Bowls and Bowling

• Peasant Recreations: Bocce and Petanque/Boule
• Bocce and Petanque: Rules and Play
• Bowls: Rules and Play
• Participation in Bowls
• Indoor Variants
• International Play
• Bowling in North America
• The Future

Bowls and bowling include a group of activities that involve rolling or throwing balls at targets with the intent of hitting or knocking them over. The term “bowls” generally refers to variants of the game played in Europe and the United Kingdom, and “bowling” is the Americanized version of the sport played in the United States. Long dominated by men, bowls and bowling have fairly recently accepted the full participation of women.
Bowls and bowling claim their origins in antiquity. Rolling or throwing small balls at various targets is said to be portrayed in carvings from ancient Mediterranean civilizations, but there are very long gaps in the evidence. Bocce claims to have been played in Italy since the days of classical Rome, with distinctive regional variations. Bocce (literally, “bowls”) and petanque/ boules, played in Italy and France, respectively, are traditional peasant games that were long played exclusively by men.

Peasant Recreations: Bocce and Petanque/Boule

In the Mediterranean countries of Italy and France, these broadly similar games emerged primarily as agents for male bonding. Men took over the sandy or gravel spaces of village squares for play, which was often associated with drinking during the warmer months from April to October. The games have common elements: the small and relatively heavy balls are tossed from a fixed line toward a target. Both have been codified only relatively recently, as they have been adapted to wider usage and urban play.
Bowls, as with many medieval and Renaissance European folk customs, is quite difficult to reconstruct in terms of whether both men and women took part. Only as the game began to be played with formal rules in the late nineteenth century has the role of women been given an occasionally controversial prominence. Many clubs remained all-male in membership.
Significant differences remain between women’s playing as part of family recreation in these sports deeply rooted in European masculine peasant cultures and their part in those games that have been developed in the wider contexts of the white-dominated sections of the former British Empire and North America. That women are confined to amateur status is also an issue; this is perhaps a remnant of the social and religious purity they have long been supposed to represent.
Since the 1980s, however, urbanization has started to break down bocce’s traditional maleness.This has been even more the case in the United States, the country to which it has been most successfully exported along with other aspects of Italian migrant culture. Here it has developed increasingly as a means of family bonding in suburbia; women tend to play within extended domestic teams rather than in separate organizations, but the situation remains very fluid.
Petanque/boule is broadly similar in history, although its spread outside the former French colonial empire owes more to tourists taking the game home to Britain than to ethnic migration. It has been codified since about 1910, having emerged from older games played in southern France.
Bowls, rolling a heavy wooden ball biased with a metal weight toward a small jack, has been played in Britain since at least the Middle Ages, and little-changed versions are still played by exclusively male clubs in a few places, including Lewes and Southampton. A limited amount of evidence shows occasional female participation in more domestic versions during the Tudor and Stuart periods—the great diarist Samuel Pepys played with his wife in the 1660s. But it was with the reemergence and popularization of the masculine game at the end of the nineteenth century that women appeared both as serious, and segregated, contenders.

Bocce and Petanque: Rules and Play

Bocce uses an “alley” or “rink” 18.3 meters long and 2.4 meters wide. As it has become more popular in cities, more indoor facilities have been constructed, which often house several such pitches. Each player tosses a bowl to get as close as possible to a smaller target bowl, the pallino, which has already been thrown to lie at least 1.4 meters beyond a central regulator peg.The player usually walks up to do this within a separate area. Competitors may play either as singles with two shots each or in teams of up to six people with four shots each. Bocce is organized into various regional and national federations but, until recently, had no organized international competition because it was played largely in Italy.
The name petanque means, literally, “feet tied together.” This refers to the standing position from which the metal boule (“bowl”) is thrown at the small wooden target, the cochonnet, which has been tossed some 6 to 10 meters into a space roughly 12 meters by 1.3 meters. Scoring depends on the player’s skill in getting a bowl closer to the target than the opponent’s bowl. In the 1980s indoor urban arenas extended the playing season to year-round. Codification led in 1945 to the organization of a national body, the Federation Francaise de Petanque et Jeu Provencal and eventually to world championships as visitors from neighboring countries, as well as those in the former French empire, took up the game.
One major factor in opening play up to women came with the formation of a British Petanque Association in 1974 (now with 320 clubs and 4,000 members), at a time when they were being admitted more readily, in southern England at least, to pubs.While some women play independently in league games, their partners are drawn largely from their families and both sexes, reflecting the domestication of a previously singularly masculine preserve.This domestication is even more pronounced when it is remembered that most games are recreational and played on family space in gardens or vacation sites.

