‘Look, it's a girl’: cricket and gender relations in the UK

Abstract

This essay seeks to explain why, despite organizational reforms, the number of females playing cricket in the UK has not significantly increased in recent years. The essay draws upon qualitative research with females playing youth and adult cricket and focuses on four main areas: female cricketers' experiences of playing cricket with males; the reactions of males who encounter female cricketers in everyday settings; female cricketers' experiences of an organizational merger with a male team; and female cricketers' views on the status of women's cricket relative to the men's game. Using a figurational sociological perspective, we argue that these experiences lead to a socially-generated personality structure (habitus) in which the internalization of a negative ‘we-group’ image of themselves as female cricketers is a prominent feature. Consequently female cricketers are unable to pose a broader challenge to their outsider status in the game and thus female participation has not increased.

Notes

¹ See Maguire and Mansfield, ‘“No-Body's Perfect”: Women, Aerobics, and the Body Beautiful’; Markula, ‘Firm but Shapely, Fit but Sexy, Strong but Thin: the Postmodern Aerobicizing Female Bodies’.

² Howe, ‘Women's Rugby and the Nexus Between Embodiment, Professionalism and Sexuality: an Ethnographic Account’; Malcolm and Velija, ‘Female Cricketers and Male Preserves’; Mennesson and Clement, ‘Homosociability and Homosexuality: The Case of Soccer Played by Women’; Scraton et al. , ‘Is it Still a Man's Game? The Experiences of Top Level European Women Footballers’.

³ Sport England, Young People and Sport in England: A Survey of Young People and PE Teachers; Sport England, Young People and Sport in England 1999; Sport England, Young People and Sport in England; Trends in Participation 1994–2002.

⁴ Aitchison, Sport and Gender Identities.

⁵ http://www.ecb.co.uk/womens/domestic/womens-cricket-history,264,BP.html; http://www.thefa.com/Womens/EnglandSenior/History/;http://www.englandhockey.co.uk/text.asp? section = 000100010003.

⁶ http://www.ecb.co.uk/womens/.

⁷ Sport England, Young People and Sport in England; Sport England, Young People and Sport in England 1999; Sport England, Young People and Sport in England; Trends in Participation.

⁸ UKSport, Women in Sport: The State of Play 2006.

⁹ http://www.ecb.co.uk/ecb/about/ecb-structure,28,BP.html.

¹⁰ White and Kay, ‘Who Rules Sport Now?’. White and Kay discuss how women's position with sports governance has increased significantly in the last 20 years, but this is predominantly within the context of women's sport. In sports such as rugby and football women hold relatively few senior governance positions.

¹¹ The concept of habitus used in this essay is drawn from the work of Elias. Elias defines habitus as ‘second nature’ or embodied social learning and argues that each person develops an individual habitus which is relatively unique, as well as a series of social habituses related, for instance to class, gender or nationality. Whilst we recognize that the concept is more normally associated with Bourdieu, Bourdieu's formulation of habitus can, at times, be criticized for being somewhat deterministic, with little scope for human agency. For this reason, and in line with the broader theoretical position of the paper, we prefer to use Elias in this context.

¹² Elias and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders.

¹³ Elias, The Civilizing Process; Elias and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders.

¹⁴ Mennell, Norbert Elias, 116.

¹⁵ Elias and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders, 16.

¹⁶ Elias and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders, 81.

¹⁷ Elias and Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders, 7.

¹⁸ Mennell, Norbert Elias.

¹⁹ Dunning, Sport Matters; Liston, ‘Established-outsider Relations between Males and Females in the Field of Sports in Ireland’; Maguire and Mansfield, ‘No-Body's Perfect’; Maguire, Global Sport; Dunning and Waddington, ‘Sport as a Drug and Drugs in Sport’.

²⁰ Van Stolk and Wouters, ‘Power Changes and Self Respect: A Comparison of Two Cases of Established-Outsider Relations’.

²¹ Velija, ‘Women, Cricket and Gender Relations; A Sociological Analysis of the Experiences of Female Cricketers’.

²² Patton, Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods.

²³ The FA state: ‘Save for matches in a playing season in the age ranges Under 7, Under 8, Under 9, Under 10 and Under 11 players in a match must be of the same gender’. http://www.thefa.com/Womens/GettingInvolved/NewsAndFeatures/Postings/2007/06.

²⁴ http://www.ecb.co.uk/ecb/publications/girls-playing-in-boys-age-group-leagues-and-competitions,598,BP.html.

²⁵ See, for example, Dowling, The Frailty Myth; Young, ‘Throwing Like A Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality’.

²⁶ Donnelly and Young, ‘The Construction and Confirmation of Identity in Sport Subcultures’.

²⁷ Van Stolk and Wouters, ‘Power Changes and Self Respect’, 479.

²⁸ Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men and Sport.

²⁹ Snyder and Spreitzer, Social Aspects of Sport.

³⁰ See for example, McGinnis, McQuillan and Chapple, ‘I Just Want to Play: Women, Sexism and Persistence in Golf’, an account of female golfers, and also Henry and Comeaux, ‘Gender Egalitarianism in Coed Sport: A Case Study of American Soccer’, an account of females playing coed soccer.

³¹ Mennesson and Clement, ‘Homosociability and Homosexuality’.