On 7 May 1881 the first ever women’s international took place in Edinburgh’s Easter Road stadium.
Organised by suffragette Helen Matthews, two teams representing Scotland and England played
out a 3-0 win for the home side in front of a crowd of just over 1,000.
This was long before women’s football clubs, and was the first organised fixture of its
kind for any of these players.
The event gained the attention of popular Scottish newspaper the Glasgow Herald, who
printed a match report in which it praised “some individual members of the teams”
for their play.
But the newspaper’s coverage was not without its problems.
For example, it gave a detailed description of the clothing of the female players before
even providing the reader with the final score.
Commentary on what female players wore, usually with much disdain, would become a fixation
for the media and socially conservative opponents throughout the sport’s history.
Aware that what they were doing would not go down well with the wider public, Helen
Matthews and other players created pseudonyms for the team sheets, printed in the paper,
to protect their identities.
Precautions like this would prove well justified.
Just one week later the teams played again in Glasgow. Word had spread quickly, and this
time around 5,000 spectators came to watch.
A largely male crowd taunted both sides in the first half before turning violent in the
second. Hundreds invaded the pitch, pushing the players, who fled to the minibus they
had arrived in. The Nottinghamshire Guardian reported that members of the crowd “tore
up the stakes” of the surrounding fence and “threw them at the departing vehicle”.
A repeat of this match had been arranged in Kilmarnock for the next day, but was cancelled
in the wake of the riots.
In the days that followed, the mainstream press attacked what they described as the
“unsuitability” of female players for football.
But Matthews and her team acted quickly in defiance of their opposition. Within five
days they had organised another match, this time moving south to Blackburn and playing
in front of a crowd of 4,000.
The team then travelled to Manchester and Liverpool, set to play four more scheduled
fixtures in June. But a forced cancellation, the experience of a second riotous pitch invasion
within a month, and further attacks even in the liberal press of the time saw their playing
attempts abruptly end.
Women’s football took 14 years to recover. But when it did, it was once again led by
its earliest pioneer.
In 1895 Helen Matthews joined forces with Nettie J Honeyball, a fellow suffragette who
in late 1894 had founded the British Ladies Football Club in Crouch End in North London.
Together, the two set about building the UK’s first ever women’s football club completely
from scratch, mostly attracting middle class women whose families were rich enough to support
them while they trained.
Rejecting the heavy criticism from newspapers around the country, Honeyball stood by her
principles. On 6th February 1895 she told reporters:
“I founded the association late last year, with the fixed resolve of proving to the world
that women are not the ‘ornamental’ and ‘useless’ creatures men have pictured.
I must confess, my convictions on all matters, where the sexes are so wildly divided, are
all on the side of emancipation”.
And it was from the radical circles of the time that Honeyball, both club captain and
secretary, looked to secure support.
For the club’s president, she recruited Lady Florence Dixie.
Despite a history of supporting the British establishment in the first Anglo-Boer war
of 1880-1881, in the 1890s Florence Dixie had established herself as a leader of a radical
movement to end the requirement that women wear dresses when playing sport, calling it
‘ridiculous’.
During this time, she developed many new and more efficient clothing ideas for pursuits
like cycling, and also spoke out publicly for girls to receive equal rights to education
as boys.
She fully committed her support to Helen Matthews’ and Nettie Honeyball’s project, and in February
1895 wrote in campaigning London newspaper the Pall Mal Gazette:
“There is no reason why football should not be played by women, and played well too
[...] looking ahead, I see arising on the golden hilltops of progress above the mists
of prejudice, football will be considered as natural a game for girls as boys.”
Ahead of the first ever British Ladies’ Football Club match in Crouch End on 23 March
the same year, Honeyball set about sowing all the strips herself, spurned on both by
necessity and inspired by the clothing designs of Lady Florence Dixie.
The match was a success, as 11,000 witnessed a 7-1 victory for North over South London.
Reports of the game in the press show the progress made since Matthews’ first attempts
14 years before. While the reaction of many newspapers, and indeed players’ families,
was highly critical, this was not universally the case.
Unlike before, some of the radical press rallied around the club, which even received support
from mainstream sports newspaper the Sporting Man.
The British Ladies’ Football club was breaking boundaries in other ways too. Their opening
match featured the first ever black women’s footballer, Emma Clarke. Clarke was born in
1876 in Liverpool and was one of the few players from a working class background in the team.
Her sister, Jane Clarke, would also go on to join in the months that followed.
It is both a devastating indictment of the widespread racism in football and society
in the 19th century, and a testament to the progressive nature of the British Ladies’
Football Club, that within a year of its beginning at club level women’s football had the same
number of black players as the much more established and widespread men’s game.
From March to September 1895 the team went on to play 34 games across England, Scotland
and Ireland.
This was the heyday of the first era of women’s football, which regularly attracted crowds
of thousands and, not without difficulty, played through a first “season” with an
even more demanding fixture list than the men’s game at the time.
Sadly, it did not last. For reasons which are now lost to history, Honeyball and Matthews
parted ways in late 1895.
The two founders continued to organise teams independently, but both sides claimed to be
the original British Ladies’ Football Club, to be fielding some of the same famous players,
and to have backing from Lady Florence Dixie.
In the wake of the split, Lady Florence Dixie pulled her significant financial support from
the project and would not back either team.
On a shoestring budget, further matches were organised by both sides in 1896. But with
dwindling funds and players, and in the face of even more bad press and a further riot
at one of the games, the teams ultimately petered out.
Despite its early promise, women’s football was then largely forgotten until it burst
into a mass sport after World War One.
But we should always remember Helen Matthews, Nettie Honeyball, Emma Clarke and the other
players involved in these first great steps.