A Game for Rough Girls?

A History of Women's Football in Britain

Jean Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135136215
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Can we truly call football England's 'national' game?
How have we arrived at this point of such clear inequality between men's and women's football?

Between 1921 and 1972, women were banned from playing in football League grounds in the UK. Yet in 1998 FIFA declared that "the future is feminine" and that football was the fastest growing sport for women globally.

The result of several years of original research, the book traces the continuities in women's participation since the beginnings of the game, and highlights the significant moments that have influenced current practice. The text provides:

*insight into the communities and individual experiences of players, fans, investors, administrators and coaches
*examination of the attitudes and role of national and international associations
*analysis of the development of the professional game
*comparisons with women's football in mainland Europe, the USA and Africa.

A Game for Rough Girls is the first text to properly theorize the development of the game. Examining recreational and elite levels, the author provides a thorough critique, placing women's experience in the context of broader cultural and sports studies debates on social change, gender, power and global economics.

Part I

A game for rough girls?¹

Women’s football in Britain

Serious fun

Contemporary perspectives on women’s football in Britain

Our complexions disprove that football is bad for us. Our complexions are our own. We have no need for powder puffs or toilet cream, and we don’t keep late hours.¹

Women’s football has been part of the social and cultural history of Britain for over a century. Nevertheless, female players today are most often depicted in the media as unconventional and academics dismiss women’s participation in football more broadly before the 1990s as worthy of oversight.² When the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 was drafted to exempt professional football specifically and competitive sport generally from gains in equality by women, then it seems safe to say that women’s association with football is about more than sport.

It seems to me that football is a game that is excepted from this statute. It is a game in which on all the evidence here the average woman is at a disadvantage to the average man because she has not got the stamina or physique to stand up to men in regard to it … 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.

(Denning, 1978)

This legislation is now almost thirty years old yet section 44, the clause that limits female access to competitive sport, has endured in its original form in spite of other amendments. Since the purpose of the Act was to address archaic conventions of the roles of men and women, to insist on the preservation of essential gender difference in and through sport is both logically and legally questionable. This is one indication of many that the connection between football and women looks set to remain contentious for the foreseeable future. This contested relationship is the starting point for this work and in particular the body of knowledge implied by ‘all the evidence here’ in Denning’s ruling.

So little work has been covered in the specific subject area that it is difficult to draw upon selected themes from writing about football, about women’s experience of team sport particularly or women’s sport generally. The most frequently discussed aspect of women’s football in England in the 1990s is the growth in the number of participants. For example, Richard Holt and Tony Mason suggest that there is evidence of a recent, rapid expansion to over four thousand women’s teams under FA control.

Women’s football … grew dramatically in the 1990s. The number of women’s teams rose from 500 to 4,500 from 1993 to 2000 and the FA announced plans for a professional women’s league along the lines of that in the United States.

(Holt and Mason, 2000: 12)

The figures above refer specifically to England but overestimate the total number of female players in Britain by at least twofold. A decade before, Williams and Woodhouse had also related the rise in participation to patronage from the football authorities, including Premiership and Football League clubs, the Football Trust and the English FA (Williams and Woodhouse, 1991: 100). However, in attempting to find confirmation of a recent, rapid increase a very different view emerged, not least because merely quantifying women’s participation does little to reveal the complexity of the players’ experiences. Precisely because of the tendency to homogenise women in football it seemed necessary to resist describing players as a set of persons with some common status. The confused but persistent stereotypes that a female football player is likely to be a tomboy, a lesbian or looking to swap shirts with supporters raised particular questions, for example. The contempt shown to English female footballers simultaneously trivialises their sporting accomplishments (as in the pejorative ‘play like a girl’) and insists on the feminine as the object of masculine desire (women are supposed to play at being a woman, not at football). Out of the discussions with women and girls at all levels about diverse experiences of playing football, it became increasingly evident that an examination of women’s participation in an outdoor contact team sport which involves competition, co-operation and skill is long overdue.