Bowls: Rules and Play

There are two main versions of the modern game, both played seasonally out of doors, with broad similarities. The “lawn” version is played on level grass greens.These are squares of between 31 and 41 meters that are usually divided into rinks of up to 5.5 meters wide, to allow several matches to be played side by side. The green is surrounded by a shallow ditch and a bank at least 23 centimeters high.
The second version, called the “crown” version, may be played on either a square or a rectangular area, but it must be a minimum of 25 meters wide. It usually rises to a central crown up to 35 centimeters high. Both games use “woods,” now usually made of artificial materials, which are “biased,” weighted to one side, so that a direct line is virtually impossible.These are bowled at a smaller “jack” up to 6.4 centimeters in diameter. Players, grouped in various combinations, usually play with up to four bowls each, the winner being the player those wood comes closest to the jack.

Participation in Bowls

Bowls was frequently and inaccurately portrayed as a semisedentary game for the middle-aged. At the beginning of the twentieth century, male clubs were recognized, in a semipublic and partly humorous way, as a refuge from both overdomestication and feminine domination. The first national organization, the English Bowling Association (EBA), was founded for men in 1903, dominated initially by the aging and irascible cricket hero, Dr.W. G. Grace. It was followed in 1926 by the rival English Bowling Federation (EBF) and by the British Crown Green Association, first begun in 1903 but reorganized in 1932. For flat green players national championships are provided by the EBA in southern England and by the EBF in the Midlands. Crown Green players have had a national championship since 1878, reorganized in 1907 as theWaterloo Cup, held in the northern seaside resort of Blackpool.
Eventually a case was advanced that play would benefit women in two ways. It would improve the health of women who were excluded from more active pursuits by age and convention, and it would also extend the women’s role from the more traditional one of making teas for visiting teams. The “ladies” became “women” players. Playing was also promoted as an additional means of inculcating graceful movement. Such pressures led the London authorities to make limited separate playing facilities in public parks available for women in 1906.
Most developments since then have seen an uneasy coexistence with men’s clubs on both private and public spaces.Women have progressed more rapidly in the “lawn” game, with its flat greens, in the predominantly southern and middle-class areas, than in the “crown” game, with its uneven greens and semiprofessionalism, in more northern and working-class towns. The latter has often been associated with gambling, supposedly a male activity.The first specifically female club was probably founded in 1910 in Kingston Canbury, near London. The great boom came in the decade after the end of World War I, when bowls became a somewhat unlikely tool in the growth of women’s independence.
Although British women moved steadily toward greater playing organization, this was one area where the island’s power did not automatically cause it to lead in imperial developments.The slightly freer culture of white groups in some of the colonies had already led South Africa and Australia to form women’s bowls associations and England’s leading women lawn bowls players followed suit, opting for the purposefulsounding English Women’s Bowling Association, or EWBA (a rival Ladies’ Association was very shortlived).
The EWBA was founded in 1931 (twenty-eight years after the men’s), with the support of many male players, and grew rapidly thereafter, pulling many existing county associations together and prompting the formation of new ones. Eventually it grew to have almost 2,000 affiliated clubs. It was matched, on a smaller scale, by the emergence in 1957 of the EnglishWomen’s Bowling Federation, for the crown green game.The two bodies’ regional influence has closely matched the distribution and the social cachet of their parallel sports. Their most significant role has been in organizing ladders of championships up to international level. Perhaps the peak of recognition for the lawn game came with its inclusion in the Commonwealth Games in 1982. The full age range is now well represented, and the playing of matches has had to adapt to the sharply changing women’s employment patterns of Britain since the 1960s. Weekday play still favors those who are retired.
Although there are honorific prizes in the womenonly lawn tournaments—culminating in the annual championships held for years in the Sussex seaside resort of Worthing—any hint of professionalism has been firmly resisted in women’s lawn bowls. By comparison, the crown variant has developed a women’s version of the male semi- and fully professional sponsored tournaments firmly located in the north of England. Early competition prizes in the 1930s consisted largely of useful domestic goods.
After World War II, financial incentives began to appear, although at a level much below the male equivalents. With sponsorship, the top champions could win thousands of pounds by the 1980s, although they were still a long way from the more obviously glamorous women’s sports, even when their matches were televised. The key change came with the organization in 1977 of a women’s annual Waterloo Championship, named after the long-established male one. Several thousand women now take part in this circuit, but few are fully professional.

