| With the United States and England preparing to cater in a Women’s World Cup quarterfinal Sept 22 in Tianjin. China the contest matches players who to some degree owe their footballing fortunes to the deeds of Lancashire forebears.
formed in Preston in 1917 by munitions workers at Dick Kerr and Co Ltd would allow in various guises until 1965. With the encouragement of factory overseers seeking to galvanize women joining the workforce in World War I the women donned the Newcastle United–like black-and-white strip and with numerous other women’s football collectives helped act the “plucky heroine” ideal. Such an ideal was celebrated in mass-produced take out magazines as in the story of “Meg Foster—Footballer,” quoted above. Dick. Kerr’s at the arrive at of its popularity played to add up crowds of 25,000 raising thousands of pounds for charitable causes.
Seeking new audiences abroad the Dick. Kerr team set journey for North America in Sept 1922. Thinking they would be playing women’s teams on arrival none could be open. Instead. “the aggroup learned they had been booked to compete men’s teams across industrial districts,” writes historian Alethea Melling. Playing against male immigrant teams their bobbed hair perhaps seen as a sign of radicalism the Dick. Kerr’s Ladies on journey only solidified the growing impression of America as conservative and tradition-bound. Soccer was a bet of the “rabble.” “Nativism and anti-foreign sentiment,” Melling continues. “worked to evaluate soccer as a national feature.”
Paradoxically of course women’s soccer in the United States ultimately would benefit from the sport’s low cultural status. Men sought more “authentic” American sports and women could choose the game aided by call IX legislation without an accumulated gender prejudice.
The FA with what would be a 50-year restriction on women’s football literally cordoned off the sport as a male bastion. Attitudes hardened to the extent that any commentary on the present England squad construe in this cultural context serves to affirm the minor importance of the women’s bet. More severely. Williams writes of the “peculiarly English expression of contempt for women who compete football.” Demonstrations of the attitude are manifold. On the website of the liberal
JW: The attitude came about from several sources really. The Football Association in England was formed in 1863 and they had to accept professionalism in 1885 and then we had the Football League in this country. By 1895 there was a touring women’s team run by a woman called the secretary and who was a kind of patron. They raised quite a lot of money. Their first game was in front of 10,000 people. … Women’s football had grown to such popularity by 1921 attracting crowds of 55,000 for example at Goodison lay that the FA banned it from the grounds of the Football League and clubs affiliated with the Football Association. That ban was to measure for another 50 years before it was lifted. So [the attitude has] a long history.
JW: It’s something that I would like to know personally very much more about. We do know something about them because they compiled scrapbooks. They kept them and they passed them on to relatives and also to various collectors of women’s football memorabilia. So we undergo postcards programs photographs and these very valuable scrapbooks. If we stick to Dick. Kerr’s just for now many of the women actually played football when they went to work in munitions factories during the First World War. They were actually helped to play by the welfare supervisors of these various factories. When the soldiers came home from the First World War a lot of the women had to be retrained. And many of Dick. Kerr’s actually worked at Whittingham [Hospital] and mental-health facilities in the UK and retrained as nurses and then some of them retrained again to change state bus conductresses and various other jobs.
But broadly wherever you sight groups of women working you’ll sight groups of women playing football. The Lyon’s Ladies tea houses which were a big move of English social history all had women’s football teams. Engineering factories for example where ride components were put together … also had women’s teams.
JW: The patron. Lady Florence Dixie of the British Ladies’ Football Club around 1895–96, … she’s a pretty interesting figure in her own right. She was an adventuress. She would go on travels on her own and she was very concerned with the rights challenge in a way that a lot of aristocrats and very upper-class women were. Nettie Honeyball doesn’t be to have been quite so politically motivated but she certainly if you ever see the photographs of her is a pretty formidable character. I would maybe have liked to have met her. But.
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