Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

17 Introduction ‘It gradually got that you were free’ demanded they played with high standards to avoid condescension, but scolded cricketers deemed too competitive or strenuous. While the First World War may have provided the foundation for the game’s emergence, and the environment for it to flourish, the Second World War significantly curtailed the game’s growth. By 1945 a lack of resources, the disruption of war and continued austerity meant the WCA did not recover its pre-war strength until 1951, and the English Women’s Cricket Federation failed to continue at all. Nonetheless, Beatrice’s tale of her wartime exploits with the Wrens is suggestive of women’s cricket in the interwar period. Her account blended youthful exuberance for sport and new opportunities with an ingrained sense of national and civic duty, and claimed social freedoms such as sport were a by-product of women’s political gains. As women’s position in society changed between the two wars, cricket was identified as a vehicle for endowing girls with the qualities and skills needed to adapt to their shifting public roles as citizens and workers. Voluntary bodies, educational institutions and businesses all recognised the value of the sport for its moral, physical and psychological benefits. Wartime work had ‘taught’ Beatrice ‘to be a leader’, but cricket was also believed to be a means of nurturing the skills of leadership, determination, cooperation, selflessness, loyalty and judgement to a new generation of young women. Administrators used the idea of citizenship to argue cricket was an essential pedagogical tool for creating healthy, active and accomplished citizens. Cricketers and advocates adopted a ‘rhetoric of citizenship’ to extoll the benefits of the game and legitimise it in the eyes of a sceptical public. 23 By the late 1930s the WCA actively encouraged the participation of working-class girls in an effort to raise their physical health and improve access to team games. Cricket was therefore presented as a democratic, beneficial form of leisure and a vehicle for creating public- spirited citizens in an age of mass democracy. The language used to justify women’s cricket not only drew from their increased civic role but was also couched in the ideals of ‘new’ feminism that emerged in the interwar years. The WCA contained women’s rights activists at the very top of the organisation, and these individuals dominated the development and direction of the sport. Their ‘separate but equal’ message was assumed into the ethos of the Association and the justifications they used to validate the sport. While the WCA was keen to appear moderate, and avoided identifying themselves as a feminist organisation, they remained committed to women’s autonomous self- determination and barred men from holding any formal power within the Association. Although the WCA and the English Federation were split on many issues, it was the Association’s commitment to feminist ideals that fundamentally prevented a single, unified governing body for women’s cricket emerging in these years. The evolution of women’s cricket is therefore bound to the history of women’s political and economic liberation during the first-half of the 20th century. But the key hallmarks of greater equality in sport are somewhat