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This book offers the first ever academic study of women's cricket in Britain from its origins in the 18th century to the present day. It examines women's cricket from grassroots to international level, in schools, universities, the workplace and clubs. The book draws on a wealth of new source material including player diaries and scrapbooks, club records and the records of the Women's Cricket Association. Through use of oral history interviews with many former players, the book argues that women's cricket was a site of feminism across its history, and an important source of empowerment to the women who participated in the sport. However, it also examines barriers to women's participation, analyzing the persistence of opposition to women's sport across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Overall, the book uses women's cricket as a case study to highlight the existence of ongoing fundamental inequalities in the quantity and quality of women's leisure in contemporary Britain.

Between 1989 and 2000, many women’s sports which had previously been governed separately to men’s sport were forced into ‘mergers’ with male governing bodies. These processes were profoundly disempowering for the women involved, often leaving them with very limited voice and representation in the governance of their sport post-merger. In this article, I detail the experiences of female coaches caught up in these merger processes, based on an analysis of archival documents and oral history interviews across six sports (squash, athletics, football, hockey, lacrosse and cricket). For some women coaches, the mergers proved a positive step on the path to professionalisation: they began to be paid for work which previously was often done for free. However, in other cases, elite coaching roles were removed and reallocated to men at the point of merger. Prior to the mergers, many women’s sports were coached entirely or predominantly by women; however, the mergers led to the loss of a generation of women coaches who were either actively pushed out or were asked to ‘requalify’ for their roles and left coaching altogether. The legacies of the mergers are still evident today in the structural gender discrimination which operates across contemporary British sport coaching.

In CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary he opined: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ One might add: ‘What do they know of cricket who only men’s cricket know?’ This article reviews the current global historical and sociological literature on female participation in cricket, female spectatorship and fandom, and cricketing masculinities, concluding that these subjects are still in their infancy–a fact which should concern all scholars of cricket. I argue that the key problem with current scholarship is that women’s and men’s cricket are examined as separate entities: fully gendering cricket scholarship requires a more integrated approach. Here I offer 3 strategies to achieve this: a restructuring of our work; a more interdisciplinary approach, with historians and sociologists working closely together; and the need to bring intersectionality into the heart of our work, to ensure the experiences of non-white female cricketers are more fully understood.

© 2020 The British Society of Sports History. Despite considerable progress over recent years, female participation in sport continues to be neglected by historians. This is as true in relation to histories of women as histories of sport. It is especially evident in the context of the historiography of the British home front in Britain in the Second World War. The extensive literature on women in the Second World War has generally been silent on sport and leisure. This article challenges assumptions that the war had little impact on the sporting lives of British women. Utilising newspaper sources, government and military documents, memoirs and the diaries and directives replies in the Mass-Observation archive, it highlights the importance of sport and leisure to women themselves as well as to the government, military and civil defence authorities. Because women were an important part of the home front, their morale, welfare and physical fitness mattered to those in authority. But the impetus for an extension of women’s sport also came from the women themselves, who pressed for the space and the opportunities to participate in sporting activity and extend the boundaries of women’s sport to a degree that had seemed impossible between the wars.

Despite suggestions of the potential opportunity of using major events to generate wider social connections, most emphasis in event management research continues to be placed on future volunteering as a legacy from event volunteering. This paper examines the impact of a dedicated Host City event volunteer programme associated with the 2014 Commonwealth Games held in Glasgow, which sought to use this major sporting event to enhance social connectivity amongst the volunteers. This initiative, designed in response to the perceived failure of legacies arising from recruitment to the main event volunteer programme, sought to leverage social outcomes beyond that of volunteering. Although the quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered at the event time and three years later indicates that the programme failed to realise all its social ambitions, it nevertheless offers valuable insights into policy and practice around how event management can and needs to adapt to help delivery legacies, and to use emerging opportunities to leverage other benefits. This study points to the need for more attention to be given to examine how unanticipated circumstances ahead of events can alter legacy planning and create opportunities for social leveraging.

This report provides data and recommendations drawn from the rst funded academic project to examine the implications of the rapid commercialisation of the Paralympic Games and the increasing visibility of disa- bility in the media; in uenced by the success of Channel 4’s entry as the United Kingdom’s o cial Paralympic broadcaster in 2012. Through an integrated methodological approach, we provide a joined-up evidence base that captures the intentions and practices of Channel 4’s (C4) broadcasting of the Rio 2016 Paralympics; the in uence of this on the content of Paralympic coverage and mediated forms of disability representation; and the wider impact on public attitudes toward disability. This approach allowed us to examine the important and in uential relationship between Paralympic production practices, progressive social change and cultural legacies.

This international collection of critical essays provides compelling insight into the lived realities of ethnic ‘Other’ females in sport.

This article examines the content of Women's Cricket magazine, which was published between 1930 and 1967 by the Women's Cricket Association. It is suggested that sportswomen have always actively resisted and attempted to combat the negative discourses surrounding their participation in physical activities; the magazine is used as a case study of this. It is argued that the editors attempted to challenge the stereotypes of women's cricket available in the mainstream press by publishing a newspaper of their own which provided accurate, serious coverage of their sport, and by distributing this to the mainstream press. The question of how far they were successful in altering negative discourses about female participation in the sport is also assessed.

This article examines the reasons behind the decline of schoolgirl cricket in the years between 1945 and 1960. It considers the impact of the Education Act 1944 and 'secondary education for all' on girls' physical education in general, focusing on why certain sports, in particular cricket, were not widely introduced into the new secondary modern and grammar schools. The outreach programme of the Women's Cricket Association, the governing body of women's cricket, to these new schools is considered alongside the problem of equipment and pitch shortages. Ultimately, blame for schoolgirl cricket's failure to become entrenched within the English education system is placed upon the attitudes of teachers and Local Education Authorities towards girls' cricket at this time; they considered the sport unsuitable for female pupils. Overall, the article serves as an historical case study of gendered physical education in action.