The FA and the 1921 Ban on Women’s Football: The ‘World Game’ – “Quite Unsuitable for Females”

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Gender wars, Leisure activities, Social History, Sport, Sports history

Britain’s sporting lingua franca has by general consensus long been football (better known as ‘soccer’ in Australasia and the United States). For the bulk of the 19th century the “round-ball game” was exclusively the domain of men, but by the 1890s women in Britain were embracing the popular outdoor pastime with passion. Women’s clubs, many based in North London, were formed at this time, beginning with the British Ladies’ Football Club (BLFC), comprising mostly middle-class women (see Footnote).

Working class women discover football
What really kicked the sport along for women however was World War I. The escalating demand on manpower to feed the war effort depleted the country’s vital industrial factories of its male blue-collar workers. The same priority had a similar draining effect on the (English) FA’s (Football Association’s) player stocks. The manpower shortages took women in large numbers out of the home to meet the factory shortfall of men. With few men around to play the game, after season 1914/1915 the premier men’s competitions, the FA Cup and the English championship, were suspended and didn’t get going again until 1919/1920. Into this breach, almost by a process of natural evolution, stepped the newly employed (working class) women of England’s factories ‘FA History’, www.thefa.com].

Dick, Kerr’s Ladies FC
With the new infusion of working women taking up football competitively, the stronghold of women’s football moved to Preston in the north-eastern county of Lancashire. Over the next several seasons up until the early years of the interwar period, one women’s club team stood tallest…Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was created out of the female workforce of Dick, Kerr & Co, Preston locomotive and tramcar manufacturers. The highly successful Dick, Kerr’s Ladies side was spearheaded by one of football’s most remarkable ever female players, the chain-smoking, openly gay Lily Parr who scored over 1,000 goals in a 31-year career✱.

Dick, Kerr’s Ladies were pioneers of international women’s matches with French women’s sides⍟ and the Preston team’s popularity soared through and beyond the war years. In 1920 a game between Dick, Kerr’s and St Helens’ Ladies at Goodison Park (Everton) drew a crowd of 53,000 – with the gates locked leaving thousands more outside! [‘WW1: why was women’s football banned in 1921?’, (Gemma Fay), BBC News, 12-Dec-2014, www,bbc.com].

Notwithstanding the enormous contribution of Lily Parr, Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was no “one woman band”…centre-forward Florrie Redford netted a phenomenal 170 goals for the Preston-based club in 1921 [Dick, Kerr Ladies FC 1917-1965′, www.dickkerrladies.com]. Another female football star of the day – who DIDN’T play for Dick, Kerr’s XI – was Northumberland’s Bella Reay who played in the north-east Munitions’ comp. Bella’s 130-plus goals in the 1917/1918 season propelled her unbeaten club Blyth Spartans Ladies FC to victory in the Munitionettes’ Cup (drawn from women workers in munitions factories and docks in the north-east who played amateur football to raise funds for charity) [Fay, ‘BBC’, loc.cit.].

Bella Reay, Blyth Spartans star striker ⬆️

The (FA) empire strikes back
Immediately following the Great War the women’s game was at a high point and on the ascent✥. But after demobilisation, able-bodied men who had fought in the global conflict, streamed back into the English workforce…this meant that the great bulk of the women who had filled their boots on the factory floor were now surplus to requirements and so were “quietly shunted back into domestic life” [ibid.]. Englishmen also returned to playing the number one sport with the Football League recommencing in 1919/1920. The FA authorities in England had tolerated rather than supported women’s football during the enforced absence of the men’s league.

Football – a “health hazard” for women!
The FA’s disapproval had an ally in some prominent members of the medical profession which shared its lack of enthusiasm for female football – on medical grounds!◘ These medicos tended to endorse the assumption of Harley Street specialist Dr Mary Scharlieb who opined that football was a “most unsuitable game, too much for a women’s physical frame” [ibid.]. At this point (1921) the FA stepped in, banning women and the country’s female competitions from using FA grounds, echoing the (predominantly male) medicos’ sentiments that the sport was “quite unsuitable for females, and ought not to be encouraged” [‘The FA’, op.cit.]. Aiming for overkill, the FA decreed that its officials (referees and linesmen) could not take part in women’s matches, a step intended to further hamper the development of the female game.

To underscore the justification for its arbitrary and discriminatory treatment of the women’s’ leagues, the FA alleged (without any proof) that the women’s setup had failed to give an adequate percentage of its gate revenue towards charitable objects”. This was a classic double standard posture as the men’s clubs was never asked to donate any gate receipts to charity. In response, the captain of the Plymouth Ladies team accurately described the FA as being “a hundred years behind the times”✫ and said the ban was nothing more than “purely sex prejudice” [‘1921: the year when football banned women’, History Extra, (Jim Weeks), Dec. 2017, www.historyextra.com].

