The Early Days of Women’s Football- Week 13

In “Women and Soccer in the Early Twentieth Century” and second chapter from “The History of Women’s Football”, we see that women’s football was well and truly in its earliest stages. As described in “The History of Women’s Football”, women playing football was heavily frowned upon. Men went off to fight overseas during World War 1 which allowed women to take over in American societies and play roles that they traditionally hadn’t been in before. This shift of course extended to sports, where women stepped onto the pitch and built something hugely popular. The scale of that popularity was huge, with matches drawing crowds up to 55,000, and teams like Dick, Kerr’s Ladies dominating, winning 58 out of 59 games at one point while raising a considerable amount of money for charity. 

In “Women and Soccer in the Early Twentieth Century” women like Doris and Helen Clark helped develop the sport in the United States by organizing women’s football matches in the 1910s. The chapter focuses mainly on journalism by women during this time period, but there is an inherent connection to soccer that shows women were an important part of this expanding space in sport. The idea that women like Doris and Helen “showed that women could not only play the game but successfully take on other important roles in the sport” reflects a reality that, considering the rising popularity of the women’s game nowadays, transcends time.

Both chapters emphasize how quickly this success was seen as a problem. Even after the war, women’s football remained popular, which prompted the men who returned from war to claim the sport was not a female sport. The FA’s official statement that football was “quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged” reveals how sexism was used to protect the men’s game while undermining the growth and popularity that the women’s game had in such a short period of time, as well as the different opportunities that it gave to many women even if they didn’t play the sport.

These chapters tell us the sad story of rapid growth followed by suppression. Women’s football definitely had the audience and organization to succeed, but society as a whole was not ready to accept that.