This weeks reading’s dove into the early days of the beautiful game’s origins with women and the women’s game.
These two pieces observed the development of the women’s soccer across the globe – although more specifically the UK and USA (however also touching on parts of South America & the rest of Europe). Throughout both readings the authors commented on the political, cultural, and economic factors that led to, and derived from, women beginning to play soccer.
Soccer developed very differently in the USA and UK, the former best being described as “use sport to develop ‘womanly qualities’ preserve reproductive health, and provide recreational opportunities for all students” and the latter as “the business model of women’s football mirrored that of men’s football: attracting large paying crowds through advance publicity and playing games in large stadiums, therefore maximizing the sums of earned”
Even though it is seen through two different scopes, the rise of women playing soccer goes hand-in-hand with the rise of opportunity, wether educationally or vocationally. In the US the rise of soccer is tied to education and college programs having the opportunity for women to play sports (tying in directly to the quote from earlier). On the other hand, soccer in the UK saw a sharp incline due to men going to war and women taking their jobs in factories.
Additionally, the development in both countries came with political ties as well. In America Doris Clark, a prominent womens soccer player and journalist, is believed to have used her platfrom to promote womens issues. Womens soccer in the UK faced backlash and reprimands as it was believed it would “take over” the mens game.
What highlights some of the differences in the way the sport developed is when Dick, Kerr Ladies came to play in the US (after being banned from playing in the UK) but were not allowed to play against collegiate teams in the US.
I think that these two readings do a tremendous job of laying out the development of the sport in their respective countries and allows a reader to draw interesting conclusions when comparing the two. Most interesting for me was how clear it was that deespite their differences, the development of the game had real effects outside of just the sporting world.
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