So was the FA simply exhibiting a blatant, sexist chauvinism towards the women players? The short answer is yes…but could there be something else behind their draconian action as well? During the war the women’s leagues had built up a considerable following and were enticing impressive crowd numbers to the matches. The FA’s overwhelming remit has always been the health of the men’s game and it was concerned that the women’s demonstrable pulling power might have a detrimental affect on attendances to the Football League (men’s) games [ibid.]. Applying a handbrake to the burgeoning women’s game, indeed sidelining it altogether, was considered a great ‘leg-up’ boosting the FA’s objective of rebuilding men’s professional football after the WWI hiatus.

Aftermath of the ban
The FA’s ruling did not put an end to women and girls playing football altogether, but the effect of it was to relegate the top-tier players in England to mostly friendly matches. The elite Dick, Kerr’s Ladies team (later renamed Preston Ladies FC) did its best to stay active. In 1922 it organised a tour of North America but even here the meddling hand of the English FA was at work doing what it could to stymie the club’s tour. On direction from the FA the Canadian FA banned the Dick Kerr women from playing in Canada. The team did however manage to organise nine matches in the US which were played against men’s sides [ibid.].

Preston Ladies, 1939 ➡

“Fem-soccer”: Women’s football goes “gangbusters!”
The ban stayed in force…beyond the formation of the Women’s FA in England in 1969. It was not until July 1971 that the FA, and then only under pressure from UEFA (Union of European Football Associations), finally lifted the ban. Held back no more by gender stereotypers, the women’s game has gone from strength to strength – in 1972 the first women’s FA Cup, in 1984 the first women’s European Championship, followed by the World Cup in 1991 (the 2011 World Cup Final was played in front of a packed 83,000-strong crowd).

Footnote: “Nettie Honeyball”
The founding of the first women’s team British Ladies’ FC is attributed to ‘Nettie Honeyball’…this was a pseudonym for the middle-class female activist (identity unknown, possibly one Mary Hutson) who organised the first women’s match in North London in 1895 (“The North” thrashed “The South” 7-1 before an estimated 11,000 spectators) [‘British Ladies’ Football Club’], Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

PostScript: The Scottish FA, closed ranks with its English brethren
The FA in England was not “Robinson Crusoe” among the home countries in enforcing discriminatory practices against women players. Other football associations took a similarly blinkered view. In the 1924/1925 season three Scottish clubs (Aberdeen, Queen of the South and Raith Rovers) all had their requests to use their club grounds for women’s matches uncermoniously vetoed by the men of the Scottish FA [‘The Honeyballers: Women who fought to play football’, BBC News, 26-Sep-2013, www.bbc.com].

– —– ——–– — -– ——–– —– —– —– ——–– — -– ——–– —–—- ——- —
✱ in 2002, many years after her death, Parr was the first (and so far only) woman player inaugurated into the FA’s Hall of Fame
⍟ although there had been a much earlier women’s match between a Scottish XI side and an English XI that took place in 1881
✥ in 1920 there was around 150 women’s teams playing the sport in England plus many more in Scotland and Wales
◘ back as far as 1894 medical professionals had advocated that women and girls be barred from taking part in football [‘The Honeyballers’, loc.cit.]. Aside from “medical concerns”, another reason that has been suggested for the opposition to female footballers at the time was that they were seen as threatening the perception of football as a “masculine game” [Mårtensson, S, ‘Branding women’s football in a field of hegemonic masculinity’, Entertainment and Sports Law, 8 (June 2010)].
✫ 8.4M British women had recently received the vote, the breakthrough achievements of women’s football was paralleling the Suffrage Movement [Weeks, op.cit.]

Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part II

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Aviation history, Gender wars

Continue reading →

Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Aviation history, Gender wars

❝ We had to prove that women were as good pilots… in an age where some men didn’t think a woman should drive a horse and buggy, much less drive an automobile, it was a job to prove that females could fly.❞
~ Louise Thaden[1]

⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ✈️ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆

The other afternoon the resident afternoon ABC evangelist on the wireless was rabbiting on that the PC word to describe female pilots, especially those early pilots of the airways, was aviator … he was saying that the term aviatrix was de rigueur, we should use only the ‘correct’ gender-neutral term ‘aviator’ which doesn’t make a distinction between the two sexes, etc, etc.

