Jean Williams - The History of Women's Football

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Jean Williams - The History of Women's Football (Pen & Sword, 2021)

Acknowledgements
Introduction

The Honeyballers and Lady Florence Dixie
Banned
The Corinthians and Nomad Globe Trotters Ladies Football Club of Manchester
Harry Batt's Touring Teams 1968-1972
The Women's Football Association and the Women's National Team
The First England Women Captains 1972-2000
Professional Pioneers 1972-2022

The Future of Women's Football
Bibliography.

Blurb:
A complete history of women's football, from its Victorian games beginning in 1881, to the plans for England to host the Euro Finals in England 2022, this book demonstrates how women's football began as a professional sport, and has only recently returned to these professional roots in the UK.

This is because there was a fifty-year Football Association 'ban' on women playing on pitches affiliated to the governing body in England. The other British associations followed suit. Why was women's football banned in 1921? Why did it take until 1969 for a Women's Football Association to form? Why did it take until 1995 for England to qualify for a Women's World Cup?

Answers to these key questions are supplemented across the chapters by personal accounts of the players who defied the ban, at home and abroad, along with the personal costs, and rewards, of being footballing pioneers.

A library loan, and just the book I'd hoped someone would write on the Women's game. Those few other histories I've read tend to concentrate on the late Victorian/ Netty Honeyball years, the rise of the Dick, Kerr Ladies and the 'Munitions' teams, then little or nothing from the FA-imposed ban in December 1921 until the 1999 USA world cup final where Brandi Chastain's iconic goal celebration set the game on the road to world domination. While the author regularly reminds us that more research is needed into this or that episode, ... History shines much needed light on the lost decades, the teams formed, league's organised, overseas tours, star players, the heroes and villains to emerge during the five decades the game was outlawed. Those interviewed include surviving members of Harry Batt's unofficial England team who contested world cups in 1970 and 1971 (from what I've read elsewhere, the second an often brutal affair), various Corinthians, Sue Lopez, perhaps the first post-ban superstar, who left Southampton FC to play a season for Roma in the Italian league, and Pat Dunn, a fearless referee appointed the first chair of the Women's FA in 1969.