SPEEDY WOMEN
A Brief History of Women’s Football in the United Kingdom
The first women’s football match in the United Kingdom was recorded May 9, 1881. It was reported in The Glasgow Herald, which noted nearly 1,000 persons in attendance, and seemed to generally appreciate the idea of the match, calling it “rather novel.” This first series of matches had been organized as more of an entertaining spectacle than a true display of sporting prowess. The players were a collection of dancers and other performers, drawn together under the management of theatre professionals. At subsequent matches, angry crowds stormed the field, forcing the players to flee.
Three years later, in 1894, Nettie Honeyball and Phoebe Smith placed an advertisement in The Graphic, seeking to recruit players for what would become the British Ladies’ Football Club. The BLFC’s players were also primarily of lower-class, theatre and dance backgrounds, but they were encouraged to take on the appearance of upper middle class ladies, to make them more appealing to the general public in a time when working women were seen as rough and immoral, often blamed for societal ills. Honeyball and the teams’ financier, Lady Florence Dixie, also encouraged a genuine love and appreciation for the game of football, with Lady Dixie in particular making her funding contingent that “the girls should enter into the spirit of the game with heart and soul.”
Following the British Ladies first match in March 1895, The Evening Standard remarked: “The probability is, we trust, that in a very short time the Club will die a natural and unlamented death. … Neither by training, nor for the most part by constitution, are women adapted for games like football, which are necessarily rough.”
Reports vary on the length of the BLFC’s tenure. They played over 100 games between 1895 and 1897, and while no games are recorded after that time, a 1905 newspaper announced an upcoming charity match between the British Ladies and a men’s team.
SPOTLIGHT:
Emma Clarke, Lost Lioness (1876-1925)
Born in 1876, one of fourteen children, Emma Clarke is recognized as Britain’s first known black female footballer, though she almost wasn’t recognized at all. In 2017, artist and historian Stuart Gibbs chanced on an 1896 newspaper report of a British Ladies Football Club match that referred to of a “coloured lady of Dutch build” and attached that description to the team’s goalkeeper, Carrie Boustead. Over the next seven months, Boustead was hailed as the first black female player, until Gibbs was able to find a photograph of the team and discovered his mistake — the player who had served as a goalkeeper during that match was another woman named Emma Clarke. One of Clarke’s sisters, Jane, was also a member of the team, and historians believe a third Clarke sister, Mary, may also have played. As the Clarke sisters have only recently become a subject of study, very little is known about their lives off the pitch. Emma Clarke is believed to have ended her career in 1903, a period when interest in women’s football was waning, after which she married and had children. She is believed to have died in 1925, at the age of 53. In 2019, a commemorative plaque was placed in her honor, in London.
The Munitionettes Take to the Pitch
The early 20th century saw a decline in women’s football being played for its own sake, with most public matches taking place as one-off events rather than organized play. Then came the First World War, and with it, a change in how women operated within society as a whole. As men were drafted and sent off to the front lines, women moved in to the jobs they left behind, more physically demanding work than women had been permitted to take on previously. According to Suzanne Wrack, author of A Woman's Game: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Women's Football, this change was not “a gradual, natural shift in the outlook of society, but a sudden and total paradigm change.” This directly affected the development in women’s football in a few ways. For one thing, the vast majority of women were “working women” now, easing some — but only some — of the scrutiny and blame laid on working women of the past. For another, as many women were now engaged in challenging and sometimes dangerous work, creating munitions and other heavy materials in support of the war effort, the argument that simply playing football was too “unsuitable” for a woman’s delicate constitution became less plausible.
In the factories, these new members of the workforce, sometimes called “Munitionettes,” were drawn into the sport of football the same way that their male counterparts had before them, playing “footie” with their co-workers during lunch breaks and tea times, creating camaraderie and keeping up morale as the war stretched on. This eventually led to the formation of teams, representing the factories where the players worked. The best known among these teams was Dick, Kerr Ladies, named for Dick, Kerr & Co., in Preston, Lancashire, Northern England. Men’s professional football had been put on hold during the war, and as a result the women’s matches now attracted thousands of attendees. Dick, Kerr Ladies, along with other factory teams, played against each other at public events and fundraisers throughout the war, raising large sums of money for the soldiers and others in need.
As the war ended, women were forced out of their factory jobs, but women’s football matches continued to be a reliable attraction for fundraising, bringing in money to support hospitals and other healthcare expenses, as the debate over a nationalized healthcare service played out in Parliament. Dick, Kerr Ladies in particular was known to be a popular and especially skilled team. In December, 1920, following a series of matches against a French team, which saw them tour across England and France, the Dick, Kerr homecoming game drew a crowd of 53,000 people, with thousands more turned away at the gate. This attendance record has stood for 92 years, until the London 2012 Olympics.
