Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

61 ‘Too much emphasis on personal comfort’ policy. The WCA media spokesperson Marjorie Pollard wrote in The Cricketer : ‘There were those, who, believing that women’s cricket was an attractive novelty, invited us to play exhibition matches at Garden Fetes, Fairs and at other less serious events… it was hard to refuse these things, but we did and kept strongly to the line of argument that we were playing cricket, and that we had no real interest in becoming side shows.’ 11 Meanwhile, Mr T. Metcalfe, the secretary of the Yorkshire Women’s Cricket Federation, drafted a patchwork of condescending ‘do’s and don’ts’ for players, including not ‘playing cricket in high-heeled footwear’ and not ‘promenading down the pitch after completing a stroke.’ Metcalfe reminded players that ‘love should not interfere with the gems. A girl cricketer who looks to see where her sweetheart is before taking a catch may drop the ball and lose the match.’ The image, however marketed, masked the reality: the WCA had played matches at their annual ‘Cricket Week’ festival against teams of men and boys between 1927 and 1933, and many grassroots teams played boys’ schools when struggling to find local fixtures. 12 Nevertheless, it was the public’s perception that mattered. A ban on playing men was never enshrined into the WCA’s constitution, though publicly the cricket field was not painted alongside the dance halls, pictures, or pier as a space for courting young couples. Throngs of single, liberated and independent ‘surplus’ women generated a tabloid-fuelled moral panic that women had rejected home, husband and child for selfish pursuits, spelling the end of existing society. The imbalance between men and women was highest in London and the South East, incidentally the region where women’s cricket was strongest. Many young women accepted the possibility, as the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School put it in 1917, that: ‘Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact. Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can. The war has made more openings for women than there were before, but there will still be a lot of prejudice. You will have to fight. You will have to struggle.’ Women’s experiences were usually not this dire, but to some extent, sport may have replaced the loss of intimacy and friendship often found in marriage. The Association and Federation, alongside many workplaces, emphasised the social side of cricket as its greatest pleasure. The game provided young, single women with a social community of like-minded individuals that in some instances, as American author Clara Amy Burgess wrote in The Sex Philosophy of a Bachelor Girl (1920), could ‘sublimate’ a woman’s ‘physical longings’. 13 Sport and athleticism were key signifiers of the ‘new modern woman’ which emerged in the 1930s. Like the American ‘Batchelor Girl’, this new fashionable femininity was characterised by a slim body, short, bobbed