Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

110 Chapter Seven More than a Game: Citizenship and Cricket One of the chief obstacles women’s cricket faced was justifying the game’s utility. What good were team sports for girls destined for lives in the home? Caring for their menfolk was often a lonely task and hardly demanded detailed knowledge of fielding positions, or the fastidious execution of a cover drive. Surely the hours spent on the cricket or hockey field was time better spent in domestic science, cookery or sewing classes? Even after the poor health of the nation was so painfully uncovered in wartime, especially among working-class recruits, the value of rigorous physical training for women and girls was still a matter of debate. The Board of Education’s physical training syllabus of 1919 recognised sport was ‘a matter of national importance, vital to the welfare and even survival of the race’ and set about building comprehensive provision for all schoolchildren. Access to healthy recreation simply had to improve for most of the population. Physical education was a specialist female profession until the 1970s (the first college for men was not established until the 1930s, nearly 50 years after Bergman-Österberg’s), but despite the best efforts of these forward-thinking colleges, girls’ schooling still focused heavily on accepted exercise for bodily development alone, such as gymnastics and drill. A nation which prided itself on games habitually excluded women and girls from participating or engaging in nearly all of them. The 1919 syllabus, although intended to free girls from Victorian physical restraint, also noted the need for gender segregation when playing team sports, specified different exercises, and only explicitly encouraged netball as a team sport for girls. 1 If the case for the physical benefits of women’s sports was making headway in the immediate post-war years, women and girls still faced stiff opposition to their moral and educational value. The government made it clear that exercise was needed not only to develop the body and maintain good health, but was also essential to ‘the formation of character and the development of the higher mental and moral qualities.’ Sport helped generate a selfless, cooperative and harmonious relationship with peers, and promoted a public spirit which was valuable in later life. But the ability and need for women to possess these qualities was debated, even when the number of girls interested in team sports was rising. In 1930 over 20 teams competed in the Holme Valley Women’s Cricket League, but one year later it was in rapid decline. The reason for this, as one of the organisers told the Leeds Mercury, was the ‘lamentable lack of sportsmanship and fairness’ players showed each other. Women’s nature, it was supposed, prevented them from playing the game properly. 2