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Title
Getting Back What We Lost in Soccer's Divorce
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xm2g88w
Author
Doyle, J
Publication Date
2011-11-07
Peer reviewed
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Ageneralviewoftheopeningceremoniesatthe2011Women'sWorldCup.
SpecialtoFoxSoccer
JENNIFERDOYLE
HISTORY
WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL
COMPETITION
TheFIFAWorldCuperainwomen's
soccermayhavestartedin1991,but
majorinternationalcompetitionhasa
richhistorypredatingtheinaugural
CopaMundial.
YEAR COMP. LOCATION FINAL
1970 Coppadel
Mondo
Italy Denmark
20Italy
1971 Mundial Mexico Denmark
30
Mexico
1982 Mundialito Italy Italy31
West
Germany
1985 Mundialito Italy England
32Italy
Recoveringfromsoccer'sdivorce
UpdatedJul 7, 2011 4:58 PM ET
What do Germany, France, Brazil and England have in common, besides the fact they all made it to
the quarterfinals of the Women’s World Cup?
The national football associations of each country have all banned the women’s game.
The longest of these bans was England’s, ending on the cusp
of its 50-year anniversary, in 1971. The most recent was
Brazil’s, issued under its dictatorship and lifted only in 1979.
West Germany banned the game from 1955 until 1970. East
Germany, however, did not – some of today’s strongest
German clubs are former GDR sides (e.g. Potsdam’s
Turbine, which formed in 1971).
Other things most of us don’t know: We like to say that the
Rose Bowl crowd for the final for the 1999 Women’s World
Cup (90,185) was the largest audience ever assembled for a
women’s sporting event. You’ve probably heard this, in fact,
in coverage of this World Cup.
But records indicate that an audience of 100,000 gathered at
the Azteca for the final of a 1971 Women’s World Cup in
Mexico City, which was not even remotely sanctioned by
FIFA. If FIFA didn’t bother the organizers with the use of the
“Copa Mundial” brand, it was because they assumed no one
would care, or notice if a bunch of women took the field.
Mexico played Denmark in the final, and lost (3-0).
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1986 Mundialito Italy Italy10
USA
1988 Mundialito Italy England
21Italy
1988 FIFA
Women's
Invitational
China Norway
10
Sweden
Cover of the April 2011 edition of FIFA World, featuring
the 1971 French national team boarding an airplane to
play in the 1971 Mundial.
The history of women’s soccer is filled with surprising
information. Looking around the world, we learn of women’s
leagues started in Goa, India during the 1970s by players
who expected opposition, but were instead surprised by the
assistance they got from brothers and friends; we find
Bengali women’s tournaments that have drawn crowds the
WPS would envy; a quasi-professional club representing
Brazil (Esporte Clube Radar) in international tournaments
through the 1980s; matches played on the beaches of Rio
which have involved thousands of women.
One of football history’s earliest (and surely coolest) night matches was a 1920 women’s game in
England: anti-aircraft searchlights were used to light a field for charity match between the Dick, Kerr’s
Ladies Football Club and an all-star squad of players from “the rest of England.” Twelve thousand
people showed up for that one. This is nothing compared to the 52,000 people who came to see that
same squad play a 1920 Boxing Day match in Goodison Park. Thousands more were turned away.
FIFA would like you to think that the first
international women’s match was played
between France and the Netherlands in 1971,
before 1,500 spectators. They’ve produced an
article in the April 2011 issue of FIFA World
celebrating this “fact.” Sepp Blatter introduces
the story for us:
"Although women have been kicking footballs informally for nearly as long as their male counterparts,
the women’s game is still relatively young in terms of officially organised international matches.
Indeed, as you can read in this issue of FIFA World, this month marks the 40th anniversary of the
first-ever official women’s international, played in April 1971 between France and the Netherlands in
front of 1,500 curious spectators. Certainly, the sport has enjoyed impressive growth from those
humble beginnings to the spectacle that it is today."
The FIFA brochure, however, shows the French national team boarding a plane to Mexico City, to
play in the 1971 Not-FIFA World Cup mentioned above.
That was actually the second not-FIFA Women’s World Cup – the first was played in 1970, in Italy.
I guess since these and other international matches were not sponsored by FIFA, and were played by
women banned from their FIFA-associated football associations, they weren’t really football matches?
One of this weekend’s marquis matches will revisit the suppressed history of the women’s game, as
the Lionesses confront Les Bleues.
Abundant records show that the audience for the first actual international women’s match was on par
with attendance at games scheduled in this World Cup’s smaller stadiums: 20,000 people turned out
in 1920 to see the Dick, Kerr’s ladies (representing England) beat French players, who were also
popular in their country.
For all but FIFA, that is where the history of the international women’s game begins: 91 years ago.
Nearly 900,000 people had seen the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies play when the English FA issued its ban
against the women’s game in 1921 – and this ban (as the first) is the source of most of our, and
FIFA’s, forgetting.
These kinds of bans against women’s football were not laws criminalizing the women’s game. They
were administrative rules designed to exile women from emerging national football cultures.
If you allowed women to play on a pitch approved by the FA for use in men’s game, you lost your
certification. If you had a license to referee the men’s game and worked a women’s match, you lost
that license. Same for coaches.
It didn’t erase the women’s game completely. As history shows us, it forced it underground. This
should not erase decades of women playing the game from historical record.
For good and bad, the women’s game retains the countercultural character born of the decades it has
spent in exile. At nearly every level except the World Cup, it is relatively free from the brutal
commercialism driving the management of the men’s game into the ground (e.g. Liverpool,
Manchester).
But women have struggled to gain the experience they need as managers, coaches, and referees.
Advertisers and mass media outlets have lived for so long with the notion that nobody wants to watch
the women’s game, they refuse to unlearn that assumption – even when confronted with the success
stories of the game’s past and the evidence of the present.
It is important to remember that these bans were not directed only at women. They quite specifically
targeted men interested in supporting the women’s game – and, by implication, women interested in
being involved in the men’s game. They were designed to make it as difficult as possible for women
to learn how to play, coach, referee, and manage a team. They worked to alienate women from men,
and men from women. You couldn’t be involved in the men’s game and the women’s. You had to
choose.
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Dr. Jennifer Doyle is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of
California, Riverside, where her research areas include American Literature, Visual Culture, Gender
Studies and Critical Theory. Dr. Doyle maintains From a Left Wing, a blog devoted to the cultural
politics of soccer. She will be contributing to FOX Soccer throughout the 2011 Women's World Cup.
It was a football divorce, and we – who know so little about our own history – are its children. I don’t
think it’s too melodramatic of me to suggest that we all lost something with those efforts to divide the
game in half.
One of the many pleasures of a good Women’s World Cup
comes from feeling like we are moving towards getting
over it, and taking back what these football associations
stole from us – a sense of camaraderie that transcends the
gender divide. A sense that women and men live in the
same world, and play the same game, on the same pitch,
by the same rules – that we can even play together.
(Nearly every story about the childhood of women players
begins with “[player] grew up playing with boys.”)
As we think about where we are going, we should remember the women and men of our
grandmothers’ generation who thought “ladies football” was a fabulous idea. We should remember
the rambunctious squads of the 1960s who played on rugby grounds and formed independent
national associations. Why not celebrate the women who played before 100,000 fans, in 1971? And
let’s remember those fans, too – each and every single one of them, standing on their feet for (of all
things) un Mundial Femenino. They should be remembered, and cheered, too.
That makes for a much better story, right?
Better than the one that would have you believe that hardly anyone played before 1971 - and that if
they did, nobody cared to watch.
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