Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

117 own frustration almost two decades after the Prime Minister’s. ‘In all this anxiety to produce perfect citizens’, she wrote in The Observer , ‘I feel those games associations which have been working quietly, efficiently for as many as 45 years are going to be overlooked or not used nearly enough… team games – and more team games – and physical perfection will follow.’ 26 This view permeated into schools linked with the Association. An article in The Mayfield Magazine in 1938, Gravesend County School for Girls’ newsletter, stressed the importance of health to the nation, asserting that team sports ‘inculcate the spirit of team work and a sense of disciplined harmony so essential to good citizenship.’ 27 As attempts to raise national health gained traction from the late 1920s, female cricketers allied themselves with this changing zeitgeist in order to push their agenda, positioning the sport as a way women could fulfil their role as model citizens. If women’s physical recreation was a symbol of modernity, then it also exemplified their greater role as active participants in public life. The importance of efforts to educate and direct young women’s spare time grew throughout the interwar years, and especially in the 1930s. Youth workers, psychologists and educationalists warned of a ‘problem of leisure’ that threatened to undermine democracy and good citizenship. The cinema, romantic novels, night clubs and alcohol were criticised as being unproductive and uneducated forms of leisure which promoted promiscuity and hedonistic behaviour, offering wider society little value. It was feared that the steady increase in leisure time was dangerously geared towards selfish individualism and materialism, and threatened to destabilise British society and democratic values. Some commentators were keen to draw flattering parallels with this type of leisure and team games which developed ‘character.’ One local female councillor in Warwickshire argued women had a duty to take an interest in cricket and other sports, as otherwise adolescent girls would become distracted by ‘distasteful literature’. It was the mother’s responsibility, she claimed, to raise the next generation of virtuous, self-sacrificing and ‘useful’ citizens, and cricket was one method instilling these qualities. 28 Forceful undertones of class control were evident in these debates. Most observers believed it was poorer girls most in need of direction and control, and most at risk of ‘sex energies’. Many employers recognised these ills and provided leisure activities for their workers as a way of directing their non-work time positively. Wealthier students at physical training colleges remarked if ‘the girls of the working class had more games we should have less slobbering along the road with young men every night.’ Games mistresses concluded girls who played more games were less likely to ‘powder their nose’, and more likely to delay their interest in the opposite sex. For schoolgirls, moral guidance was usually found through the instruction of their games mistress. By encouraging a sense of fair play and justice in an informal setting – but also demanding orderliness, discipline and intelligence – physical educators provided an attractive model for how to conduct oneself outside the classroom. 29 Cricket was More than a Game: Citizenship and Cricket