Before doing this reading I was aware that women were involved in sports very early on in their history. In the case of soccer I knew from the prior readings that we have done that soccer was popular amongst women, and there were a good number of female soccer clubs in the late 19th/early 20th century. In the early 20th century there was a period where women’s soccer was more popular than men’s soccer. Despite women wanting to play soccer and women soccer clubs popularity, there was pushback against women’s soccer. Countries such as Brazil saw the sport as too masculine and discouraged women playing soccer, and women’s soccer clubs were outright banned by the FA in the early 1920s.
This article helped fill in some gaps of those early women’s clubs and players. The article covers early women’s soccer in the United States, where the views of soccer being a hyper masculine sport and unfit for women to play were also present. In Post-Civil War America, soccer was a means for men to preserve their masculinity, the game was constantly being compared to war and the rules of the game reflected that mentality. Women were taking up a variety of sports across America, including soccer, and the press was aware of this. There were reports of women playing soccer in secret, largely in order to avoid male spectators and attention. It is assumed that most of the women who played were a part of the middle or upper class. Women modified the rules of the game to make it more appropriate for them to play. They changed their clothes, in cases having identifiable uniforms and padding and protection to reduce injuries, they also changed the rules and eliminated tackling. The press who covered these early games did not see women’s soccer as problematic, and were rather positive in their coverage of the games. This is likely due to the fact that the participants were from the middle class and that the game’s ruleset was modified to make it more ‘appropriate’ for women to play.
Women playing men in matches was also something I didn’t expect to see. An article about a game in 1898 St. Louis where a women’s club beat a men’s club 10-0, and another instance in Connecticut in 1905 where the women’s team also crushed the men’s team 12-0. The press was usually accepting of women playing the game, and playing against men, but of course this wasn’t always the case. When women tried to form a professional league the media coverage treated women and the games as a novelty and embraced negative female stereotypes.
