England Women's Cricket History: 1934 to the Present

The women who played the first Test match paid their own way to Australia. They sailed in the autumn of 1934, were away for the better part of six months, and several of them had to give up jobs to go. Nobody was reimbursed. Half a century later the same national side would still be raising money through jumble sales and subscription. The story of women's cricket in this country is not a story of gradual, sensible progress. It is a story of an amateur organisation running a serious international sport on almost nothing for seventy years, and then handing it over.

Get that sequence right and everything else makes sense: why the women staged a World Cup two years before the men did, why the professional era arrived so abruptly in the middle of the 2010s, and why the modern game's structures still carry the fingerprints of decisions taken in the 1920s.

Before there was an association

The earliest reference most historians accept is a match in 1745 between women of Bramley and Hambledon, played on Gosden Common near Guildford and reported in a Reading newspaper. The report is brief and slightly astonished, which tells you the game was unusual but not unheard of. Through the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women's matches appear intermittently in the record: estate matches, village matches, matches got up for a wager.

The White Heather Club and the Lady Cricketers

Two Victorian developments matter. The White Heather Club, founded in Yorkshire in the 1880s, was a private club for women that played regular fixtures and lasted for decades; it established that women's cricket could be organised rather than occasional. The Original English Lady Cricketers, a touring professional troupe of the early 1890s, established the opposite lesson. They drew crowds, they were treated as a novelty act, and they collapsed when their manager absconded with the money. The commercial model failed. The club model survived.

That is the fork in the road. Women's cricket in England developed as an amateur, club-based, self-governing activity, deliberately separate from the professional men's game and its county structure, described in our guide to the English domestic cricket structure. It kept control of itself and it kept no money.

The Women's Cricket Association

The WCA was founded in 1926 by a group of women, several of them physical education teachers, who wanted a governing body for a sport they were already playing. It wrote laws, ran a county championship, organised trials, selected national teams and negotiated international tours. It did all this with volunteer administrators and without meaningful commercial income.

The WCA's culture was distinctive and, for most of its life, fiercely defended. Players were amateurs and expected to remain so. Dress and conduct were regulated. The association was suspicious of anything that looked like exploitation, which included, for a long time, sponsorship and television. Historians of the game argue about whether that conservatism protected women's cricket or held it back. Both are probably true.

What is not in dispute is that the WCA achieved something the men's authorities never had to attempt from scratch. Within eight years of its founding it had put a team on a boat to Australia.

1934-35: the first Test

England's first women's Test was played at Brisbane over three days from 28 December 1934, against an Australia side whose own national council had been formed only three years earlier. Australia batted first and were dismissed cheaply. Myrtle Maclagan took seven wickets in that innings. England replied with a substantial total, bowled Australia out again and won by nine wickets.

It was a thorough beating and the rest of the series followed the pattern. England had more organised cricket behind them and it showed. Maclagan went on, later in the same tour, to make the first century in women's Test cricket. Betty Archdale captained the side; she would go on to a distinguished career in Australian education and remains one of the more remarkable figures the English game has produced.

What the tour established

Three things, all of which lasted.

• The Ashes framework. England and Australia became each other's defining opponents in the women's game as surely as they had in the men's, a rivalry whose men's counterpart we track in detail on our Ashes page.
• The tour as the unit of contest. For most of the next fifty years, women's international cricket meant occasional long tours between a small group of nations, not a fixture calendar.
• The self-funding principle. Players paid. That expectation, established in 1934, was not fully dismantled until the 2010s.

New Zealand were added to the itinerary on the same trip, and a genuine three-nation Test circuit existed before the Second World War interrupted it.

The amateur decades

From the resumption of international cricket in the late 1940s through to the 1990s, the England women's team operated on a model that would now be considered impossible. Players held full-time jobs. Tours were fitted around annual leave and unpaid leave. Fundraising was constant and largely done by the players themselves. Coaching was minimal and sports science non-existent.

The cricket was still serious. England's Test record through this period was strong, and the standard of the best players was high enough that they would have been recognisable as internationals in any era. What they lacked was volume: a Test series every few years, no regular white-ball programme until the 1970s, and no financial base on which to build anything more.

Rachael Heyhoe Flint

She captained England from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s and never lost a Test series in charge. That alone would earn her a place in the record. It is not why she matters.

Heyhoe Flint was a journalist and broadcaster as well as a batter, and she understood that women's cricket had a publicity problem rather than a quality problem. She courted the press, she was very good company, and she was relentless. She campaigned for women to be admitted to the MCC and to Lord's, which took decades and which she lived to see achieved. She talked a businessman into funding a World Cup. When she was eventually made a life peer, it was a reasonable recognition of a career in which the cricket was only part of the argument.