And in a purely technical sense the government-sanctioned radio evangelist is right, the name ‘aviator’ does better represent the spirit of our contemporary times, after all no one (hardly anyone, right?) these days uses poetess or even authoress – these descriptors sound a bit cumbersome and more than slightly ridiculous in 2017 … although I note that the staunchly conservative Oscar ‘cinemarati’ dole out prizes to screen actors every March for what they still insist on calling the “best actress” and “best supporting actress”. Notwithstanding all this, my preference to describe those pioneering women of the skies is for ‘aviatrix’, quaintly old-fashioned as the term may be … to me it does set them apart, identifying the uniqueness of their important role in the evolution of aviation history and as pathfinders for new female work roles, and in doing so, demonstrating that women were capable of doing anything than men could do.

The internet is awash with studies and information on untold number of pioneer aviatrices. A casual googling of “aviatrix history” will turn up a host of sites with titles like “Harriet Quimbey – First U.S. Aviatrix”, “Lores Bonney – the forgotten aviatrix”, “The History Chicks Aviatrix Archives”, “LadiesLoveTailDraggers | Aviatrix History”; “Aviatrix – Sheroes of History”, “BBC – Forgotten record of aviatrix Beryl Markham”, “Aviatrix You Should Know: China’s Amelia Earhart” and “Our History | Women in Aviation History | “Sharpie: The Life Story of Evelyn Sharpie – Nebraska’s Aviatrix”. Clearly, most who write on the subject, on the World Wide Webosphere anyway, seem to concur with my preference for ‘aviatrix’.

Irish first wave aviatrix Lilian Bland

France gold, the US silver …
What becomes readily apparent when you delve into the history of the early, formative phase of aviation, is how internationally diverse the phenomenon of the aviatrix was. France and the United States led the way with the earliest pioneering achievements❈ – first woman to earn a pilot’s licence (Frenchwoman Baroness Raymondé de Laroche, 1910); first woman to pilot a motorised aircraft solo (American Aida de Acosta in France, 1903, in a dirigible owned by Alberto Santos-Dumont – six months before the famous Wright Brothers’ flight). Not to be outdone, women aviatrices in the English-speaking world were also quick out of the blocks – Anglo-Irish aviatrix Lilian Bland in Belfast 1910/1911 was one of the first to design, build and fly her own aircraft (which she called the Mayfly⌖)[2].

In the first 40 years of the 20th century the appearance of women pilots became a worldwide craze. Aviatrices took to the air in Belgium, Germany, Britain and Eire, Russia, Estonia, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, Japan, China, Korea, Italy, Australasia, Canada, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Persia, in fact from any country that had a viable even if rudimentary aircraft industry.

Aviatrix “rock stars”
The public at large is familiar possibly only with a few of these pioneer aviatrices, the “glamour-pus” headline grabbers like American Amelia Earhart and England’s Amy Johnson, or if you are from the USA you probably have also heard of Ruth Law, Louise Thaden, Jacky Cochran and Florence ‘Pancho’ Barnes. All of these high-flyers (literally) broke numerous records and won continent-to-continent, long-distance air races¤ and have been the subject of various biographies, television documentaries or biopics.

[Photo: www.airforcebase.net]

Barnstorming
There was a lot of women pilots by the twenties and thirties (especially in the USA), and the great majority of them weren’t as fortunate as Earhart and a select few of the elite aviatrices who could elicit sponsorship from newspapers and the like. There were few posts for commercial pilots available to women at the time (primarily due to systemic and deeply ingrained sexism), therefore many women pilots in the “Roaring Twenties” turned to barnstorming and if they could to working as a stunt pilot in the movies. Barnstormers moved around the country performing aerial tricks and manoeuvres, for audiences, either individually or in orchestrated clusters of Gipsy Moth type crafts (known as “flying circuses”). Barnstormers also made money by taking local townspeople up for joy rides[3].

Jean Batten (NZ)

“First-wave” Australasian aviatrices
Gladys Sandford was the first New Zealand woman to be awarded an air pilot’s licence (1925), but without dispute the Shaky Isles’ greatest-ever aviatrix was Jean Gardner Batten. After wrecking her first biplane Batten talked the Castrol Oil Co into buying a second-hand De Havilland Gipsy Moth, in which she was the first woman to complete the solo round trip between England and New Zealand. Batten also won the Harmon Trophy three times and achieved a world record for flying from England to South America. Later in the thirties the relentless Kiwi aviatrix Batten obliterated Amy Johnson’s England to Australia record, bettering it by more than four days![4]

Australia’s first female flyer in an heavier-than-air plane was Florence Taylor in 1909 at Narrabeen, NSW. Taylor’s flight was in a glider designed by her husband George (which he had adapted from Lawrence Hargrave’s cellular box-kite prototype). Prejudice from male aviators and the industry meant that women in Australia were prevented from holding a commercial pilot’s licence until 1927 (Millicent Bryant was the first to earn her Australian licence in that year)✪.

