Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

62 ‘Too much emphasis on personal comfort’ hairstyles and a preoccupation with glamour, health and beauty. She was closely linked to her 1920s predecessor the ‘flapper’ girl, who had caused such a stir following enfranchisement. The likes of flamboyant tennis star Suzanne Lenglen, who dominated women’s tennis in the 1920s and became a household name, epitomised the newly liberated and carefree modern woman. Her short dresses and competitive play provided a role model for many young female athletes. 14 However, while tennis was a recognised pastime for women, cricketers could not afford to push these boundaries so brazenly or risked alienating public support. Even so, suppliers of tennis and cricket equipment confused the two markets on more than one occasion. Advertisements for Lillywhites and T.H. Prosser and Sons presented cricketers as youthful, stylish and alluring young women. Players were drawn wearing short dresses, heeled brogues and bare legs, all of which were unacceptable under WCA rules. The model the WCA provided was far more reserved, middle-class and conservative. Fearful of rocking the boat before it had set sail, the WCA rigidly stuck to an obsequious, conservative public image. The flapper and new modern woman of the interwar years were a focus for anxieties, especially as they were often closely connected with lesbianism in popular literature and the public imagination. There were certainly some elements of homosexuality within the WCA. Former England captain Betty Archdale revealed she was bisexual in later life, but uncovering such a taboo topic in a period when the subject was not spoken of, much less written about, has proved difficult. Nonetheless, interviews conducted by Raf Nicholson have proved lesbians played in the 1950s, and the Association was a welcoming environment for them. 15 Given fears of a declining birth rate and the outcry following the first openly lesbian novel, Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928), cricketers were tactful not to associate themselves with the new modern woman or risked further claims of impropriety. Although lesbianism was not illegal, acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men were punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, and between the 1920s and 1950s public awareness of homosexuality increased as sensationalist tabloids regularly took aim at what they termed ‘Evil Men’. 16 Hall had even implicated women’s cricket in her novel as the protagonist Stephen Gordon ‘envied’ her brother’s ‘right to climb trees and play cricket’, despite Stephen being a far better player than him. 17 The links may have been understated, but they were certainly there. The Well of Loneliness uses Stephen’s yearning to play cricket, football and climb trees to underline how gender inequality in Edwardian Britain started from an early age. While her brother had a ‘right to be perfectly natural’ and was ‘privileged’ to be a boy, Stephen was taught to supress her desires, both physical and social. Nevertheless, Hall’s portrayal of cricket was broadly uncontroversial. She paints an image of the traditional English rural idyll, where life centred around the church and village green, and in the afternoon choirboys ‘played cricket to the glory of God and the good of the country’. 18 The game was an expression of their manliness, morality and patriotism.