Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

25 Out of the Darkness: The Game Emerges co-educational Quaker institute based in Saffron Walden, Essex, accommodated mixed boys’ and girls’ cricket from 1889, and possibly earlier. 14 Although the South East, and especially Kent, was a stronghold of women’s cricket during the interwar years, it is likely a small but significant number of girls played cricket throughout England in fee-paying middle-class schools prior to or during the First World War. Modelling their curriculum on boys’ public schools, with their intensive focus on physical recreation, cricket was a key pedagogical tool that, in the words of Penelope Lawrence, co-founder of Roedean, ‘admitted girls to a world far wider than their own and offered the best possible training in courtesy, good breeding, honour, obedience, magnanimity and organisation.’ 15 If the expansion of girls’ education in the second half of the 19th century laid the foundation for the evolution of women’s sport in the interwar years, it was physical training colleges that truly built on them. The first of these colleges was founded by Martina (Madame) Bergman-Österberg (1849-1915) in 1885 at Hampstead Heath with the purpose of training young women to be Swedish gymnastics teachers for middle-class girls’ secondary schools, and with the resolve of improving the fitness and health of children following eugenics-fuelled fears of racial degeneration. These concerns steadily grew in the ensuing years as the poor fitness of working-class men was highlighted during the Second Boer War (1899- 1902) and was painfully exposed when recruiting soldiers in the Great War. Of the male recruits surveyed in 1917, one in ten was deemed unfit for service, two in five suffered from ‘marked disabilities’, and a total of one million were rejected by the end of the war. 16 As mothers and wives were deemed responsible for the healthy development and maintenance of the nation’s men, medical attention was unsurprisingly refocused to include women too. International pressures, expanding educational opportunities and worries over working-class health were factors that led to the opening of further physical training colleges at Birmingham (Anstey, 1897), Chelsea (1898), Liverpool (1900) and Bedford (1903). These colleges would remain the chief educators of physical training teachers until the 1970s, as women monopolised the profession. Although these colleges originally specialised in gymnastics, they soon diversified by teaching team games too. All five physical training colleges had affiliated to the WCA by 1927 and, in the case of Bergman-Österberg’s college (which later moved to Dartford Heath in 1895) had played cricket from as early as 1891. These colleges provided women with a safe, women-only, autonomous space where the social constraints outside their walls were flouted. The freedom to pursue one’s own leisure activities and control one’s own body was a liberating experience for these students. As most of these women went on to teach in fee-paying schools, their radical ethos was transferred to the next generation of pupils. The Association’s close connection to this emerging field of women’s higher education was embodied by Kathleen Doman, graduate-turned-teacher at Dartford, who officially proposed the WCA’s formation in 1926 and served on its committee until 1933. 17