Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

16 Introduction ‘It gradually got that you were free’ engaging in physical activity or recreation. A rival body to the WCA, the Yorkshire Women’s Cricket Federation was founded in the summer of 1931 and established competitive league cricket mainly for working-class girls. By 1933 a Lancashire equivalent had been formed and in April 1934 these bodies created the English Women’s Cricket Federation. Far smaller than the WCA, the two bodies quickly developed a contentious relationship as they clashed over issues of feminism and class in the sport. 20 But the development of women’s cricket is not a cosy narrative of inevitable, unopposed expansion. Life for women like Beatrice may have improved in these decades, but opportunity also brought hostility from socially conservative forces. Cricket was a symbol and a reality of her new social and physical freedom. Women’s wartime work may have temporarily challenged the existing gender order, but this swiftly resulted in an assertive backlash that reaffirmed women’s traditional role as wife and mother. Women employed in ‘men’s jobs’ were not readily accepted. As one munitions worker later put it: ‘[we] were just about the lowest form of life in the eyes of the public. We were supposed to make a great deal of money, and as others didn’t make so much they called us all sorts of things, even shouted things after us.’ 21 With peace came the return of the widespread belief women should return to the home. Just one year following the armistice 775,000 women had already been dismissed as men were restored to their position as the family breadwinner. Women who retained their jobs were often labelled irresponsible and antisocial by the mainstream press, and by 1921 the role women played in the national economy was smaller than a decade earlier. 22 The loss of economic freedom also led to a regression in women’s social opportunities. Sackings put an end to many workplace cricket teams. Although war brought opportunities to play ‘the national game’, it never promised to provide a future for it. Women would have to seize this themselves. ***** The ability to negotiate the competing forces of female respectability and social emancipation is the major theme that runs throughout this book. Just as the political emancipation of women did not end with the vote but marked an evolution in the fight for equality, the First World War represents an important threshold in the history of women’s cricket. It was between 1916 and 1919 that its origins as a mass participation sport crystallised, even if it was not yet realised. No longer was the game confined to grand country houses, novel spectacles, or expensive fee- paying schools. The war marked the beginnings of a sport now accessible to women of all classes. Although undeniably middle-class in values and governance throughout the interwar period, these years witnessed a flowering of the game as it was organised, codified and expanded year-on-year. Scrupulous over dress, decorum and public image, bourgeois cricketers were watchful never to push the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour too far, or they risked damaging the sport. Players walked a tightrope of popular opinion that