The unease between the ‘theorists of sport and the ordinary historian’ that Richard Holt has described is a tension that I have tried to resolve:

Sociologists frequently complain that historians lack a conceptual framework for their research, whilst historians tend to feel social theorists require them to compress the diversity of the past into artificially rigid categories and dispense with empirical verification of their theories.

(Holt, 1989: 357)

The challenge was to explore diversity within a structure that enables us to begin to extend our understanding of women’s football, and the project consequently began by collecting views of some of the players as this was a fundamental part of my lived experience of the sport. The interpretation of events, people, texts and context which arises out of that starting point may frustrate those who insist on neutrality as equating to objectivity in research but a value-free framework does not exist. Instead the intention has been to capture some detail of players’ experiences and to discuss this difference against the backdrop of surrounding factors which bear upon the creation and understanding of those subjectivities. There is an immediacy and a transience that often informs administrators’ and players’ actions that is crucial to encapsulate as an example of ‘history from below’. As an example, two women who regularly coach and play football with men made these comments:

And sometimes they look at you like, you know, who’s she? Then you just have to get your head down and get on with it and after a while they forget and you’ve got their respect, especially if you pull off skill moves. So you have to have confidence in your ability and play your own game.

One of them said, ‘Are you his secretary?’ even though I was in boots and kit and so I thought, ‘Right! I’ll have you’ … and I did. I waited until he came to tackle me first time, feinted to the right to go inside and went left and stuck a perfect nutmeg on him. I was laughing so much I couldn’t run with the ball … [laughs] had to pass.

That is, women’s football is distinctly un-monumental. Solutions are often designed to work upon the moment and to accomplish something at the time rather than to stand for something in the future. There is, however, much to observe, applaud and commemorate. The player testimonies are like snapshots that are supplemented by textual excerpts and media clippings from which it is possible to compose a collage of English women’s football. This piecing together of fragmented sources is both the historical method used to express the diversity of women’s football and the conceptual framework, as elements of variety are juxtaposed.

The experience of doing gender in and through football is unavoidable for the male and the female participant, and one reviewer of an early draft of this book offered the perturbed comment, ‘There aren’t many men mentioned here.’ Though not entirely accurate, there was something to this and at several points the evidence suggests that the person who wanted to investigate the place of men in developing women’s football would be rewarded with plenty of primary material. Unlike the reviewer, my feeling when reading a book on football is usually, where are all the women? So while clearly this is a gendered topic, men’s role is contributory to the focus of this work but not a main theme. Space and ambition preclude including most, let alone all of the women who play football in England and so many men who help them to do so are also left out. The idea of gender division, though, is central because it has shaped ideas of equality of opportunity and, indeed, outcome in football in some peculiar respects. Difference as it is used here is quite distinct and contrary to this meaning, as it incorporates contrasting and overlapping opinions of women’s football without this variance necessarily entailing opposition. The strain between the two meanings of difference is significant because at the same time that women express several kinds of freedom when they participate in football, equality is currently contested and unrealisable precisely because there is no consensus about what it means: should the aim be, for example, mixed senior football or separate but equal provision? Should we be developing a professional league for women or allowing elite women to play in the present professional leagues? What kinds of tactics are appropriate in pursuing those objectives? Women interviewees frequently emphasised the similarities between the sexes yet pressed for equal but separate forms of football. This contradiction was intriguing. In trying to examine what was meant, it became clear that participants were not overtly radical in their aspirations for the sport as a whole or in the personal means employed to effect change at club and regional level. Nevertheless, playing football appeared to be more of a lifestyle choice than, say, belonging to a certain gym. For the women who do play, the experience of team sport involving the simultaneous expression of sameness and difference with other players who were usually, but by no means always, also women was sufficiently engaging and celebratory to make it worth taking part. So gender is one of many aspects of players’ identity; its fluctuating importance relative to others. To extend the combination of membership and independence that the players talked about, the chapters in Part I provide more detail on how community and memory is constructed and communicated.

