Married vs Single — Women's Cricket Match, 1838

Women's cricket had been played in England since at least the 1740s. The Married vs Single format was the dominant women's match-form, played at village festivals across the south. The early nineteenth century saw a decline in metropolitan reports of women's cricket as the men's game professionalised, but the rural tradition continued unbroken.

Women's cricket in England has a documented history at least as old as men's, with the famous 1745 Bramley v Hambleton match in Surrey often cited as the first recorded women's fixture. The Married vs Single format — pitting the village's married women against its unmarried women — was the dominant women's match-form through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, often played as part of village festivals or harvest celebrations. The 1838 match, reported in the Sporting Magazine and in several local papers, was one of the better-documented late-Hanoverian fixtures. The exact venue is uncertain (the report names the village only as 'in the West'), but the format is clear: eleven married women against eleven single women, full underarm bowling (women's cricket continuing to be played underarm for decades after the men had moved to roundarm), two innings each. The Married won. Such matches were played for a small wager and a meal afterwards rather than for the large stakes of men's single-wicket cricket; the social context was the village fete rather than the professional sporting circuit. The Sporting Magazine's reporting of the 1838 match is significant because it is one of the few mid-nineteenth-century notices of women's cricket in a national publication.

Women's cricket continued at village level through the Victorian era. The first women's clubs in the modern sense — the White Heather Club in Yorkshire — were formed in the 1880s. The Women's Cricket Association was founded in 1926 and women's Test cricket began in 1934.