Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

97 Separate but Equal: Feminism Divides the Game after the Great War. If women began to play ‘one of the last preserves of man’ and were ‘outstripping’ them at it, men would find it more difficult to claim a distinctive collective identity. This goes some way to explaining the hostility the sport faced from its critics. 7 It was not only the media that made this connection between cricket and feminism. In 1936 the Association was asked to send delegates to International Women’s Week in Hungary, which it declined on the basis of cost. Even those who did praise the sport, for example when describing the 1937 Ashes tour, joked that negative comments might ‘lead to another suffragist movement.’ 8 Despite some voices of support, those that associated cricket and feminism were unenthusiastic about women’s incursion into a game whose prestige was tied to its masculine image. When showing highlights of the first Ashes Test at Northampton in 1937, one newsreel presenter joked that ‘maybe in ten years from now, when you men are all mere slaves, we shall remember the beginning of the end at Northampton on this sunny June day.’ When Australia played England in Brisbane in 1934, it made the front page of the Brisbane Sunday Mail. ‘Cricket for women and croquet for men spell male downfall’, the headline read. It later argued the sports were ‘symptoms of the spread of sex confusion and extreme feminism’, and warned readers that they were on the cusp of a matriarchal tyranny. Female ‘domination’ in sport would soon result in male ‘subservience’ in all walks of life. 9 Binding women’s cricket and feminism together was a particularly powerful argument made by opponents of the sport. Following the end of the First World War, but chiefly after equal enfranchisement in 1928, feminism became deeply unpopular with the British public and press. The movement was simply seen as redundant and further claims for equal citizenship wholly unnecessary. Political extremism, the threat of war and the Great Depression were on the minds of the nation in the 1930s, and women’s issues took a reluctant back seat. Some right-wing journalists commented, and not entirely tongue-in-cheek, that women’s cricket was an appropriation of masculine pastimes; a greedy female imperialism unsatisfied merely with political equality but intent on cultural uniformity of both sexes. Brian Penton goaded players for a reaction in the Daily Telegraph when he wrote how ‘the emancipated woman, the sportswoman, the non-home-loving, business-efficient woman’ was perfectly exemplified by cricketers. Feminism on the sports field diverted them from their true place ‘in the home.’ 10 The media broadly accepted women’s newly-fought rights, but discouraged further developments as they loudly declared female emancipation complete and further demands were ignored or ridiculed. 11 Just two weeks after the WCA was founded, the president of the National Council of Women, Henrietta Franklin, rejected the term feminist while simultaneously arguing ‘for the equality of the sexes in enfranchisement, in the workshop, and in the professions.’ 12 The ideas espoused by feminism continued in organisations such as these, even if the tainted title was dropped and ‘dead-level’ equality was not sought. In this environment,