The Bodleian Library at Oxford University has a manuscript with the earliest image of English people playing something that looks like cricket. It dates from 1344 CE.
One of the players is a woman. She actually looks rather more proficient, preparing to release the ball underarm, than the batsman who seems to have made up his mind to swipe it one-handed on the full with an early version of a reverse sweep.
Women have been part of the story of English cricket for nearly seven hundred years since. But for half of those years they were invisible. A historian, Dr. Rafaelle Nicholson, has uncovered their story in an excellent book Ladies and Lords: A History Of Women’s Cricket In Britain. She relates it to the entire social, economic and cultural history of women in Britain. One finds many echoes of the story of women’s cricket in Pakistan, and perhaps in every country. England’s women cricketers did not face the intense struggle experienced by the pioneering Khan sisters of Karachi, which I was privileged to hear from them at first hand.
But England’s women also had to battle against prejudice and neglect. Until very recently, they never got paid and met all their expenses, including overseas tours, without sponsorship or support. They were expected to be grateful to men, especially husbands and employers, for the chance to play at all. They endured mockery, even from experienced cricket journalists who should have known better.
Women disappeared from the records and images of English cricket for four centuries until in 1744 CE a local newspaper published an account of an all-women’s match between two rural villages. Other such games attracted crowds and sponsorship – and gave rich men another outlet for betting. But then Victorian men decided that women should not play sport but watch themselves play it. Medical “experts”, including Britain’s best-known doctor, W G Grace, told them, on no evidence, that cricket was dangerous for their delicate constitutions especially their ability to bear children. In this W G igno