Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

94 Chapter Six Separate but Equal: Feminism Divides the Game ‘Now that we’ve got a woman cabinet minister’, the journalist Kennedy Williamson wrote in June 1929, ‘we may even need to get used to the idea of a woman going out with Hobbs or Sutcliffe or Sandham to open the innings for England!’ Women had earned their place at the wicket, he reasoned, and their contribution to the development of the game deserved recognition. Men who denied them this showed a loathsome ‘anti-feminist prejudice’. Williamson was certainly not the only commentator to link the cricket pavilion and Parliament. One reader of the Yorkshire Evening Post wrote that while enfranchisement may have been the ‘outward and visible sign of equality’, the ‘real basis’ was on the cricket field, where they now competed seriously with men. For the Co-operative Wholesale Society, equality on the ‘political field’ needed to be matched on the field of play, and they urged women to take up the game in their factories. 1 Yet, the relationship between cricket and the pursuit of equal rights had not always been so harmonious. In April 1913, campaigners set the Nevill Cricket Ground’s pavilion alight, leaving behind only a skeleton of scorched timbers, a photograph of Emmeline Pankhurst, and a copy of The Suffragette , one month before Kent’s annual Cricket Festival. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lambasted the ‘female hooligans’ for their barbarity, and declared such actions would set their cause back a generation. A few days later Perthshire Cricket pavilion was also destroyed, causing £1,000 worth of damage, and in June that year North Middlesex Cricket Club was set ablaze. In March 1914, Smethwick Cricket Club’s pavilion was burnt and Suffragist literature distributed around the ground. Horseracing courses, football grounds and rugby clubs were also targeted, partly for publicity, but also as symbols of exclusion and chauvinism. 2 Before the First World War, sport was emblematic of women’s status as second-class citizens, habitually side-lined culturally and politically. After the war, games like cricket took on new significance. By 1919, feminism was politically obsolete in the minds of most of the public. The chief aim of gaining the vote had been partially achieved in the previous year, and coupled with the right to run for Parliament and the opening of the professions, the movement fractured after 1928 when equal enfranchisement was granted. As the first female MPs took their seats in Westminster, the media chastised women for staying in work, and depicted the only image they thought worthwhile: the domesticated wife and mother, safe and warm in the refuge of the hearth. Those that wished to continue the fight, which of course was far from over, were denounced