The conspiracy against women’s football

The moment before the fall of women’s football can be precisely dated. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies FC beat St Helens 4-0 at Everton’s Goodison Park in front of 53,000 paying spectators, a sellout crowd.

That was too much for the men at the Football Association. Hysterical at the sight of women running about as they liked and scared of competition from the female game, they banned it a year later. ‘The game of football is quite unsuitable for females,’ its ruling explained. From then on, the FA barred men’s clubs from letting women use their fields. Female players were condemned to jumpers for goalposts in parks. In the following years, many of the world’s other leading football associations followed the FA’s ban. That crowd at Goodison in 1920 would remain the record for an English domestic women’s game until 2019.

Only now is women’s football roaring back, with the European Championship set to fill major stadiums when it kicks off in England on 6 July. The female game’s rocky road is traced here by Suzanne Wrack, the Guardian’s full-time women’s football correspondent – the first person in that role at any British newspaper.

E.P. Thompson wrote in The Making of the English Working Class that he wanted to rescue forgotten people who had lived their lives almost unseen at the bottom of society ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’. That’s the moral purpose of Wrack’s book. Almost all male football writers (including me) have ignored female footballers. Other men have attacked them, sometimes physically. The second ever official women’s football match, Scotland vs England in 1881, in front of a crowd of 5,000, was abandoned when hundreds of men stormed the pitch and the players were forced to hide in an omnibus.