockey ‘was part of the movement for the emancipation of women… it was rough and unladylike, and people rushed to print and talked about girls becoming unsexed.’ 23 However, like the WCA, hockey administrators publicly denied their ties with feminism after the war. ‘There is no feminist movement in the All-England Women’s Hockey Association’, the president wrote in the Manchester Guardian in October 1938, ‘since its foundation it had stood for the organisation of the women’s game by women appreciating the educational value of such a policy.’ Of course, such educational policies were liberating simply by the act of playing sport, but hockey