Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

96 Separate but Equal: Feminism Divides the Game to autonomy was fundamentally too costly for many working-class girls. 5 While many in the Association could afford the luxury of hiring a ground, or owning their own equipment and transportation, the WCA’s philosophy prevented most working girls in Lancashire and Yorkshire from playing. It was a bourgeois feminism. Although more women were playing the game by the late 1930s, the average woman’s engagement with cricket was still in the kitchen preparing players’ teas, or washing dirty whites, and not at the wicket themselves. Nevertheless, ultimately it was the Association’s commitment to feminist ideals that ensured the longevity and future of the game. Feminism and the Women’s Cricket Association The WCA’s rallying cry of respectable femininity was far removed from the English Women’s Cricket Federation. The latter body happily allowed cricketers to play in white trousers, and encouraged competitive, strenuous play to please the paying public. Both aspects were frowned upon, especially among the middle classes. While the two organisations had a mix of women from different classes, their public images would have indicated few similarities. On the one hand were the tourists of 1934/5, playing in new and sparklingly-clean white tunics, most of whom had studied at the most prestigious schools and universities in the country; on the other were the smiling girls of the English Federation, dressed in a mismatch of oversized trousers and jumpers, and a wide variety of caps, hats and belts. Betty Archdale later recalled the wealthier WCA players showed an ‘unconscious class bias’ during the tour, and wicketkeeper Grace Morgan privately wrote that working-class Australian teams ‘did not like us and thought we were very snobbish’. 6 Actually, both organisations contained women and girls from wealthy and poorer families, but if women’s cricket was not separated solely on class, what splintered the sport? With the permanence and future of the game constantly in danger, providing a safe social space for women to express themselves free of subordination by men was a hurdle that affected women of all social classes. But as the financial barrier to the sport did not affect women on the WCA’s committee, they turned their attention to this obstacle instead. They sought control over their own bodies, sport and social environment. The initial class division within the game, therefore, gave rise to cricket’s greater rupture, feminism. Cricketers had been labelled feminist crusaders before the game became organised. Linking women’s political and physical emancipation was an open goal for many journalists, and terms such as ‘cricket’s Suffragettes’ appeared before 1914. Just two months after the WCA was established, the Thanet Advertiser discussed the idea of ‘physical feminism’ and cricket, and other papers commented on how cricket represented a fresh ‘surging wave of post-war feminism.’ Some observers believed the rise of women’s cricket was a result of feminists ‘defending’ their ‘emancipation’, and male hostility was galvanising more of them to take up the sport. Coverage of the game highlights how many men experienced a crisis of masculinity