Women's Cricket in the 1850s — Charity Matches and Village Traditions

Women's cricket had a long English history: the earliest recorded women's match was in 1745 at Bramley, Surrey. Through the late eighteenth century women's cricket was fashionable as a society entertainment and occasional gambling fixture. By the 1850s the formal women's game had declined; the surviving matches were local charity affairs, often played in aid of village funds or for harvest festival prizes, and treated as curiosities by the local press. Teams of eleven or twelve women, usually identified only as 'Married v Single' or 'East Side v West Side', played on village greens with borrowed equipment and informal rules. The press covered them with a condescending tone — descriptions of the players' dress were invariably longer than descriptions of the cricket — but the matches drew genuine crowds and produced occasional skilled individual performances that the correspondents acknowledged despite themselves. The formal women's cricket movement began in the 1880s with the foundation of the White Heather Club in Yorkshire and the first organised women's county clubs.