FEMINIST goals
Who MARION McMULLEN looks at the women cracked pioneered the beautiful game... until men years ago down on their burgeoning success 100
THEY were the darlings of the football pitch and cheered on by thousands.
Women’s football was thriving more than 100 years ago... until the FA banned its members from allowing women to play at their grounds, effectively killing the professional and international women’s game overnight.
While they could still play football, women were only allowed to compete at a recreational level – a ban only lifted in 1971. The FA deemed the sport “quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”.
The reality was that the women were attracting bigger crowds to their games than many of the male sides. Now the beautiful game is attracting top sportswomen and all eyes will be on the Women’s Euro 2022 tournament this summer.
Today’s players are following in the footsteps of the early pioneering teams that dominated the game before the Second World War. One of the most successful was the Preston-based Dick, Kerr’s Ladies. Their story began during the First World War, with the team drawn from female workers making bullets and shells at a munitions factory founded by William Dick and John Kerr.
The women began playing during their breaks and then took part in a fundraiser against another munitions factory to aid the war efforts. Their Christmas Day match in 1917 took place before a 10,000-strong crowd at Preston North End’s Deepdale ground and raised £600.
It was the start of a success story that saw them and other women-only teams seeing bigger attendances than their male counterparts.
Women played for teams like Blyth Spartans, Doncaster and Bentley Ladies, Bolckow Vaughan, Rutherglen Ladies, Stoke
Ladies and Edinburgh City Girls.
But the Dick,
Kerr Ladies FC were Britain’s leading team and they took part in the first women’s international game in 1920 when they beat a French XI 2-0 in front of a crowd of 25,000 fans in Stockbecause port. They even did tours of Canada and America. According to the Football Association, the record attendance for a women’s game in English football was the 53,000 that saw Dick, Kerr Ladies beat St Helens Ladies 4-0 at Goodison Park in 1920. They played the French women’s team again in 1925 in aid of the shipwrecked mariners. Fittingly their opponents arrived for the game wearing berets.
Lily Parr was one of football’s first female superstars. One of seven children, she is said to have started playing football with her brothers on waste ground near the family home. She went on to represent the famous Dick, Kerr Ladies team – which was renamed Preston Ladies – in the early 20th century. Parr is thought to have scored around 1,000 goals in a career spanning more than 30 years.
The St Helens native, who also worked as a nurse at Preston’s Whittingham psychiatric hospital, began playing professionally when she was 14. The 6ft tall, chain-smoking, left-footed winger only hung up her boots in 1951. She was the first female player to be inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame 20 years ago.
National Football Museum curator Belinda Scarlett noted at the time: “She didn’t stop playing the FA ban happened. She had so much tenacity and continued to play and fight for her right to play.”
UK-based online genealogy service Findmypast recently found details of fellow early female footballer and athlete Alice Wood in the 1921 Census.
Alice was born in 1899 and played midfield for Dick, Kerr Ladies FC. She was also a sprinter and one of the first women to race under Amateur Athletic Association of England laws. Findmypast tracked down her living relatives and discovered that Alice inspired a long line of female athletes, competing at the top level of sport. Her granddaughters Gaynor and Yvonne Swanley both swam competitively – with Gaynor representing Britain at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and great granddaughter Lauren Quigley recently represented England at the Commonwealth Games.
Alice’s old team were sporting superstars in their heyday. Now their modern counterparts are showing that women’s football is stronger than ever.
See the 1921 Census online at findmypast.co.uk, or in person at The National Archives in Kew, the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and the Manchester Central Library