The nature of the topic therefore precludes unequivocal conclusions about a radical or liberal feminist perspective in studying women who play football. Some developments appear to support the position that collaboration between women players and established bureaucracies is the way forward. Proponents would point out that women’s football under FA control has access to increased resources, more structured playing opportunities and centralised administrative co-ordination. Opponents interpret these benefits as largely cosmetic because they have yet to serve as the basis of more far-reaching alteration to the provision of football for women or to the structures of football itself. As this work makes evident, football authorities have acted as superficially tolerant but tight-fisted patrons of women’s football only in the last decade and periods of increased female participation have not led in any direct way to reform of the systems of football itself. So though I subscribe to the view that a radical revision of the place of women, and by extension gender difference, within football is required to bring about fundamental transformation, this will not go far enough for opponents of competitive sport and its values. This line of argument is not pursued here, because most women players who were interviewed in the course of this study did not want to play a different form of football, either as an alternative game or as a critique of the values of sport. Rather, women’s right to play the standard form of the game without modification to the size of the field of play, the length of a match, the number of substitutes and so forth remains a moot point. Over and above this, it is not the point of this discussion to outline what a feminist form of football could and should look like but to give a platform to the historical and contemporary aspects of women’s participation. This said, the data collected here enable an assessment of the balance of conservatism and progressivism in women’s football which could lead to a more widespread discussion of the theoretical repercussions which lead out from the subject.

Part I looks at the historical summary as well as examining two crucial dimensions in more detail to elaborate on the kinds of community and memory in women’s football. In order to explore the past, present and potential future of the sport, female players’ interpretations are juxtaposed with other diverse texts, from newspaper articles and photographs to personal scrapbooks and match programmes. Widespread support for the idea of a different game for women appears, partly, a function of administrative control by male elites but is also as a means of protecting space for female play. Like the consensus over the growth in numbers of women players, this arrangement appears to suit both the football authorities, because of the dynamic image it presents, and women players as it defends their control over the majority of regionalised activity. This is not compatible with another continuity, which is that the women’s game has long called for more financial assistance, media coverage and for female coaches and administrators to be more recognised within the structures of football. One of the broader dilemmas for players and the authorities is about the present and future cultural, economic and social arrangements for women in football in England. In order to summarise why increased participation has yet to translate into more widespread demands for change, some of the popular myths surrounding women’s football are deconstructed.

The widely held view is that that there has been a recent, rapid expansion of female interest and play. How many women are we talking about as football players in England at any one time? Even generous FA interpretations suggest that at best there is one female player for every fifty male players:

There is a total of 2.25 million footballers in England, which includes 750,000 players of school age (say 16 and under) and 41,000 female players. Altogether there are 42,000 football clubs.³

The English FA website in 2000 recorded figures of 700 women’s and 750 girls’ teams. In 2001 it recorded 700 women’s and 1,000 girls’ teams. This difficulty is also apparent in the context of participation in Britain; for example Sheila Begbie reported the 1991 Scottish women’s FA audit as showing 27 affiliated senior teams, 400 member players and 23 qualified coaches. By 1995 this had grown to 194 senior and junior teams, 2,400 players and 184 women coaches (Begbie, 1996: 44–8). In Northern Ireland, the Women’s Football Association of Ireland (WFAI) caters for 6,500 registered players, playing in 350 teams and in the Republic of Ireland, the Ladies’ Football Association of Ireland (LFAI) has approximately 300 teams. In Wales development has been slower and there are around 150 teams with registered players. The situation is complicated by methods used for calculating clubs, for example the number of girls’ teams was immediately doubled by the introduction of small-sided football (in which players under 11 are not permitted to play in teams of more than seven a side) in 1998. To go beyond this emphasis on the number who play, this section develops other narratives about women football players: what are the components of the identity of the players? What do they think they are doing when they play? How do other factors beyond gender diversify women’s experience?

In pursuing this line of enquiry, the idea of ’subjectivity’ in Passerini’s study of memory was particularly valuable. By this she means:

Both the aspects of spontaneous subjective being … contained and represented by attitude, behaviour and language, as well as other form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I. A game for rough girls?1: Women’s football in Britain
• PART II. The future is feminine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index