Indoor Variants

Women players have also found a new outlet in the latetwentieth- century development of a previously eccentric minority version of the sport, indoor bowls, usually played on special carpets up to 46 meters long in shared multipurpose halls. Over 250 clubs in England have emerged to follow this winter game, often with membership drawn largely from the seasonally restricted outdoor game. It has its own hierarchy of tournaments, largely under the auspices of the National Indoor Bowls Council, formed in 1964, but a great deal of the play is between older husbands and wives, another extension of domestic bonding.

International Play

As with a number of other quintessentially British sports, women’s bowls has spread among Anglophiles in the United States as well as throughout the former British Empire. As with cricket, its following in the United States is limited and strongest among the eastern seaboard states, where women play as part of the approximately 7,000 players affiliated with the American Lawn Bowls Association, formed in 1915. But it is deeply rooted in the dominant white suburban cultures of South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. In Australia, in particular, it is often an arena for sharp clashes between women themselves over issues such as dress and apparent cultural dependency on Britain’s former power. It is also a major target of semiaffectionate male criticism because of Australia’s uneasy history of macho male cultural dominance.The formidable dedication of many female bowlers is often portrayed as more of a threat to male power than the more traditional restrictions expected from domesticity.

Bowling in North America

The various games that bowl at skittles or pins grew largely as an Americanization of European men’s play linked with taverns and pubs, more often played indoors than outside. As such, they had a distinctly working-class following tied to a culture formed around recreational alcohol consumption. In this setting, views on the role of women in these games have been ambivalent. It was with the popularization in the United States of tenpin bowling (and its Canadian variations) that women emerged more significantly, although some historians have pointed out that the greatest female following is blue-collar in its origins.When bowling became a respectable family activity in the 1950s, women usually entered it as wives or daughters playing alongside their menfolk in friendly games—it had become another wholesome prop to suburban lifestyles, an image it has largely retained.That move had accompanied its mechanization and the shift to larger, specialist premises that attracted larger groups. As a way of meeting high investment costs, promoters set out to popularize bowling among women.
Women have gradually emerged as independent players, and it is no accident that a number of the standard rule manuals are written by women.When local leagues emerged to play, women were quick to organize. The overall rules were standardized by the essentially male American Bowling Congress, founded in 1895, and the Women’s International Bowling Congress, a women’s organization that emerged in 1916, well before the game assumed its mantle of suburban respectability— although it is said that their presence led to a rapid cleanup of the alleys.The 1950s brought an increasing professionalism with commercial sponsorship. A Professional Women’s Bowling Association (later changed to “Tour”) was formed in 1959, a year after its male equivalent, the Professional Bowlers’ Association, which had 2,000 members.
At this level of the sport, women’s participation is relatively small and sparsely funded by male standards, although play is vibrant and important as one aspect of career development in sport and as a source of models for playing performance. The four major events on the women’s tour are the Bowling Proprietor’s Association of America U.S. Open, the Women’s International Bowling Congress Queens, Sam’s Town Invitational, and the WPBA National Championship. The leading women bowlers earn only about 60 percent of that earned by the leading men. For example, in 1997 the earnings of the top ten men ranged from $75,000 to $166,000, while for women the figure fell between $44,000 and $117,000. Altogether 7 million men and women play in organized U.S. leagues. The various alley games have largely involved women at local amateur and domestic recreational levels, particularly when exported overseas to such places as Britain.

The Future
For both sexes, bowling offers various advantages that make its continued growth likely, on both professional and recreational levels. Many communities have bowling alleys, and casual play requires no serious investment of time or money. Provided prize money keeps pace with interest, more women may take up professional bowling. In the 1990s the sport became a symbol of the supposed decline of family recreational activities as well as reflecting a less sociable work culture, but there has recently been a resurgence.Whether the North American form of bowling will spread further abroad remains an open question.