Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

50 It’s not Cricket? Public Hostility and Apathy control of public institutions. Certainly the sport’s governing body, the MCC, and all first-class counties were administered by an ex-public- school elite with strong links to the county’s aristocracy. Control over the national game legitimised authority over national political institutions. For example, King George IV was a leading patron of the MCC, while every president between 1919 and 1938 was a member of the nobility, a politician or a leading military figure. Like cricket, powerful institutions were almost unquestionably male in character and appearance. For some men, it was this appearance that counted above all else. While they were seemingly indifferent to women’s ‘attempts’ to play the game, they loathed the level of media attention their ‘cheap, temporary notoriety’ was receiving. The Lord’s pavilion was probably England’s premier old boys’ club, and the fact that women were not admitted as members until 1999 testifies to the masculine status it was believed to possess. 11 Hostility towards women’s cricket was commonly motivated by a fear that public displays of the female body, which often aimed to entertain a paying audience, challenged traditional gender roles and the monopoly men held over competitive sport. Given women’s increasing legal and political equality following partial enfranchisement in 1918 and the opening of the professions a year later, perhaps it is unsurprising some men reacted with contempt at women’s colonisation of the sports field. England’s first Betty Archdale demonstrates a forward stroke, 1934/5. Archdale returned to Australia after the Second World War and was appointed principal of Sydney University women’s college, and later headmistress of Abbotsleigh School in Wahroonga. (WCA archive, Somerset Cricket Museum)