Millie Bright, captain of the Lionesses, is “absolutely heartbroken” that the England women’s team lost to Spain; they all are. The players are probably not in the mood to take the long view on what they’ve done for women’s football, and what women’s football has done for the country. My slender understanding of life at the top of an international sport is that you have to take it pretty seriously on a game-by-game basis, and the time for a philosophical approach is when you retire.
Yet it has taken just over a century for the women’s game to get back to the kind of adulation and spectator numbers it enjoyed just before it was banned by the Football Association (FA) in 1921. That ban was lifted just over 50 years later, which signalled a revival, but not a fast one: the first official women’s Euros were held 13 years later and the first Women’s World Cup didn’t take place until 1991. You can’t really account for that sluggish pace without figuring out why it was banned in the first place. The FA’s given reason was broad and weak – “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged” – and had a supposed basis in medicine, in the idea that the female frame was too delicate for the game. What rubbish.
There’s a view that this was just the story of war: men go away, women take their places, men return, women have to give them their stuff back. It would be rude otherwise, as the men had sacrificed so much. Plausible, but contestable: you can see why returning soldiers wouldn’t want to be economically displaced, you can see why there might be an emotional case for the world to look as it had done when they left. But the British Ladies’ Football Club predated the outbreak of the first world war by two decades, and if women’s football in the 1890s and 1900s was controversial, it was more because of its links to the suffrage movement than a sense that it was impossible for the men’s and women’s games to coexist.
A counter explanation I prefer is that, by the end of the first world war, women had just got too good. They were making the numbers – the Boxing Day game in 1920 between the teams of Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helen’s Ladies pulled in a crowd of 53,000, with another 14,000 stuck outside. This was the largest ever crowd for a women’s game in the UK and kept that record until the 2012 Olympics. Dick, Kerr had an incredible striker, Lily Parr, who was the first woman ever to get sent off for fighting and the first to break a man’s arm with a ball (not, it is believed, on purpose).
Women’s football, besides, was getting more political by 1920, repurposing the money it raised (not insignificant amounts – the Boxing Day match netted the equivalent of £500,000 today) away from unobjectionable causes such as the war injured, towards social solidarity causes such as striking miners. There was documented anxiety that the women’s game was about to outstrip the men’s.
What is clear is that individually and collectively, female footballers challenged the status quo around gender, sexuality, class, constitutional justice and industrial relations, and this is something that people found as unbearable from footballers 100 years ago as they do today. Whether it’s the England men’s team getting Tory hell for taking the knee at last year’s World Cup, or the US women’s team being castigated by Donald Trump for their broad-brush crime of “wokery”, athletes pose a particular kind of threat when they voice a progressive view. People just tend to like and admire them; there’s a very real danger that they’ll turn a tide of opinion without even trying.
But then the malaise of the women’s game after the ban was lifted in the 70s – small crowds, chickenfeed funding, condescendingly commentated when it was commentated at all – reminds me of other bizarre blindspots of the late 20th century, expressed in 80s and 90s debates that people actually had out loud, such as “Why are there no female comedians? Is it because women aren’t funny?” There was a long period of cultural revulsion for the sight of young women, especially working-class young women, being good at something other than being pretty. There was a high tolerance for models and actresses (though not if they were “gobby”), but low to zero tolerance for women with skill and excellence, particularly if in exhibiting it, they gave the impression that they didn’t care what they looked like.
It was like a fin-de-siècle double-bind, that you could exist in the public sphere if you were beautiful, but never give any trace of awareness of your beauty, and always be mindful of its impact. This mindset seemed to exclude female sporting heroines most of all, because the greatest insult would be to look as though you were concentrating on something other than the male gaze – something like a ball. I feel sure if anyone had said it out loud, we would have fought our way out of that fog faster, but it was the age of irony, and nobody had to.
So, sure, the Lionesses did not technically win the World Cup. But they’ve won the respect that’s been denied their game for nearly a century. If I were them I’d be cock-a-hoop.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
