Norma Rae Meets Downton Abbey: the English Factory Football Clubs
Twitter is a slippery slope. In two week’s time I went from having an anxiety attack at the thought of the banal inanity that was surely to come my way to routinely and gleefully reading the tweets of a cat. C’est la vie.
But, as it turns out, there have been some fortuitous moments along the way, including the discovery of Caroline’s Miscellany, a blogged collection of fun little historical stories from London and surrounding towns. One such story is that of the British Ladies’ Football Club and later leagues formed by competing factories, ostensibly as a way to both pacify dissent and boost war-time morale (Lloyd George encouraged such matches, apparently). Caroline writes:
“In 1920, 53,000 spectators watched a boxing day match between Dick, Kerr Ladies (a Preston team) and St Helen’s Ladies; the biggest crowd for a men’s match that year was just 37,545. Such success, though, was perhaps the cause of what happened next. The following year, the Football Association decided that the game should be male-only. They banned women from Football League grounds with the argument that ‘football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.’ This (lighthearted, not to say patronising) ‘topical budget’ newsreel was made in response: Quite Unfit for Females.”
The video has everything: gratuitous exercise footage, some old-timey carousing, and even a cameo by Adolf Hitler (look at the coach at 0:33 and tell me it’s not Hitler). Also, the women wear poofy hats the entire time—which is something that needs to be implemented in the contemporary men’s game immediately. With this year’s US Women’s Professional Soccer league canceled, and its players getting more attention as body-painted sexual objects than as athletes (or, for that matter, as class warriors), this video is of ever-increasing relevance.
For more video goodness, check out this clip about the history of Dick, Kerr F.C. and the World War I factory leagues. Think Norma Rae meets Downton Abbey.
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