Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

81 Workplace and Working-Class Women’s Cricket industry, as the production of food, clothing, motor vehicles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and paper replaced the declining heavy industries. Employers turned to women, and usually teenage girls, who had so ably demonstrated their economic importance in the Great War, as an essential new supply of cheap semi- or unskilled labour. Young women were said to have the vital characteristics of dexterity, speed and ‘nimble’ fingers that were considered perfect for assembly-line production, which demanded long hours of monotonous, repetitive work. Managers believed girls, normally hired from the age of 14, were less likely to succumb to boredom than men. Their influx into these newly- established machine-operative roles, estimated at 8-14% of the whole female workforce, signalled women’s elevated significance within the industrial economy as they steadily moved away from traditional areas of employment, such as textiles and domestic service. Between 1923 and 1938 an extra 650,000 women entered paid employment. With the majority of them under the age of 35, they became a vital demographic buttressing a changing economy. 20 These young, single and financially liberated workers yearned to exercise their newfound leisure time and disposable income. The growth of women’s cricket in England was intimately tied to this section of the economy. The national distribution of the female workforce was remarkably similar to the distribution of women’s cricket teams: in 1931, 37% of female wage earners in England and Wales worked in the South East, 34% in the North, 18% in the Midlands, and under 4% in the eastern counties and Wales respectively. 21 Employment was a major reason for the development of the sport: workplaces represented almost a quarter of all teams in the period, and probably over a third of the total number of players by 1938. Some of these sides were from prevailing areas of female employment, like the retail and textile industries, but the majority of workplace teams were linked to emerging areas of female employment. By 1938 the WCA contained pharmaceutical firms such as Boots and British Drug Houses, paper manufacturers like Aylesford Paper Mills and Forman’s, motor vehicle producers Leyland Motors, and tobacco companies Imperial and Player’s. 22 Not only was there a steady rise in the number of women in the workforce from the early 1920s, but employment was also increasingly concentrated into larger organisations. The nature of domestic service was unfriendly to those women wanting to play cricket as work was performed individually or in small groups, long hours were expected including weekends, poor pay was customary, and workers were typically older and married. Unsurprisingly, few domestic servants could play the game. Although these conditions were often shared by retail workers, the tendency towards chain stores meant some of these companies played cricket too, like Lyons, a chain of teashops, and Woolworth’s in Maidenhead. 23 A greater concentration of female workers in companies improved the prospects of raising a side.