‘She was foul mouthed and never without a Woodbine’
In an extract from Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, Helen Lewis recalls football trailblazer Lily Parr
‘She had a kick like a mule,” her team-mate Joan Whalley recalled. A hundred years ago, Lily Parr was a phenomenon. At 14, when she started playing for a local team in the north of England, she was “hauntingly beautiful in a sullen, dark way, just out of school – if she’d ever bothered to go”, according to her biographer Barbara
Jacobs. She was also “foul-mouthed, never without a Woodbine in her mouth except when she was playing, a kid who took her chances to pocket anything left lying around”.
At its peak, Lily Parr’s team – the Dick, Kerr Ladies – played in front of a crowd of 50,000. They travelled to France to compete. They became celebrities thanks to Pathe newsreels shown in cinemas. Their success suggests the path that women’s sport could have taken throughout the 20th century: well funded, well attended, well loved. Instead, the Football Association snuffed out
Parr’s career, and women’s football as a whole in 1921.
As women like the US captain Megan Rapinoe finally become household names, the sport is only just beginning to recover. From the beginning, women’s football was controversial. In the 19th century, it was seen as alarming and unfeminine. Its pioneers included the Scottish suffragist Helen Matthews, whose players were repeatedly chased off the pitch by angry men in the early 1880s.
But when the First World War came, the absence of so many men left Britain’s munitions factories short-staffed. Women were employed to fill the gaps – on half the pay, of course – and as they entered the workforce, they began to do what men had done. They kicked a ball about during breaks.
The Dick, Kerr & Co factory in Preston had its own sports pitches, and soon a women’s football team had formed. Since the FA had suspended the men’s league, there was no competition for spectators or grounds. And the public’s previous qualms about women’s sport were mollified by the fact that these were charity games: all the ticket money went to injured soldiers and other good causes. Parr, born in 1905, became Dick, Kerr Ladies’ star player at the age of 14, when she was talent-spotted by the team’s manager. She was already 6ft tall, an agile, left-footed winger. The team played local matches first, then – since the war was now over – took on a French team (who, cutely, wore berets on the field instead of caps).
When Parr and her team-mates travelled to France for the rematches, however, the tide had begun to turn again. Their first match ended with an unfriendly pitch invasion, and the girls had to run back to their dressing room. Still, they carried on, and when they returned home, the pinnacle of women’s football in Britain arrived. On Boxing Day 1920, the Dick, Kerr team played their great rivals, St Helens, at Goodison Park, home of Everton. It had a capacity of 53,000. The gate receipts were £3,000 – £500,000 in today’s money.
But the success of women’s football was now attracting serious hostile attention. The FA had restarted the men’s league in the autumn of 1919, by which time more than two million British men had been discharged from the Army. There were fears about the birth rate following the death of so many young men, and women were pressured to leave the workforce and “do their duty” at home. The factory teams began to fall apart, and newspapers began to worry if all this exercise was really good for women.
On Dec 5, 1921, the FA crushed the sport altogether. “The game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged,” it ruled. Women were banned from playing on any professional pitch in Britain, and referees and other officials could not assist in their games.
It was a killer blow. At 16, Parr’s semi-professional career was over. But she carried on as an amateur, and played her last game at the age of 45 (she scored). She died of cancer in 1978. Last year, she became the first female player to get a statue in the National Football Museum in Manchester. She is surrounded by 111 men.
When I began researching my history of feminism, Difficult Women,
I was astonished to discover the life and career of Parr, and the brief popularity of women’s football. Why hadn’t I heard about her? But like many of the women I know, I grew up thinking sport wasn’t for me. Not just football, rugby and other team games: snooker on television is men’s snooker, and there’s no reason women can’t hold a stick and wear a waistcoat. Darts is men’s darts, even though there’s no physical reason women can’t grow ponytails, drink pints of bitter and have absurd nicknames.
When the FA effectively destroyed women’s professional football in 1921, Parr was denied the career she deserved. Just over half a century later, a talented girl called Theresa Bennett was chosen to play for a local boys’ team, and she challenged the FA in the courts to let her join it.
Lord Denning denied her request. “Women have many other qualities superior to those of men, but they have not got the strength or stamina to run, to kick or tackle and so forth,” he said. “The law would be an ass and an idiot if it tried to make girls into boys so they could join in allboys’ games.”
I think of Parr, and Bennett, whenever people sagely observe that women’s football does not attract the ticket sales or television viewing figures of the men’s game. Maybe it just isn’t as good? Maybe women are too weak to run, too delicate to tackle? Well, Lily Parr wasn’t.
Perhaps Theresa Bennett wasn’t, either. Give the women’s games a century of investment and infrastructure, and then we’ll talk about how great it can be.
Difficult Women by Helen Lewis is published by Jonathan Cape, Vintage in hardback, £16.99.
The FA effectively destroyed the women’s pro game in 1921