Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

54 It’s not Cricket? Public Hostility and Apathy ‘neuter’ a girl, stunting her development and leaving her ‘flat-chested, with a badly developed bust, her hips narrow, and in too many instances there is a corresponding failure in function.’ 23 No doubt Scharlieb was echoing entrenched medical opinion – the contradiction between her profession and her feminism is plainly apparent in her writing – but even so, by the start of the First World War even those actively campaigning for greater access to sport for girls were worried of the health implications. The physician and eugenicist Arabella Kenealy (1859–1938) was more outlandish still. Her diatribe Feminism and Sex Extinction (1920), where she associates women’s sport with feminist politics, argued the ‘masculine’ effects of games such as cricket, hockey and football ‘sapped’ mothers of ‘internal muscles’ needed for childbirth. Kenealy maintained a mother would ‘energise her muscles with the potential manhood of possible sons’ and lead to either infertility or ‘emasculated’ sons. Girls who were subjected to the horrors of cricket would develop crudely and unnaturally. Many of these assertions continued to be repeated in mainstream media decades later, with popular magazines such as Girl’s Own Paper warning young readers against turning their bodies into ‘sterile gardens and barren orchards.’ Cricket was a masculine sport for a reason, girls were warned, and they could resemble ‘half-grown lads’ if they persisted with it. 24 Women’s cricket even threatened the very existence of humanity, according to the extraordinary headline of one Australian newspaper during England’s tour in 1935. The game threatened to sterilise all women, it was argued, and it therefore risked the very ‘perpetuation of the human race.’ Dr Mary Scharlieb, one of the earliest female doctors, began practising in London in 1887 and was influencial in medical politics through her writing. (Wellcome Library)