Abstract

This is the first text to theorise properly the development of women’s football in Britain. Examining recreational and elite levels, the author provides a thorough critique, placing women’s experience in the context of a broader cultural and sports studies debates on social change, gender, power and global economics. The discussion in part I begins by looking at the production of women’s football culture. Women’s participation at local, regional and national level is explored in terms of football’s development, women’s sport and social change to ask how we have arrived at this moment of obvious inequality in Britain. If the invention of tradition has been used to create communities and these practices transmitted by memory, then how can the production of culture in women’s football be characterised? Chapter I outlines the construction of tradition in women’s football before moving on in Chapter 2 to discuss community and, finally, in Chapter 3, memory. Part I as a whole argues that structural and organisational constraints shaping women’s access to football are only a part of the picture and there is much more work to do in uncovering the meanings and values that women bring to playing the game in a culture of production. Part II opens out the discussion to look outside football as a sport and a business in order to consider what is going on within it. By looking at the meanings that are given to football in equal opportunities legislation and in segregated employment opportunities for men the author is suggesting a shift towards wider questions about British culture. The marginalisation of women in football has yet to be contested in any sustained and systematic way, even by players themselves. The recent apparent increase of interest on behalf of women is embedded in a context of national, regional, ethnic, religious and linguistic affiliation and the expression of identity through forms of football. Women who choose to play the game are always in the process of translating and mediating these identities in addition to gender. How do the male/female and heterosexual/homosexual ‘roles’ and stereotypes that can be found in football translate into other, broader patterns of practice? What aspects will affect the potential professionalisation of football for women and how will gender, sexuality and the taboos around mixed contact sport create patterns which shape the presentation of women players to a potential audience? Part II also questions the extent to which women’s football can be understood to be a globally popular game. For the minority of women who choose to play, and for the majority who do not, football is more than a sport or recreation. FIFA and the Olympic movement, as professional and occupational communities, have given women’s football a specific form through working practices that have been changed little by the incorporation of women into those systems. The resilience of the structures to change and to accommodating women as decision-makers is therefore another facet of the construction of women’s football. The discussion includes women making football cultures in other countries in order to highlight the typical and the unusual elements of the English case. The aim is, first, to move away from the idea that women’s football can be understood by the engineered and corporate perspective of national and international sports associations and second, to see what areas of continuity thread through the different case studies. How are the practices of various kinds of football for women shaped by these large sporting bureaucracies? In summary, to comprehend the place of women’s football in contemporary society it is necessary to consider the broader patterns that intersect with it. So the focus of this work is specifically about the construction of a women’s football culture, but it is also about women’s football within English culture. Aus Umschlagtext und Einleitung