Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

86 Workplace and Working-Class Women’s Cricket Although playing outfits did not always fit perfectly with the WCA’s strict code – sleeveless dresses, bare legs, and short skirts were common sights – workplaces did make genuine efforts to ‘conform to the rules of higher authorities’, as the Co-operative Manchester League put it, and remove clothing like trousers. Some employers such as LMS Railway, British Drug Houses and Lever Brothers even offered their facilities for regional trial matches, further integrating working-class girls into the WCA. 38 ‘The cultivation of a spirit of unity’ If the sport was widely thought unsuitable for women, why were companies willing to sponsor, promote and fund the game? It certainly posed a risk to their reputation, and even profitability, if publicly condemned. Women who continued to work after the First World War were often judged to be usurping returning servicemen’s breadwinning male duty, and the press labelled them unpatriotic feminists unless they downed their tools. By staying in employment and playing cricket, workers challenged the domestic ideal and traditional gender roles, especially pertinent following the emasculating effects of trench warfare. Supporting cricket was even more bizarre given the inflexible gender- defined educational schemes many employers forced younger workers to attend. Girls learnt needlework, sewing and dressmaking in domestic schools and boys metalwork and woodwork; their futures rigidly predetermined by their sex. The financial advantages of hiring teenage girls were obvious. They could be paid half the wages of males in similar jobs, Members of Rowntree’s Girls’ Cricket Club at the North of England WCA trial in July 1934. By the middle 1930s the side was generously funded by the company and regularly featured in their staff magazine. (Rowntree archive, Borthwick Institute)