Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

125 cycling, tennis and hockey, middle-class women challenged culturally- constructed gender boundaries that restrained bodily freedom. 3 The stereotype of women as ‘eternally wounded’, victims of their bodies and forever atoning for their Original Sin, gradually declined in the 1920s as the stylish, youthful and athletic ‘flapper’ emerged, willing to flaunt their scorn for the idealised Angel in the House. If women’s cricket was to thrive, players realised broader media support was essential, but associating themselves with the hedonistic flapper or the new modern woman was a dangerous game. They may have challenged rigid social boundaries, but their provocative appearance and the moral panic which companied them was to be avidly avoided. Cricket would need a more subtle, calculated and tolerable public image, which the WCA and English Women’s Cricket Federation started fashioning from the outset. The ridicule the game often experienced in popular magazines and newspapers was met with sustained defiance, as cricketers vocally challenged their doubters through their own media channels. Marjorie Pollard was instrumental in this, as editor of Women’s Cricket and a regular contributor to The Times, The Mirror and The Observer , and many others, she successfully orchestrated a counter-narrative that confronted the falsehoods, distortions and patronising coverage the game widely received. The Association embraced the proven approach adopted by its sister organisation the All-England Women’s Hockey Association, which produced three instructional films between 1928 and 1945 and were viewed by almost 175,000 people by the end of the Second World War. Exhibition hockey matches, including the first ever televised international sports match in March 1938, between England and Wales at The Oval, as well as promotional literature and engagement with schools were other measures pioneered by the Women’s Hockey Association and later borrowed by the WCA. 4 Efforts to reshape the media’s portrayal of women’s cricket was the bedrock of the Association in its early years. A little over six months after the WCA’s founding, one women proclaimed in Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News that ‘no longer will women’s cricket be looked upon as a kind of children’s game indulgently smiled upon by the kinder-hearted among men’: such ‘condescension’ would no longer be suffered. The reality of such a claim proved far more difficult, but the WCA did achieve headway. Women’s Cricket sustained a small circulation throughout the interwar years, of less than 1,000 subscribers per year (though readership would have been far larger), but there was a distinguishable increase in the volume and tone of coverage in more widely-read literature towards the end of 1930. 5 Like their hockey-playing counterparts, the WCA printed its own instructional material and used new forms of mass media to extend its influence beyond a pool of elite girl’s schools. In 1934 Pollard published an instructional book, Cricket for Women and Girls , which gained ‘unqualified approval’ from The Cricketer . Newspapers also heaped on praise. The ‘The idea a girl cannot play cricket has proved to be rubbish’