After the 1893 soccer matches hosted in the United States, which only featured women, there started to be a bigger push for women to be allowed to compete in soccer at higher levels, more specifically, the collegiate and amateur levels. In some cases, women would even coach or act as administrators to the team.
Soon after this first women’s soccer game, the United States and other countries like England would enter World War 1, where a majority of young men would go overseas to fight. This large number of men leaving to fight created some problems for production during the war, which women were quickly able to step up and fix by working the factory jobs that a lot of men left for the war. These jobs were often dirty and dangerous, as most of the time they were working in factories that produced supplies for war, like weapons or munitions.
Women all across the world worked in these factories during the war to try and support their home countries, but they also tried to support another way; all 150 of Britain’s women’s soccer clubs played matches to try and gain money for the war effort. There was also an increase in international football matches between women during this time, where in 1920, two years after the war ended, there was an international between France and England that drew 25,000 spectators to watch England win the match 2-0.
After this success, men’s leagues in England began to feel threatened by women’s soccer and wished to protect their revenue stream, so they complained to the English FA about women’s soccer and claimed that the women were too feeble to play on the same fields as the men, and the FA agreed. This led to almost all women’s club teams having to play on public land as they were not allowed to share stadiums and fields with other established men’s clubs. This is a terrible thing to do to the women who held down the production in the country while men were off at war. And the British women’s team seemed more than capable at the time, beating France twice in a week in dominant fashion. But it seems that the only thing that mattered to the men’s clubs was profit, so they made all sorts of negative narratives about women playing sports, how it would hurt their reproductive health, or that they were too feeble to play this sport, which is preposterous.
It is great to see that women’s football has been getting more of the respect it deserves recently, but it still has a troubled past with men dictating whether these women are suitable to play for most of the history of the sport in Europe and America. I hope that as we continue to move forward, women’s sports start to get more of the respect they deserve, and that we can give little girls someone to look up to and allow them to see that women’s professional sports are just as important and respected as men’s.
Leave a Reply