Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

30 Out of the Darkness: The Game Emerges new friendships with women from all walks of life. The high number of single women, the growth in leisure, and improved transportation go some way in explaining this boom in women’s physical recreation. 31 Yet, as the barriers sportswomen faced began to dissolve in the interwar years, and opinions gradually mellowed, cricketers faced a unique set of criticism when attempting to justify their incursion into the nation’s summer game, one that was not so harshly felt by hockey or lacrosse players. Cricket was the only team sport women played in significant numbers in the 1930s which was widely considered entirely masculine. Although some ‘feminised’ sports did contain violent or dangerous play, these games were not necessarily thought of as unsuitable or physically damaging. The speed and hardness of a cricket ball undoubtedly added an element of danger to play, and some women’s matches were abandoned due to blows to the head, but cricket did not contain the physical contact or potential for injury like other team sports. Hockey certainly fits this description, but was the most popular outdoor women’s team game of the period. But unlike cricket, women and men’s hockey developed at broadly the same time. The All-England Women’s Hockey Association was founded in 1896, just eight years after the men’s Hockey Association. The sport was quickly popularised by women and by 1914 was widely believed to be feminine, leading many men to devalue the sport. Rounders and rambling also attracted greater interest between the wars, particularly with working- class women, while cycling boomed as a form of cheap transport and leisure. By the start of the First World War these physical recreations had become widely acceptable female activities. 32 Lacrosse, more elitist and less popular than hockey, emerged as a female pastime soon after the founding of the (exclusively male) English Lacrosse Union in 1892, and partly due to its obscurity it did not experience such fierce public resistance. In the interwar years, lacrosse was also deemed an acceptable female activity and more women regularly played than men. The physicality of the particular game may have played a leading factor in the harshness of the reaction they received, but its historic and cultural significance also determined this. In the case of women’s football, the sport’s growing popularity after 1914 resulted in the Football Association effectively banning the game in 1921 for challenging its ‘masculine’ image (see chapter 4). Where medical arguments fell short, critics assailed not whether they could play, but whether they should play. Team sports were believed to develop both the body and the mind: if girls were destined for lives in the home, why bother learning teamwork, leadership and critical thinking skills? Where women found team games restricted by their need for combative and exertive play, or pedagogical rationales, their involvement in individual sports was less controversial. Girls’ first formalised physical education was, thanks to the efforts of Madame Bergman-Österberg, heavily focused on physical over ‘moral’ development, through Swedish gymnastics, calisthenics or drill. However, by the end of the First World