Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

122 to fully utilise their newly-fought rights and responsibilities. Cricket was increasingly identified by educationalists, players and many in the general public as the perfect method of inculcating the virtues necessary for life outside the home. As Winifred Sim, a Bergman-Österberg College graduate and pioneer of cricket at Gravesend school put it in 1919, team sports ‘must be treated quite as seriously as lessons in school’. As concerns over the ‘problem’ of excessive leisure time built in the 1930s, efforts amplified to promote pastimes conducive to individual and community betterment. 41 Cricket was seen to cultivate the physical fitness crucial to a productive, competitive and successful nation, but also develop the mental attributes which openly challenged homogenous stereotypes of women as jealous, emotional, passive and submissive. While this assumption, once used to justify women’s exclusion from higher education and political equality, persisted into the interwar period, the belief team sports were hostile to a woman’s ‘nature’ slowly began to fade. 42 Players and administrators worked hard throughout the 1930s to reverse the widespread narrative that athletic women were uncivilised ‘Amazons’. Instead, through cricket and other sports, women could endow themselves with the morals needed to fulfil their role as public-spirited citizens. 1 Board of Education, Syllabus of Physical Training for Schools, 1919 (London, 1922), 5, 84-5, 127, 213-4; Sheila Fletcher, Women First: The Female Tradition in English Physical Education (London, 1984), 4, 40, 131. 2 Syllabus 1919 , 7-19; Leeds Mercury (1 May 1931). 3 College of Preceptors, Report on Differentiation of the Curriculum (London 1923), 65-74; quoted in Threlfall-Sykes, ‘History of Women’s Cricket’, 372. 4 Dorothy Beale, Lucy Soulsby, Francis Jane Dove, Work and Play in Girls’ Schools (London, 1898), 397-402. More than a Game: Citizenship and Cricket