A Game for Rough Girls? A History of Women’s Football in Britain

A Game for Rough Girls? analyzes historical and contemporary aspects of womenʼs participation in football and advocates transformational changes. Connecting themes throughout the book are the contemptuous attitude toward female players that has long prevailed, the persistent idea of gender division on which this attitude is based, the construction of football to protect male dominance, and womenʼs own failure to contest systematically their marginalization. The book is divided into two parts and five chapters that are bracketed by an introduction and conclusion. Part I examines womenʼs football from the 1880s at the local, regional, and national level, within the context of the development of the game of football, womenʼs sport, and social change. Williams traces the evolution of the womenʼs game from a largely voluntary, autonomous, and spectator-supported enterprise into one that is more widely participatory and bureaucratically and externally (meaning male) controlled. She goes on to examine the construction of private and public memory in womenʼs football, as well as the structural, organizational, attitudinal, and media constraints that have shaped and devalued womenʼs involvement and produced a striking lack of awareness of, or interest in, the early history of the womenʼs game. In Part II Williams focuses on the rise of womenʼs football in a global and professional era, and she explores relevant political, economic, regional, cultural, racial, and sexual developments inside and outside both football and England. She discusses the direct and indirect effects of equal opportunities legislation and footballʼs growth into a huge international business, comparing developments affecting women in countries such as Norway, Namibia, and the United States, as well as in major international sports competitions such as the Olympic Games and the Womenʼs World Cup. Among the bookʼs strengths is its raising of fundamental questions about how gender and sexual-role stereotypes and divisions in football have been constructed and perpetuated, how they relate to and reinforce broader patterns and practices, how they affect the development of womenʼs football at all levels, particularly the most competitive, and how they urgently need changing in order for the womenʼs game to advance. Williams is deliberately provocative in challenging long-standing traditions and perceived wisdom in order to shake up the football establishment and to inspire people to think about and then alter restrictive attitudes and practices. She strongly advocates specific changes that she regards as essential to the achievement of womenʼs basic human rights in football and in sport more broadly. Damning the “equal but different” theory and practice that underlie womenʼs football, Williams