Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

28 Out of the Darkness: The Game Emerges earliest of these bodies was the All-England Women’s Hockey Association (1896) and the Ladies’ Lacrosse Association (1912). But after the First World War they were shortly followed by the Women’s Amateur Athletics Association (1922), Women’s Amateur Rowing Association (1923), and the All-England Netball Association (1926). Even sports with no central administration, like stoolball (similar to cricket but with shoulder-height wickets, underarm bowling and round-faced willow bats) experienced a huge expansion, with an estimated 1,000 teams by the mid-1930s. By 1939 the Ladies’ Golf Union (1893) had 1,417 affiliated bodies, and the Women’s Hockey Association had 2,100, including 200 leagues in the North of England. It was clear that where women were excluded, they could find inventive ‘feminine’ solutions. Netball had been developed at Bergman-Österberg’s College from 1893 as a less physical (and therefore less controversial) adaptation of basketball. As it was cheap and required little equipment or space, it was swiftly adopted by schools as a safe game for girls and was the most widely played women’s team sport between the wars. 22 As the interwar period progressed, so too did the diversity of activities available. Swimming, hiking, cycling, and fitness classes all became commonplace and sporting activities helped to reinforce one another; for example, cricketers at Rowntree’s cycled to matches in York, and therefore extended their pool of local opponents. 23 Women increasingly adopted cycling as a new social and physical freedom from the 1880s, and it also opened the gates for other sports. The Women’s League of Health and Beauty (WLHB) epitomised these developments in women’s physical activity. Mary Bagot Stack had opened her first Health School in 1926, and by the time she died in 1935 the WLHB had over 60,000 members, offering commercial keep-fit classes predominately to mothers and city girls. Consisting mainly of calisthenics and aerobics, these classes sought to improve women’s physical beauty through cultivating a slim and lithe body, and were therefore not considered unfeminine but the perfect expression of modern womanhood. The WLHB offered members a chance to socialise in a safe space while ‘building the body beautiful’. By 1939 it was the second largest women’s organisation in England, after the Women’s Institute. 24 This increasing expansion and toleration of the athletic female body was partly rooted in imperialist and eugenicist understandings of human evolution. The Second Boer War and First World War had simply highlighted the folly of Britain’s presumed racial superiority. A renewed focus on women as ‘race mothers’ emerged as their physical health was deemed imperative to the continued preservation and prosperity of the empire. Popular, inexpensive and widely available ‘keep-fit’ classes were intended to raise the health of the nation, and the movement resulted in the state-sponsored National Fitness Campaign of the late 1930s. Rather than harming a woman’s fertility, as was generally accepted in the immediate post-war years, medical and public opinion slowly succumbed to the idea moderate physical exercise was beneficial for female health, but