IN FOOTBALL, ‘wearing a skirt’ has always implied inadequacy. To play ‘like a bunch of girls’ – or worse – ‘like my grandmother,’ are insults that have stood the test of time through our game’s 150 year history.
But historical research is uncovering that playing like your grandmother could in fact be quite a compliment. Publications Officer of the Australian Society for Sports History Rob Hess, and University of Sydney Research Fellow Nikki Wedgwood are conducting a project examining the history of women’s football in Australia before the Victorian Women’s Football League was established in 1981.
They have discovered evidence of women playing football throughout the past 100 years, albeit in competitions described as ‘sporadic and discontinuous’. Hess and Wedgwood have been studying several case studies from pre-1920s through the 1940s and beyond, with the aim of piecing together the story of women’s football.
“A lot of people do find it difficult or surprising to think about women several decades ago, or more, wanting to play such a rough, masculine sport,” Wedgwood says.
“But really what we’ve found so far is that there have always been women around wanting to play. Whether they do or not depends upon a few other factors.”
Workplace teams encouraged women to take part in organised matches, such as one between Foy and Gibson factory employees in Perth around 1915.
Charity events also supported women taking the field in the name of fundraising.
“It seems to us the normative social sanctions against women playing such physical sports are put aside for a worthy cause,” Wedgwood explains. “So in a sense, any challenge to the gender order is suspended, temporarily.”
This theory was perfectly demonstrated during the 1940s, when the war resulted in women taking on roles normally reserved for men in all facets of life. Football games provided an opportunity for fundraising for the war effort, such as a game played in the Victorian town of Mortlake in 1943, between a team of single women versus married women, in support of the Miss Army Patriot Queen carnival.
Hess quotes a line from the Camperdown Chronicle, which reported: ‘They were not afraid to mix it and even when play became rather crowded, and enthusiasms at a high pitch, they threw themselves into the fray with gay abandon’.
“The women took these games seriously, and this is an indication of that sort of attitude,” Hess says, citing a quote from the same newspaper commenting on their training sessions, the score, and the quality of umpiring during the match.
But publicly, women’s games always accompanied an element of comical entertainment, such as a 1921 match between two women’s teams in Melbourne, where the male umpire officiated in drag.
The 1930s depression encouraged women onto the fields to help raise money for sections of the community. In 1933, a Carlton ladies side played Richmond ladies in a match attended by 10,000 football fans. But while attendances were solid, the games were still fanciful novelties.
In Melbourne in 1947, women’s teams representing VFL clubs Footscray, South Melbourne, Fitzroy and St Kilda played over several weeks to raise funds for the Red Cross. The grand final attracted a crowd of 25,000 people, but the focus of the Herald front page story was to poke fun at a woman training in high-heeled shoes.
“Analysis of the press commentary is interesting in itself and the attitudes they take towards these women,” Hess says.
“But hundreds of women responded to an advertisement saying does anyone want to be involved in these matches, and the South Melbourne secretary was overrun with phone calls.”
Wedgwood’s research has involved interviews with past players, including Dorothy Briggs, who played in Daylesford just after the Second World War. Employees from local textile and woollen mills competed in five known matches from 1946-8, including games between the Castlemaine woollen mill and a combined Daylesford team.
“I was only a skinny little thing, lucky if I was nine stone,” Briggs told Wedgwood.
She was a ruck-rover who followed the Rovers – her local Daylesford side on Saturdays – and had learned to kick the footy growing up with five brothers. Some of her teammates had never kicked a football before their first match, and some had never worn shorts before.
“Oh, I enjoyed it all, really. It was a lot of fun,” Briggs recalled of playing.
“If a big girl fell on top of you and nearly flattened you, you got up and got on with the job again. You were stiff and sore the next day but still, you got over that.”
While there were obvious barriers, such as Sunday prohibition – women could only access grounds on Sundays, when the men weren’t using them – Hess and Wedgwood are uncovering some surprises. They are currently searching for evidence of Aboriginal women taking part in games in Shepparton, for instance, where games between 'singles' and 'marrieds' were played in 1947.
New evidence has also come to light of a game in Ballarat in 1918, and another in Richmond in 1923, where women played a team of men who wore fancy dress costume throughout the match.