1973: the World Cup that came first

The first Cricket World Cup of any kind was a women's tournament, held in England between June and July 1973. Seven teams played a round-robin of 60-over matches. It happened because Heyhoe Flint and the Wolverhampton businessman Sir Jack Hayward discussed the idea at a cricket weekend in Eastbourne in 1971, and because Hayward then paid for it.

The tournament was decided by the final round-robin fixture, played at Edgbaston on 28 July between England and Australia. Enid Bakewell made 118 and Heyhoe Flint 64 as England posted 279 for 3 from their 60 overs. Australia were held to 187 for 9. England were world champions, and the men's game would not hold its own first World Cup until 1975.

What 1973 proved and what it did not

It proved the format worked. The 60-over structure, the round-robin, the idea that a global one-day tournament could be staged and completed and won: all of that was demonstrated by women before the men attempted it, a point our 50-over World Cup history keeps in view.

What it did not prove was that the model was sustainable. The 1973 tournament depended on one wealthy individual's cheque. There was no broadcast contract, no significant gate revenue and no governing-body budget behind it. Subsequent editions were staged irregularly and with considerable difficulty. A competition can be a landmark and a financial one-off at the same time.

Lord's, access and the long argument

Women's cricket was not played at Lord's until 1976, when an England and Australia one-day international was staged there. That fixture is now routinely described as a breakthrough, which it was, but it is worth being precise about what had been blocking it. The MCC was a private members' club that did not admit women as members, and it owned the ground. Access to Lord's was a governance question, not a cricketing one.

The club voted to admit women members in 1998. Our Lord's history covers the ground's institutional life in more depth; the relevant point here is that the venue which now stages women's finals and which hosted the most famous match in England's women's history spent most of the twentieth century formally closed to the people who played it.

1998: the merger

In March 1998 the Women's Cricket Association voted to merge into the England and Wales Cricket Board. The WCA had been in financial difficulty for years. The ECB, formed in 1997 as the single governing body for the men's professional and recreational game, had money, staff and infrastructure. The logic was obvious and the vote was not unanimous.

The case against was straightforward: seventy-two years of independent self-government by women, handed to an organisation run by men, with no guarantee that women's cricket would be a priority rather than a line item. The case for was equally straightforward: the WCA could not fund a competitive international programme and nobody else was offering.

What the merger actually changed

Not much, at first. For roughly a decade and a half after 1998, England's women remained effectively amateur. What the merger did was make a professional future possible, because for the first time the sport sat inside an organisation with broadcast revenue. Everything that followed — contracts, a domestic professional structure, a place in The Hundred — required that single institutional fact.

It is fair to say the ECB took its time. It is also fair to say that no equivalent transformation happened in countries where the merger did not occur.

Professional contracts

In May 2014 the ECB awarded the first full-time professional contracts to England women's players. That is the dividing line. Before it, an England international arranged her cricket around a job. After it, cricket was the job.

The change in the team's physical condition and skill level over the following years was visible to anyone watching. Fielding standards rose first, then fitness, then the pace of the seam bowling, then the range of scoring options. A generation of players who had been good part-timers became good full-timers, and the players who came after them had never known anything else.

Era	Player status	Domestic structure	International programme
1926-1998	Amateur, self-funding	WCA county championship	Occasional long tours
1998-2014	Amateur under ECB	County championship, ECB-run	Regular but limited
2014-2020	England players professional	Kia Super League (2016-19)	Full multi-format calendar
2020 onwards	Professional at domestic level too	Regional then county-run professional teams	Full calendar plus franchise cricket

The domestic game

The county championship the WCA founded survived the merger and still exists in a recreational form, but the professional domestic structure is a recent invention and it has been rebuilt more than once.

The Kia Super League ran from 2016 to 2019 with six teams and was explicitly a proof of concept: could a short, televised women's T20 competition attract a crowd and produce international-standard cricket? It could. It was then wound up to make room for something bigger.

From 2020 the ECB created a regional professional structure, awarded the first domestic contracts to players outside the England squad, and established two competitions — a 50-over tournament named for Rachael Heyhoe Flint and a T20 competition named for Charlotte Edwards. The naming was not sentimental; those two players between them span the amateur era and the transition. The ECB has since moved the women's professional game onto a county-run footing with a tiered structure, which is the sort of arrangement that gets adjusted periodically, so check the current season's shape rather than trusting any article to be current on it.