Other women soon took up the mantle of the earliest Aussie aviatrices, most prominent among these were Maude ‘Lores’ Bonney and the aptly named Nancy-Bird Walton. Lores Bonney, originally from South Africa, in the 1930s was “regarded as perhaps Australia’s most competent aviatrix”[5]. Bonney’s record-breaking feats started in 1932 when she became the first aviatrix to circumnavigate the continent of Australia (embarking on the marathon flight – the equivalent of Darwin to London in distance – after first gaining the permission of her husband). She was the first pilot of either sex to fly from Brisbane to Cape Town, and the first woman to fly solo from Australia to England.

Nancy-Bird Walton got her pilot’s licence at 19 and like Bonney and so many other early aviators (from Charles Lindbergh down) tried initially to make a living out of it through barnstorming. In 1936 Walton won the Ladies Trophy in the Adelaide to Brisbane air race in a record time. As the first woman commercial pilot in Australia Walton was responsible for the operation of a flying medical service in the outback (Royal Far West Children’s Health Service), using her own Leopard Moth as an air ambulance. During WWII she trained a women’s air corps as back up for the men pilots in the RAAF and in 1950 founded the Australian Women Pilot’s Association, paving the way for today’s female commercial pilots to make a career of the profession[6].

Hollywood ’Aviatrix’ Kate Hepburn, feet and plane planted firmly on the ground!

PostScript: Hollywood and the glamorous socialite aviatrix
In the golden age of aviation aviatrices like Jean Gardner Batten and Beryl Markham were not adverse to infusing a bit of glamour into their public personas. It certainly didn’t hinder their careers and sponsorship was often needed by the young female pilots to finance their attempts to win races and break records. In the twenties and thirties nothing personified the idea of the modern woman more than the aviatrix, she represented the height of glamour and daring … and of course the ubër glam-aviatrix in the world was Earhart whose image and media-savvy husband secured her income from promotional and speaking tours and from product endorsement [7].

It is hardly surprising then that from early on Hollywood took an interest in the aviatrix, and in the whole burgeoning area of aviation which provided film-makers with fresh new storylines with lots of breath-taking action and thrills. Several of the glamorous aviatrices had stints in movie acting. Ruth Elder for instance, (known as “Miss America of Aviation”) juggled flying with a (part-time) actress job and a (full-time) one as a serial ‘matrimonialist’ (Elder was married six times). RKO cashed in the vogue by casting an up-and-coming Katherine Hepburn as a socialite aviatrix in 1933’s Christopher Strong. Capitalising on the appeal of feminine good looks and the fearless reputation of women pilots, studio photographers cultivated the “glamorous aviatrix look” for movie publicity purposes[8].

———————————————————
❈ the very first experiments with flight involving women began in France – 1784: first woman to fly in a hot-air balloon, Marie Élisabeth Thible (eight months after the Montgolfier brothers’ first successful accent); 1798: first woman to pilot an airship, Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse (Mme Labrosse was also the first woman to parachute jump from a balloon, 1799), www.centennialofwomenpilots.com. So, in a very real sense aviatrices were in on the ground (umm, off the ground) in aviation from the get-go!
⌖ as in may fly, may not
¤ Earhart and Johnson were both fated to die in mysterious circumstances, tragically if heroically in pursuit of their addiction to flying

✪ although the first Australian woman to get a flyer’s licence was nurse Hilda McMaugh (1919) who achieved it in the UK…she would have been barred from flying if she had returned to her homeland afterwards

[1] ‘Aviation Pioneer Louise Thaden’, www.arkansasairandmilitarymuseum.com
[2] K Mitchell, ‘Lilian Bland: Ireland’s first female pilot, the world’s first aviation engineer’, Engineers Journal (Republic of Ireland), 31-May-2016, www.engineersjournal.ie
[3] ‘Barnstorming’, Wikipedia, http://em.n.wikipedia.org
[4] Ian Mackersey. ‘Batten, Jean Gardner’, from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/4b13/batten-jean-gardner (accessed 20 May 2017)
[5] K Alexander, Taking Flight: Lores Bonney’s Extraordinary Flying Career, (2016)
[6] ‘Nancy Bird Walton AO’, (Australian Museum), www.australianmuseum.net.au
[7] K Lubben Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, cited in ‘Why Amelia Bombed’ (V Postrel), 10-Nov-2009, www.vpostrel.com
[8] S Kelly, Aviators in Early Hollywood (2008)]