The Ban on Women's Football and its Resilient Rise
It Was What It Was : The Football History Podcast
The Overlap
4.9 • 667 Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2024
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the latest episode of The Overlap’s football history podcast, It Was What It Was.
In this week’s episode, we take an in-depth look into the 1920 Boxing Day game between Dick Kerr ladies and St Helens Ladies at Goodison, which remained the biggest crowd at a women’s game in England for over 90 years. It also appeared to be a historic turning point, as the FA would ban women’s football a year later on the 5th December 1921.
Journalists Jonathan Wilson and Rob Draper delve into the growth of women’s football in the 19th-century, looking at the formation of Dick, Kerr Ladies in Preston during WW1, the powerhouse they would become in English football, the attention their football would attract and the large crowds it created.
Jonathan and Rob provide a detailed analysis of the lead-up to the game on Boxing Day that attracted 52,000 fans, raising money for wounded soldiers, the months that followed which led to the FA’s decision to ban women’s football and looking at how far we have come since.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, the FA Council will feel |
| 0:12.0 | impaled to express their strong opinion that the game of football is unsuitable for females |
| 0:17.2 | and all not to be encouraged. The council requests clubs belonging to the Football Association to refuse the use of |
| 0:23.9 | their ground for such matches. |
| 0:27.1 | I'm Jonathan Wilson and that was Rob Draper reading out the minutes from the FA committee meeting |
| 0:31.7 | which made a decision to ban women's football on the 5th of December 1921. |
| 0:36.9 | Most of the sisters, and I include myself in this, are probably aware |
| 0:40.1 | of the ban and the baleful consequences for women's sport. What we're going to do today on |
| 0:44.1 | it was what it was is to look at the context for it. Who has actually made that decision, and particularly |
| 0:49.1 | at the remarkable story of a dick, ladies. Now, I think the assumption is that this was a simple case |
| 0:56.4 | of pioneering women coming up against the patriarchy. And I'm sort of vaguely aware that it's a bit |
| 1:01.8 | more complicated than that. But this is a story that I know I should know a lot more about. |
| 1:05.9 | So I'm really looking forward to getting into the detail and understanding one of the very |
| 1:09.9 | worst decisions. |
| 1:14.9 | And let's be honest, they've made a lot that the FA have ever undertaken. |
| 1:16.5 | So, Rob, come on. |
| 1:17.3 | Educate me. |
| 1:21.6 | Well, I think it's the most stupid decision the FA have ever made. |
| 1:25.8 | And as you say, there's quite a lot of competition for that. |
| 1:29.8 | And I also think it's a really, really important story. I researched this when I was working on a book with Gary Neville and we were looking at the role of women's |
| 1:34.5 | football. And I knew this. So I'd known it for quite some time, but I hadn't known the details of it, |
| 1:39.5 | and the granular detail of it, really opened my eyes to this extraordinary sort of revolution of women's football |
... |
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