The Hundred

When The Hundred launched in 2021 it did so with men's and women's competitions from the start, using the same eight teams, the same grounds and the same broadcast platform, with equal prize money. Whatever you think of the format, and our Hundred explained guide sets out the objections honestly, that structural decision put women's domestic cricket in front of a mainstream television audience in a way that no previous competition had managed. Double-headers meant crowds who came for one match watched the other.

The counter-argument is that the women's game became dependent on a competition designed to solve a men's-cricket revenue problem. That dependency is real. So is the exposure.

The Ashes as a multi-format series

For its first eighteen editions the women's Ashes was a Test series, and by the early 2010s that was a problem. Women's Test cricket had become rare, tours were short, and a single Test could not carry a marketing campaign or fill a broadcast window.

In 2013 the ECB and Cricket Australia restructured it. Since then a Women's Ashes has consisted of one Test, three one-day internationals and three T20 internationals, with points allocated across all of them and the Ashes going to whichever side reaches the higher total.

Match type	Win	Draw / tie / no result	Loss
Test match	4 points	2 points each	0
One-day international	2 points	1 point each	0
T20 international	2 points	1 point each	0

The design does two things at once. It keeps Test cricket in the women's calendar, because four points is worth more than any white-ball match and no side can afford to treat the Test as an exhibition. And it produces a contest that stays alive across several weeks and multiple formats, which is exactly what a broadcaster wants. It is the most successful piece of scheduling innovation in modern women's cricket and other boards have copied it.

The men's series has never been restructured this way and never will be; the Ashes in its traditional form is five Tests and nothing else, as our history of the Ashes sets out.

World titles and the players who won them

England have won the 50-over World Cup four times and the global T20 tournament once, in 2009, when they took both in the same year.

Tournament	Year	Notes
World Cup	1973	The first World Cup in cricket, staged in England
World Cup	1993	Won on home soil, the final at Lord's
World Cup	2009	Won in Australia
World T20	2009	The inaugural edition, won in England
World Cup	2017	Won at Lord's, beating India by nine runs

The 2017 final is the match most people remember, and correctly. India were 191 for 3 chasing 229 with more than seven overs left. Anya Shrubsole took the last six wickets to fall, finishing with 6 for 46, and England won by nine runs in front of a full house at Lord's. It was the best advertisement the women's game in this country has ever had, and it arrived three years after the first professional contracts. That is not a coincidence.

The line of players behind those results runs from Maclagan and Archdale through Heyhoe Flint and Enid Bakewell, to Jan Brittin, whose aggregate remains the benchmark in women's Test cricket, to Claire Taylor, who in 2009 became the first woman named among Wisden's five Cricketers of the Year, to Charlotte Edwards, who captained across the amateur-to-professional divide, to Heather Knight, who lifted the trophy in 2017. Our player database covers the modern internationals; the earlier figures are documented mainly in the specialist archives rather than in mainstream statistical records, which is itself part of the story.

What the history explains

Three features of the modern women's game in this country only make sense historically.

The first is the speed of the professional transition. Because the amateur era lasted so long, the shift after 2014 was compressed into a decade rather than spread over a century, which is why the gap between the best and the rest widened so quickly and why depth is still the ECB's stated concern.

The second is the instability of the domestic structure. There was no inherited professional county system for women, so every version of it since 2016 has been designed from scratch, and designs get revised. The men's County Championship has been argued about for 130 years precisely because nobody dares rebuild it. The women's game has no such constraint, for better and worse.

The third is the international programme's shape. England's women play far more white-ball cricket than Test cricket, and that pattern was set in the 1970s when one-day tournaments proved they could be staged and Test tours proved they could not be afforded. Our account of England's white-ball revolution describes the men's version of the same shift, which happened forty years later and for entirely different reasons.

For the wider picture of how the game is organised here, start at the cricket in England hub; for how the sport is followed elsewhere, our cricket around the world section is the place to go, and the quiz will tell you quickly how much of the above you already knew.

Sources and method

The narrative here is assembled from the standard published record of women's cricket in England: match and series results as recorded in the general cricket archives, the documented history of the Women's Cricket Association and its 1998 merger with the ECB, contemporary reporting of the 1973 World Cup and the 2017 World Cup final, and the ECB's own announcements of professional contracts and domestic restructuring.

Where a figure could not be verified against the published record, it has been described qualitatively rather than guessed. Attendances, ticket arrangements, squad composition and current competition structures change and are deliberately not stated here in a form that would date. Statistical conventions used across this site are explained in our statistics glossary.

We are an independent cricket site. We have no affiliation with the England and Wales Cricket Board, the ICC, the MCC or any county or ground mentioned above.