Women's Football History

This is a bit of a mea culpa. We need to acknowledge from time to time where our research is limited or has fallen down. I think that in relation to women's football I could have done a little more. The women's game is largely absent from my book for example. And there's not a great deal on neos osmos.

Having said that, I have published an article on women's soccer (with Greg Downes and Roy Hay) and have devoted a lot of time to tagging articles on women's football (including soccer) in trove. I was reminded of this when someone posted an interesting historical piece of women's soccer journalism on twitter and I realised that I had found and tagged that article perhaps 10 years ago. Yet I had done nothing to create a permanent reminder or analysis that could be easily accessed by researchers. It was as if my labour disappeared back into the abyss from which the article came.

My experience teaching poetry at uni offers an interesting analogy. 17th and 18th century poetry is dominated by male writers and sometimes students asked me why I don't teach more female poets. The simple answer is that there were very few and even fewer good ones. But this is too simple. Yes, the mainstream of poetry was male but there were many literate women who expressed themeselves in verse. The system, however, was not interested in acknowledging or nurturing them. Indeed there was something threatening and dangerous about a woman who wanted to write literature.

Can we map this analogy directly over to soccer history?

I think we can. Look at the attitudes women playing football faced

Sporting Globe, Wednesday 6 August 1947, page 1

---

Football No Game For Women

By VALERIE, The Globe's Woman Sports Writer.

AUSTRALIAN football definitely is no game for women. A correspondent who signs herself Sportsgirl contends that girls who have been taking part in football charity matches are doing a great disservice to women's sport. Personally I have not taken these matches seriously. Some years ago a similar attempt was made to stage such games, but the venture died from lack of interest, or, perhaps from an overdose of bruises. The present venture will no doubt end the same way for few women can go on doing something that makes them look ridiculous. The general public must deplore the trend to exploit, in the name of charity, silly girls who will join in these burlesque matches for the love of sensation. Quite apart from the ridicule they merit, the players run serious risk of injury. The fine thing about present day women's sport is the fact that girls can play well and still retain their femininity. Women at football can do neither of these things.

Newcastle Sun, Tuesday 15 September 1936, page 1

---

Seeks Divorce Because Wife Plays Football

(From Our Special Representative)

LONDON, Monday.

Karl Lutz, a Viennese, has filed a petition for divorce be cause his wife, who is one of the best of Austria's women soccer half-backs, prefers playing football to cooking. Frau Lutz, a pretty 28-year-old blonde, admits that such a state of affairs is regrettable, but says that she lives for foot ball. Her husband is proud of her skill on the football field, but objects to keeping house and minding their young son while his wife is away playing.

This stuff needs to be countered.

But as with the research of women writers, perhaps the best kind of research of women soccer players will be performed by women. For all the good work of male soccer historians like Lee McGowan, Greg Downes and others, we need writers like Fiona Crawford, Sam Lewis, Lucianne Lauffer and Vanessa Lucchesi who can't help but inject their identity and more importantly their feminism into their work.

Searching Trove

publictag:"women soccer" look at spreads

• geographic 
• date 

publictag:"women football"

Gleanings

Before and during WW1 women's football emerges across Australia. Becomes formalised in the 1920s. Interesting demarcation

• Soccer Brisbane, Ipswich, Toowoomba 
• RL Sydney 
• Australian rules other states 

Soccer tends to be played sporadically in places like Lithgow and Newcastle in the late 20 and 30s. Resurges in Brisbane in the 1930s with a link to Ipswich.