A Woman’s Game

Guardian Faber 256pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £11.99

“The fall of women’s football” can be “precisely dated”, said Simon Kuper in The Spectator. On Boxing Day 1920, 53,000 paying spectators watched Dick, Kerr Ladies FC (pictured) – a team based at a Preston munitions factory – beat St Helen’s 4-0 at Goodison Park. This was “too much for the men at the Football Association”: soon after, they declared the game “quite unsuitable for females”, and prohibited men’s clubs from letting women use their fields – in effect introducing a ban on women’s football that would take 50 years to be lifted. In this absorbing history, Suzanne Wrack, the women’s football correspondent for The Guardian, traces the female game’s “rocky road”, and argues that even today – when it is “roaring back” – it is still heavily handicapped by its “50-year restraint”. Although Wrack can be a bit “wonkish” at times, her book is an “impassioned rescue” of the game’s brave female pioneers, and “a joyous look ahead to better days”.

Wrack argues that “for women, the mere act of playing football is a feminist one”, said Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. She shows how the game rose in tandem with the suffrage movement, and that its revival in the 1960s and 1970s was linked to feminism’s second wave. Today, she argues, activism still plays an important role: the US star Megan Rapinoe – Fifa top women’s player in 2019 – is a self-declared “walking protest”, who “refused to go to the White House during Donald Trump’s presidency”. There’s a bit too much politics in

A Woman’s Game, which “squeezes out the human side”, said Melanie Reid in The Times. I would have liked to learn more about today’s players. Still, Wrack is a “hard-hitting and clear-sighted” writer, and her book is a useful reminder that for all its recent progress, women’s football still has a long way to go.