Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

144 Conclusion - War Again, and its Aftermath celebratory events was organised, including cricket and hockey matches between the girl and boy pupils. At Royal Holloway, the students played the staff on the grounds of their striking mock-French chateau. 15 These joyful celebrations were only temporarily permissible for some. The revered veteran Len Hutton, who had scored heavily in the Victory Tests of 1945, wrote in 1952 that ‘the muscular differences of the sexes prohibits cricket’ from being suitable for women. At the time of publication, Hutton was England captain. Just a year earlier the Australian women’s team was invited to use the Lord’s nets on their tour of England, but the move was criticised in the popular press as a pitiful ‘surrender’ to the ‘invasion’ of female cultural imperialism. 16 Women’s Cricket was eager to highlight the opposition they faced. In 1948, a letter from ‘one who likes a woman to be a woman’ was sent to the Association in response to their tour fund appeal. ‘It would be far better if these individuals would instead continue at their work, or… take up domestic service’, she wrote. ‘Women should try and occupy themselves in doing something which they are fitted and avoid trying to act and dress as men do. I suppose that before long we shall see female players playing rugby… it is a most ridiculous thing for females’. 17 After the war, Marjorie Pollard had predicted women would need to ‘fight every inch’ once again, and she was entirely correct. Women’s cricket was still a contested subject for many men and women. Players defied social expectations nonetheless, but in the late 1940s it must have seemed the game was yet another casualty of the war. The widespread belief women were unsuited to cricket would continue to be the biggest hindrance the sport faced throughout the 20th century. The inroads that were made before 1939 soon came under attack in an austerity-stricken, socially conservative Britain. ‘The time I should give to playing games I devote to watching cricket which has been a particular passion of mine most of my life’, one 28-year-old housewife told Mass Observation interviewers in the late 1940s. ‘Two years ago, I joined an excellent ladies’ cricket team but I felt the game was too masculine for me. I do not think it is a suitable game for women.’ A major leisure survey by Mass Observation in September 1948 found only 7% of married women played sport (with cricket virtually unrepresented) but 37% were regular spectators, with cricket, football and tennis most popular. 18 Marriage evidently continued to constrain women’s leisure time: what little recreation they had was rarely spent playing sport. Even before the German surrender, there were attacks by senior public figures on female teachers’ supposedly effeminate influence on pupils. The president of the National Association of Schoolmasters chastised the ‘muscular women’ who taught boys physical education, and called for an absolute separation of the sexes in schools. One headmaster even claimed the overbearing influence of women in the war meant most boys had developed a fear of the leather cricket ball. 19 Just like after the First World War, there was an immediate hardening of attitudes towards gender roles and growing calls for women to return to their ‘natural’ sphere. They simply could not