When you were small did you fantasise about wearing claret and blue and scoring the winning goal in front of a roaring crowd at Upton Park? So did I.
Whether you only ever played for your school or a local youth side or were talented enough to reach the heady heights of the professional game, I would wager that the majority of you had the opportunity to play football on a marked out pitch with a referee and proper goalposts.
As a girl born in 1965 I could only look on longingly at the boys’ youth teams playing over our local park on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. During the 1970s little girls were simply not expected to want to play organised football so no provision was made for us, at least not where I grew up on the Essex/East London border. So I had to content myself with games in the road or over the park with the boys who lived down my street. I did have one girl friend at school who was as mad about football as I was and I was green with envy because her dad took her to Upton Park every home game to sit in the mysteriously named chicken run – you can’t imagine the images that conjured up in my 9 year old mind! I can vividly remember the day that we discussed how we were going to join one of the newly formed ladies teams that we’d heard of when we reached the age of 16. In the meantime we endeavoured to practise our skills by ourselves in the pouring rain and mud over a small rec near her house, before trailing back to look at her WHU programmes and dream. Her horrified mum took one look at our bedraggled muddy state and promptly threw us both in the shower. As I walked home in clothes two sizes too big for me I vowed that one day I would be a footballer.
As it transpired, 16 came and went and love and life got in the way and I transferred my longing to play the game into supporting my then boyfriend/husband in his footballing career. It’s a decision that I deeply regret and I honestly believe that if I’d had the opportunity to be involved in grass roots football at a young age then I would have naturally progressed into the women’s game. At the time I just accepted that that’s the way things were, football was for boys and I was some kind of anomaly. It was only with the advent of the internet that I learned that I had been the victim of a great sporting injustice.
The women’s game has a long and interesting history and can even be traced back to ancient times. Fast forward to the 1890s and women’s football in England was well developed with a national team structure and was growing in popularity; one north London team reportedly attracted a 10,000 gate to a game at Crouch End before the turn of the century. However, it was the outbreak of war in 1914 which really saw the women’s game come into its own.
Women were drafted in great numbers to the munitions factories to keep the wheels of the war machine turning and they became known as the ‘Munitionettes’. The Government appointed women welfare supervisors to oversee the well-being of these women and they also encouraged the development of sporting activities. One of those activities was football, and the beautiful game became the official sport of the munitions girls. Almost every factory in the UK involved in war work had a ladies football team; but it was at Dick, Kerr & Co Limited in Preston that the most successful team in the history of women’s football was formed. This team of ordinary factory girls quite literally took the country by storm; and on Christmas Day 1917 10,000 spectators came to the home of Preston North End to witness the start of the most phenomenal success story in the history of women’s sport. Dick, Kerr Ladies notched up the first of many famous victories and £600 was raised for the wounded soldiers, a sum today that would be worth over £38,000. What started out as a means to raise money for the war effort proved to be a bigger success than anyone could ever have imagined and it became obvious that women’s football was a real crowd pleaser.
In the early 1920’s the national enthusiasm for Dick, Kerr Ladies (DKL) was on a par with that for the professional men’s game. DKL had earned themselves the reputation of being the premier team in England and the charities they were playing for recognised ‘what a little gold mine these girls were’. By 1921 the popularity of DKL was at its peak. They were the team that everyone wanted to see and they were being booked to play an average of two games a week. Because of their popularity they were even feted as the unofficial England team and they travelled to Europe and North America to play in exhibition matches. When they arrived in Canada to find that their scheduled games would not be allowed, they travelled to the USA to play a number of men’s club teams.
The fact is that during those post war years women’s football was attracting crowds far in excess of many of the men’s games. On Boxing Day 1920 Dick, Kerr Ladies played against St Helen’s in front of 53,000 people at Goodison Park, with thousands more locked outside. That same year the biggest crowd at a men’s match was 37,545 at 1st Division Chelsea, 2nd Division West Ham attracted 20,100, Division 3 South Millwall 16,650, and Division 3 North Stockport 11,050. The remainder of the new Division 3 North and South could only attract crowds of between 2,500 – 9,500 people; and with the Dick, Kerr Ladies regularly attracting crowds in excess of 30,000 it isn’t difficult to see why men felt threatened by the success of the women’s game.
At its inception women’s football was embraced by The FA for the patriotic nature of their games but by now it was offending the middle class patriarchy of The FA’s ruling council and perhaps more importantly, it was stealing the limelight from the men’s game. It all came to a head on 5th December 1921 when The FA banned women’s football and effectively changed the course of the beautiful game forever. The minutes of the meeting read as follows:
“Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, the Council feel impelled to express their strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.
Complaints have also been made as to the conditions under which some of these 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 request clubs belonging to the association to refuse the use of their grounds for such matches”.
It was as easy as that. The axe had fallen on women’s football and fifty years of prejudice and exclusion were to follow. Some members of the medical profession also supported The FA’s ruling, stating that football was a dangerous pursuit for women and could seriously affect their fertility. It was probably the biggest sporting injustice of the last century.
As a result we are a nation that for generations has been brought up with the belief that football is a man’s game; but only because men wanted it that way in order to keep it for themselves. History does prove it to be otherwise but the glittering legacy of women’s football has been conveniently buried and largely forgotten. If only women’s football had been allowed to prosper and grow at the same pace as their male counterparts, just imagine where it would be today.
Women’s football only come back under the auspices of The FA in 1969 when they lifted the ban on women’s teams becoming members. This meant that they were finally allowed access to affiliated pitches and referees; but still only as amateurs. Inevitably, with the women’s game pushed back into relative infancy there was no female grass roots infrastructure for the likes of my generation in the 1970s; and West Ham Ladies wasn’t founded until 1992, so sadly my childhood dreams of playing in claret and blue were a bubble that had long since burst. For me personally there’s scant consolation in the fact that women’s football is slowly beginning to regain the recognition and popularity that it had already worked so hard to gain a century ago; but at least subsequent generations of young women are back in their rightful place on the pitch.
Ironically, at the time of writing, if you Google ‘history of women’s football’ and click on the link to the FA’s website you are directed to this: Please Keep Off The Grass.
With thanks to Gail Newsham for the majority of the information on Dick, Kerr Ladies.