Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

69 ‘Too much emphasis on personal comfort’ The Women’s Hockey Association required national teams to wear ties and black stockings until 1939, having little changed their playing outfit in fifty years.30 Yet, despite grumblings from the rank-and-file, uniformity in playing outfits prevented journalists from spending all their column inches on this trivial issue, which was common. Smart, ‘feminine’ clothing reduced their novelty status and encouraged the press to comment on the performance of players rather than their appearance. Throughout these debates the WCA balanced, as one player put it, ‘the desire of looking like a man player and of playing good cricket in comfortable clothes.’ The compromise placed comfort and unrestricted play behind the guiding principles of the organisation: ‘dignity, circumspection, caution and submission to public opinion’. 31 Trousers and shirts would have undoubtedly offered players greater freedom and comfort (stockings did not prevent skin burns, skirts were cumbersome and sleeved dresses stifling), but appearances were placed before unrestricted movement and competitive play. Unlike footballers, deference to popular, middle-class opinion took priority, and trousers were not generally embraced until the 21st century. A respectable, feminine image of women’s cricket, which the WCA reasoned was the bedrock of its survival, was also achieved in other ways. Historian Raf Nicholson has argued the Association actively sought to construct a counter-narrative to those that trivialised and undermined the sport. Attempts to remould its portrayal by writing in national newspapers and producing their own publications like Women’s Cricket was one such method. 32 Another was writing regularly on the history of the game, depicting its centuries-long past and imagined foundations. The message it aimed to project was that women’s cricket was nothing new, and had a bright future. Marjorie Pollard often countered the press that mocked them with her own sarcastic scorn: ‘Darlings, have you heard? Women’s Cricket is dead, slain by no less an authority than the Lady Sports (or was it Beauty?) Expert of a Sunday Newspaper! It seems that the dear creature, all beautified, ‘pallid and feminine’, penetrated to the wilds of Beckenham the other day and found herself surrounded by a dreadful horde of ‘Amazons’ wearing simply ghastly garments with sleeves, my dears, and cotton stockings that positively wrinkled at the knees!... these unfeminine creatures laughed and ate chocolate (milk) in the pavilion, while discussing the game in technical terms, so indelicate—and ‘horreur’—referred to each other by their surnames instead of as Susy, Katy and Lucy, or even Fluffy, Dinky and Sweety.’ 33 For Pollard, cricket was perfectly compatible with modern femininity, and rather than being ‘Amazons’, the game was edifying. Women didn’t need to stare at the yellow wallpaper all day. To underline this point, the WCA dissuaded teams from playing mixed-sex matches, not only because they perpetuated woman’s ‘sense of inferiority’ and relegated their cricket into mere ‘burlesque’, but also to improve the