However, as the players used their love of the sport to bring money and attention to their own working-class causes, they drew criticism from the ruling classes. For example, in March 1921, Dick, Kerr Ladies and other teams chose to raise money for miners who had been forced out of work when the mines were privatized. This contributed to the Football Association’s decision, later that year, to officially ban the use of any Association-affiliated sport venue from holding or promoting women’s matches. They further declared the sport “unsuitable for females,” physically and mentally, and even cast suspicion on what exactly they had been doing with the funds their matches had raised.
The Football Association’s Consultative Committee
(December 5, 1921)
Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, Council felt impelled to express the strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged.
Complaints have also been made as to the conditions under which some of the matches have been arranged and played, and the appropriation of receipts to other than charitable objects. The Council are further of the opinion that an excessive proportion of the receipts are absorbed in expenses and an inadequate percentage devoted to charitable objects.
For these reasons the Council requests the Clubs belonging to the Association refuse the use of their grounds for such matches.
SPOTLIGHT:
Lily Parr, Queer Pioneer (1905-1978)
Lily Parr, star of the Dick, Kerr Ladies football team, was born in 1905. She developed her skills on the pitch through play with her brothers as a child, earning the “lethal left foot” that would make her career by the age of thirteen. She joined her local team, St. Helens Ladies, the following year. After St. Helens defeated Dick, Kerr Ladies in a match, Dick, Kerr’s manager recruited her for his own team, and offered her a job in the factory as well. Parr later faced her original team, St. Helens, in Dick, Kerr’s historic Boxing Day match in 1920, dealing them a 4-0 defeat.
Parr became a nurse after World War I. She met Mary, the woman she would spend the rest of her life with, as a fellow nurse at Whittingham Mental Hospital. Parr and Mary lived their lives together openly, in the face of prejudice and hostilities against gay people — homosexuality between men was legally outlawed in England during this time.
Parr scored nearly 1,000 goals over her 30-year career, retiring from football in 1951. She died in 1978, of breast cancer, at the age of 73. In 2002, Parr was the first woman inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in Manchester. In 2019, she was further honored with a statue on the museum grounds.
Many teams continued playing after the ban keeping the sport of women’s football alive on the margins. However, as Wrack writes, “the effect of the ban was devastating because it extinguished the crowd sizes … Teams were forced into parks and friendly rugby or athletics clubs, but the stadium capacity offered by men’s football clubs could not be matched.” The Dick, Kerr Ladies team continued playing until 1965, when a dearth of player interest forced them to disband, just five years before the Football Association’s ban was finally lifted.
PITCH PERFECT:
Poets & Playwrights
Sabrina Mahfouz is a writer, performer, and educator. She has written several award-winning plays, including Chef (2014), Clean (2012), Dry Ice (2011), and the children’s show Zeraffa Giraffa (2018). Her poetry collection, How You Might Know Me, was published in 2017, and she has contributed poems to over ten anthologies, including The Good Immigrant in 2016. Mahfouz founded the Great Wash Workshops, supporting working-class writers, and the Critics of Colour Collective, which works toward establishing equity in arts criticism. Mahfouz was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.
Hollie McNish describes herself as a “writer who loves writing.” She has published several poetry collections, most recently Slug: and other things I’ve been told to hate, in 2022. Earlier collections include Plum (2017), Cherry Pie (2015), and her poetic memoir Nobody Told Me: Poetry and Parenthood (2016), which won the Ted Hughes prize for new work in poetry.
See a selection of poems performed by the playwrights HERE.
GLOSSARY
general terms
GCSEs
General Certificate of Secondary Education, a series of educational assessments for UK students, required for qualification in specific school subjects. Roughly equivalent to the high school diploma in the U.S.
weedy (women)
physically weak in appearance
(suitcase in) the boot
the trunk of a car
“free chicken”
a gift, as in a free chicken meal
biro
a ballpoint pen, after the Biro brand name
sports corner!
offside
In association football, a player is considered “offside” if, while their team is in control of the ball, that player is ahead of the ball, and closer to the opposing team’s goal than both the ball and the second-to-last opposing player. The rule is designed to keep the “attacking” team from taking unfair advantage by camping at the opposing team’s goal line.
match of the week
A reference to the sports highlights program Match of the Week, a weekly television show that aired on Anglia TV from 1962 to 1983. Currently, BBC One’s Match of the Day draws over 2 million viewers.
the England team
The England women’s national football team, nicknamed the Lionesses. The team has qualified for the FIFA Women’s World Cup seven times, reaching third place in 2015. They won the UEFA Women’s Championship in 2022.
the pitch
The field on which UK football is played.
the FA
The Football Association, founded in 1863, oversees all competitive football matches within England, and appoints all managers for national teams.