Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

ACS PUBLICATIONS As the golden age of cricket came crashing to an end in the summer of 1914, it unexpectedly marked the beginning of women’s mass adoption of the national game. Women eagerly responded to the country’s wartime plea for help, but as they entered the factories, depots and hospitals of England, few anticipated they would also enter the cricket field. From a handful of wealthy, country-house teams before the war, by 1939 the sport had been transformed. International tours, first-class county venues, crowds in their thousands, and a substantial rise in playing numbers: women’s cricket became a permanent andwidespread feature of the English summer. But their physical liberation was not without opposition, and accusations of being ‘unsexed’, uncivilised and manly doggedly pursued the sport. Just as players began to earn the respect and admiration of the public, the Second World War intervened, and women’s cricket became another casualty of the conflict. The fourth volume of the Cricket Witness series, this book is the first in-depth study of the formative years of the game, and places the sport within broader changes in women’s education, employment, and civil rights, and argues cricket was a new setting for women’s emancipation after achieving electoral equality in 1928. With a forward from Alison Mitchell. £18.00