A better half for women players
NATIONAL FOOTBALL MUSEUM EXHIBITION AIMS TO 50 PER CENT FEMALE
NATIONAL Football Museum curator Belinda Scarlett feels content planned for this year and 2022 will mark an important step in the organisation’s work regarding women in the game.
The Manchester-based museum, shut for much of the past 12 months due to the coronavirus pandemic, last week announced it is planning to reopen on May 27.
In 2019, it stated it was aiming to increase representation of women in football to 50 per cent.
When it reopens, a new exhibition will be on display showcasing its English Football Hall of Fame, which will have had new inductees announced.
Eighteen women have been inducted to date, and Scarlett said of the exhibition that “we’ll be looking to get as close to that 50 per cent representation as we can”.
A new gallery focusing on the Hall of Fame’s first female inductee Lily Parr, a statue of whom was unveiled at the museum in 2019, is then to open this summer.
Prolific goalscorer Parr was a key figure both before and after the Football Association imposed a ban on women playing on its member grounds 100 years ago this year.
Regarding Parr, who is said to have scored close to 1,000 goals for the famous Dick, Kerr Ladies team, Scarlett told the PA news agency: “She didn’t stop playing because the FA ban happened – she had so much tenacity and continued to play and fight for her right to play. I think she’s become a symbol of that generation of women that not only progressed women’s football so far but then had to live through that FA ban from 1921.
“It’s the first time we will have dedicated such a significant space to a female footballer.”
There are also plans for a women’s football exhibition to open in February 2022 ahead of the England-hosted European Championship that summer.
“It will be a celebration of where women’s football has come in the past 100 years and also look at what are the problems still in the women’s game, what progress has been made, where might it be after the women’s Euros,” Scarlett said. “I’m really excited - I can see this year and next being a really important time for the women’s game and for the museum.”
The museum’s women’s football content was significantly boosted by its 2016 purchase, using a Heritage Lottery Fund grant, of a collection of memorabilia put together by American coach Chris Unger, which Scarlett says ‘really allowed us to completely change our focus when it came to women’s football.’