Women, Football and History: International Perspectives

Special edition of the International Journal of the History of Sport The papers in this collection, however, have their focus on developments related to women and football that occur outside the locus of established scholarship. In particular, the studies concentrate on the geographic locations of New Zealand, Australia and the USA, and, unique for such a collection, the papers cover four major football codes. The investigations are also not limited to women playing football, but female spectators and coterie groups are also considered. In terms of variety, different methodological and theoretical approaches are adopted, and a range of time periods are reflected on, as outlined below. Jennifer Curtin kicks-off the collection with reflections on women’s engagement with rugby union in New Zealand, stretching her investigation back to some of the earliest newspaper references to female involvement in the code between 1870 and 1920. As she notes, a picture emerges. Women from both the lower and middle classes of New Zealand society clearly supported the game of rugby as spectators, supporters and fans. But the reception to this involvement was mixed, and sometimes seen as distinctly unsuitable. In addition, claims Curtin, women’s involvement was often informal and localized, and it is this feature, she says, that helps to explain women’s virtual invisibility in the histories of rugby union in New Zealand. Barbara Cox and Richard Pringle, while also focusing on New Zealand, hone in on a different code and on two particular time periods. In their study, they draw heavily on the works of Michel Foucault to examine how women’s bodies, exercise and motherhood impacted on the historical development of female soccer in New Zealand in 1921 and between 1973 and 1975. Employing Foucault’s genealogical framework they not only analyze newspaper reports, and historical documents, but they conduct in-depth interviews to demonstrate how medical/scientific discourses both inhibited and aided the involvement of women in football. Their conclusion is that while medical knowledge was used to publically disqualify the legitimacy of the female footballer in 1921, the absence of such medical knowledge in the early 1970s, combined with other factors, paved the way for the eventual ‘normalization’ of female football in New Zealand. A more general overview of women’s soccer in Australia is tackled by Greg Downes, Ian Syson and Roy Hay. They point out that women have fought to overcome active obstruction to their taking part in the sport and their paper provides an outline of the history of the game both nationally and in its international context. Making use of oral testimony, they attempt to capture the experience of some of the pioneers of the women’s game and its modern exponents, along the way revealing some of the ways in which overt and covert discrimination still hampers appreciation of what these women have achieved. In the penultimate paper, Andrew D. Linden mines his doctoral research to look at the contested space associated with women’s American football in the 1970s. Scholarship on the ‘women’s movement’ in the USA has grown in recent years, but as Linden acknowledges, this area has yet to fully incorporate women’s athletic experiences. His paper, based on 13 interviews, brings together these two areas of analysis of women’s experiences of playing professional football. His intent is not to force a feminist mantle on these women or to contest their own self-descriptions. Rather, he attempts to locate their experiences within the larger women’s movement using the notion of ‘contested space’. He convincingly argues that while female football players did not explicitly align with the feminist movement, they were a part of the larger revolution in women’s social rank. Competitive matches of women’s Australian Rules football have been played since 1915, when two workplace teams began a series of games in Perth, Western Australia, with the female code then diffusing east to South Australia and Victoria during the period of the Great War.37 While the women’s game is about to undergo a revolution with the advent of a national league in 2017, Lisa Gye turns her attention from the field of play to examine female coteries in Australian Football League (AFL) clubs. She explains that the AFL has made extensive efforts in the past decade to ensure that Australian Rules football is seen as an inclusive culture that respects and acknowledges the presence of female supporters in its membership base. However, given that women have constituted a significant proportion of the football audience since the inception of the game in the mid-1800s, her view is that this show of support for women is somewhat belated and underpinned by other motivations. In fact, Gye’s paper questions whether recent attempts to acknowledge women as an important constituent group in AFL football culture are genuinely aimed at making AFL club culture more inclusive of women. It remains to be seen how well the new embrace of women’s football by the AFL meshes with, or contradicts, the old attitude displayed towards women’s coterie groups. To conclude more generally, it should now be obvious that any research agenda which emerges from observations on international perspectives concerning the relationship of women with football will continue to resonate and add value to wider understandings of sport and gender. The field of play remains wide open.