The 1921 Peak and Turning Point in Women’s Football History: An Australasian, Cross-Code Perspective.

The year 1921 has been recognized by scholars as an international peak and turning point in the history of women’s football. From peak activity and record crowds in the years immediately following the Great War, the popularity of women’s football declined rapidly in the years thereafter. This paper takes the circumstances of a women’s Rugby League initiative in Sydney as a departure point for exploring from a cross-code perspective this international peak. It examines how various international, multi-directional influences between and across the codes conditioned the rapid emergence of 16 women’s football initiatives throughout Australasia in 1921. The second part of the paper then seeks to shed light on the 1921 turning point. It does so by examining the only comparable ban in the Antipodes to the English Football Association’s (FA) ban on women using their playing fields in 1921: being a ban by the New South Wales Rugby League (NSWRL) on a women’s match in Sydney. It maps a range of threats that the NSWRL may have perceived a women’s competition as posing to the stability of the men’s game. In doing so, it raises questions that may have bearing on future investigations of the FA’s ban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]