OPINION
The Acceptable Face of Sexism?
By Nick Pelling
I like to think I am not a particularly sexist bloke. I read the Guardian for heaven’s sake. Even the godawful Weekend Guardian. But I have a terrible confession to make. I don’t know quite how to put this but here goes anyway: I have generally felt that women’s football was unlikely to be as exciting as that played by men. There. I have said it. It is, I said to myself, just a little ‘acceptable’ bit of old-school thinking. If you want to throw
the paper down in disgust right now and unfriend HIP I will understand.
It was in this complacent frame of mind that I settled on the sofa to watch England play Spain in the quarter-finals of the Women’s European Championship, last Wednesday. By any standards, this was a fantastic football match. (England fought back from 1-0 down with six minutes to go, against a brilliant Spanish side, to grind out a 2-1 win, after extra time. At the time of writing, we are still basking in this result but obviously, as you read this, England may even have lost their semi-final, but hey.) The game had skill and grit and power and above all, it had excitement, in buckets. To the extent that the dog had to run out of the room as my wife, Helen, and I performed that traditional TV spectator’s footy-voodoo ritual of screaming at the inanimate black object in the corner of the room. At the final whistle, my casual soccer-based sexism had been almost exorcised from my football soul.
The whole experience set me wondering not only why I had been so unthinkingly biased, but why it has taken so long for women’s football to hit these current heights, in terms of crowd-numbers and TV coverage and global profile. The question – the second one that is – sent me on a historical search for an answer.
Needless to say, part of the answer lies in the fact that many years ago men decided football was not a “suitable activity” for girls. To be more precise, back in 1921, the Football Association banned all clubs within their association from allowing any women’s teams to use their facilities. Effectively the men of the FA sought to kill the women’s game. The male explanations for this ranged from questions of lady-like decorum to God’s revealed biblical plan for organised sport.
It turns out that before that ban, women’s football had been growing relatively healthily alongside the professionalising men’s game from the 1890s. Trawling through what little there is of the history of this subject I found that there were some heroic female pioneers.
Who amongst us, male or female, can honestly say that they have heard of Nettie Honeyball. (Yes, that was really the name she used.) Nettie set up the British Ladies Football Club in 1895. Effectively the first female football organisation in the world. Then, it seems, she disappeared from History. As written by men, at least.
Alongside Nettie in the pantheon of female football founders should stand the rather aristocratic, Lady Florence Dixie, youngest daughter of the brutish Marquess of Queensberry. Lady Florence was a lady of means entirely determined to break out of her gilded cage. In an age when upper class ladies were expected to engage in little more than embroidery, piano playing and suppressing hysteria, she sailed to wildest Patagonia just to see what was there. She returned with a pet jaguar that went feral in Windsor Park. She became a passionate campaigner for votes for women, and then president of the British Ladies FC, to which she utterly devoted herself.
The more I looked into the struggle women have had just to be allowed on a playing field – let alone a level one – the more I felt that my little bit of ‘acceptable’ sexism may have been part of a more obstructive, historically ingrained, mentality than I had realised. If only the Guardian had priests – female ones obviously. Maybe I could absolve myself of the sins of the male football fan. In the meantime, when’s the next game?
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