Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

112 grace, gentleness and courtesy – they sought to feminise games without radically altering them. Physical recreation and sportsmanship was fundamentally geared towards producing good, upright citizens, but that citizenship was still biologically determined. 5 If sports were used to train female minds and bodies for their future roles in society, then they also helped reinforce existing constraints on women that defined their fruitful contribution to society principally through their womb. By the 20th century, women were told it was their duty to King and Country to cultivate their bodies to perfection; but they were simultaneously labelled uncivilised for pursing masculine sports. The earliest advocates of strenuous team sports for women absorbed these muddled, often contradictory motivations. ‘I try to train my girls to help to raise their own sex, and to accelerate the progress of the race’, Madame Bergman- Österberg wrote in 1892, ‘unless the women are strong, healthy, pure and true, how can the race progress?’ Jane Francis Dove had used similar language when she maintained the ‘supremacy’ of the British Empire relied upon the qualities individuals learnt in games. 6 Few women and girls played team sports before the First World War, and even fee-paying secondary schools usually restricted pupils to netball and hockey. Even fewer working-class women enjoyed organised team games prior to 1914. By employing the idea games were vital to producing ‘race mothers’, women’s physical liberation was justified through conservative, biologically-essentialist and racialised rhetoric, and not just through the civic value of their minds. This was despite Bergman-Österberg’s view that sport was socially and economically emancipatory. Yet women who played with aggression, competitiveness or intense vigour were labelled ‘unsexed’ by writers, physicians and gossip columnists. They were no longer the ‘fair sex’ but ‘Amazons’ or ‘barbarians.’ 7 Battle lines were drawn around team sports, with advocates painting it as morally improving and critics as uncivilised, unfeminine and a threat to racial supremacy. How did cricketers defend the value of their sport, if opinion varied so widely on the impact of the game? As the development of women’s cricket proceeded swiftly in the interwar years, the rhetoric of ‘race mothers’ was briskly dropped by the organising bodies in favour of arguments centred on girls’ moral maturation. The physical benefits of the game, if mentioned at all, eschewed the idea bats and balls for mothers produced stronger sons. So was any openly feminist language calling for dead-level equality. Instead a ‘rhetoric of citizenship’ was used to explain how cricket improved community life and individual virtue. 8 Other conservative women’s voluntary organisations had adopted similar arguments following equal enfranchisement in 1928, such as the Mothers’ Union and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, as a method of expressing their contribution to local and national life. These bodies educated their members on their newfound political responsibilities and used citizenship as way of legitimising their calls for greater social and civil rights. This rhetoric was also used by the Women’s Cricket Association (WCA) and English Women’s Cricket Federation to justify the existence More than a Game: Citizenship and Cricket