Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

49 It’s not Cricket? Public Hostility and Apathy over the tea urn, they have sent us out nicely creased and laundered’ but now entered the field themselves. At this rate ‘cricket won’t last very long’, he predicted, ‘we men will soon be banished from the wicket. We shan’t be dressy enough.’ Another commentator wrote in the Yorkshire Evening Post that if women’s golf, tennis and cricket continue at the existing rate of progress, ‘who would dare to deny in a few years’ time man’s supremacy even here may be in danger?’ If women competed with men on the cricket field, as they could now do in Westminster, the courts and the shop floor, what separated the sexes? This loss of identity and status motivated many men to condemn women’s continued pursuit of athleticism and social equality. 8 As the embodiment of an idealised England, cricket was endowed with ambiguous and often overused moral qualities such as sportsmanship and fair play. The sport was an expression of Englishness and the nation’s supposedly unique traits of deference to authority, reticence and a principled Christian outlook. On hearing of the growth of women’s cricket, many readers wrote hostile letters in defence of these qualities to the Bristol Evening World . ‘Women often excel at games where individual performance counts, because this appeals to their vanity, but they cannot submerge their personal feelings for the good of the team’, one man wrote. Another argued their ‘petty jealousies’ and ‘cattiness’, which extended to preventing their husbands from playing, demonstrated ‘women cannot appreciate the team spirit.’ They might become ‘good athletes, but they can never be good “sportsmen”, and there is a wide gulf between the two.’ For some cricket enthusiasts, women may have been physically capable (after all, hadn’t they proved this in wartime?), but they lacked the defining and supposedly masculine characteristics which gave the sport its reverential and unique appeal. 9 The dearth of women’s cricket before 1914 was befitting for a nation that universally excluded ‘the fair sex’ from many of the same political and social rights as men. The game had been adopted as an essential, usually compulsory, element of public boys’ education in the 19th century, and continued to hold the same reverence into the 20th. In many ways cricket was more of a cult than an educational tool, and membership gifted to boys an aesthetic and moral manliness through the philosophy of Muscular Christianity. It was infused with martial metaphors neatly summarised in the widely-believed adage that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (The Duke of Wellington had in fact never said this, and it was simply a product of the Victorian imagination). Cricket continued to typify the ideals of a male economic and political worldview in the interwar years – competitive and tough but never deceitful – and was often used to advance the careers of the bourgeoisie. 10 Women’s invasion of the cricket field threatened the game’s prestige. The cultural capital the game provided wealthy men with usually bolstered their social status and helped justify their fitness to wield political power. Not only was it perceived by many as a way of instilling the skills necessary for leadership, it was also used to justify upper and upper-middle class