Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

48 It’s not Cricket? Public Hostility and Apathy Throughout the country women’s cricket was treated as an unwelcome otherness. 3 Women were seen to be trespassing on a sacred and ancient male space, and this belief was shared by individuals from all classes. Fears that women’s cricket would devalue the sport and challenge male supremacy abounded, and this was increasingly common as matches became prominent affairs and organising bodies steadily grew in ambition, size and scope. Male territorialism was exposed in the first edition of Women’s Cricket in May 1930, which contained a warning over the potential consequences on the sport: ‘It could not really be true that another field of male activities was to be usurped by the fair sex! Women seriously be-taking to the greatest of all British games? Why it is sacrilege!... a direct insult is thus hurled at the heads of those who call themselves men. If this attack is not nipped in the proverbial bud, we predict a rapid decline in the noble art of cricket.’ 4 A broad spectrum of local and regional papers contained dire warnings, including concerns from male administrators that, in the words of J.J. Booth, president of the Yorkshire Cricket Federation, women’s cricket was a ‘caricature’ of the real game, a ‘spurious imitation of the genuine article’ reminiscent of ‘pantomimic entertainment.’ 5 Some northern sporting audiences even held animals such as horses and greyhounds in higher regard than their sportswomen. As women’s cricket moved beyond the insular protection of university colleges and public schools, opposition often became more vocal and forceful. Even sympathetic commentators wrote in condescending, novel or patronising language. 6 This was true for most of the sport’s media coverage until the highly-successful Ashes tour of 1937 (see chapter 8). Women’s encroachment into sanctifiedmale space held greater significance as cricket was the most culturally important sport in England between the wars. Unlike football, whose popularity remained heavily confined to the working-class, cricket was watched and played with religious-like fervour by all classes and in all regions. Enthusiasm was roughly equal in both the North and South, and local sides were usually a melting pot of men from various professions and classes, unlike other team sports. For many English men and women, especially the public-school elite, cricket was more than a game but an institution, the most popular and symbolically significant sport in the British Empire. It was portrayed as an ancient and mythical patriarchal game intimately tied to English history. This symbolic importance increased after the First World War as its rural, timeless, and peaceful image became a panacea to the horrors of war, mass unemployment and political extremism. 7 Cricket presented a nostalgic withdrawal from an ever-changing world, and women threatened that landscape. The language adopted by some commentators was one of barely contained crisis. Cricket is our ‘last mystery’, wrote columnist Austin Barber in 1932. Women ‘have presided