ABSTRACT
There has been a good deal of research conducted into the issues of race, racism and cricket in Britain. Much of this, though, has focused on men’s cricket, with the experiences of female cricketers either skirted over or ignored completely. Jack Williams in his work Cricket and Race, for example, argues that “Race was at the heart of cricket throughout the twentieth century”, but pays scant attention to the experiences of female cricketers in these years. This chapter seeks to explore how far the racism pervasive within recreational cricket in England during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries carried over into the women’s game. To date, only one Black woman and two Asian women have represented England at international level, and grassroots provision indicates that the sport has historically been and remains overwhelmingly white dominated. But why is this the case? The focus of this chapter will be to problematise the ‘whiteness’ of women's cricket in Britain throughout its history. I suggest that the interaction of cultural, financial and practical factors, including the middle-class nature of the sport, the development of racist imperialist ideologies within the women’s cricket community, and the popular image of cricket as ‘old white guys on a field’, acted and continue to act together as forceful constraints on ethnic minority female participation in cricket.
