THE GOOD OVEN *Wattpad Featured* (aka 'Re Ply')

Ladies FC International

It took the Football Association fifty years to recover from the Dick, Kerr's Ladies football team.

From the ammunitions factory, the munitions workers came out to play at lunch time and slaughtered their male colleagues in impromptu football matches  in the factory yard, captivating the management peeping down from a high office window. An official factory team was quickly set up and was a roaring success. By Christmas Day of 1917, the girls of the Dick, Kerr's Ladies' team played with woolly hats pulled down like pixie cloches over their bobbed hair, and won 4-0 before a crowd of 10,000.

At Goodison in 1920, the crowd reached 53,000 strong, with 14,000 more outside the gates! Their brilliant factory manager got the international matches underway, starting well at home with numerous victories over French teams. They were eventually conquered by the French with bizarre serendipity at the battle of Stamford Bridge (although this was the Chelsea ground called Stamford Bridge, not the battle field that signalled the ending of  the Viking Age and the coming of the Normans in 1066).

Their factory had previously made trams and railways, branching out into planes, but when war came it had to be converted. Men were called up, so women came in, and made the munitions that their men were using to kill the enemy. The women knew all too well, from personal experience, what their weapons were doing, as their own men came limping home. The plight of the wounded returning was a terrible one, with no real infrastructure, no national health service, no understanding of shell shock or post traumatic stress disorder. No space in their tiny dwellings for them to sit in the day time. No role any more for these injured men to fulfil. So the women of the Dick, Kerr's Ladies football club gave a huge amount of their footballers' earnings  into a fund for wounded soldiers.

Their enormous success did not always endear them to their male counterparts. The crowds for the women were huge. Somehow, this generous and successful bunch just found themselves blocked, and stopped.

In 1921 the Football Association put an end to women's football by banning them from using their grounds. Effectively, there was then simply no space for women. It was such an effective ban, many young women today think that the women's football movement is a recent invention. How did that happen? How did we forget all this so soon?

With no ground to play on, the women then went to America, playing successfully against the men's teams there. They struggled to carry on playing at home as Preston Ladies F.C. when and where they were able to find a place to play, and the team finally stopped in 1965.  It was only in 1971 that the F.A. once again recognized women's football, and allowed the use of pitches once more to women's teams.

That's a full fifty years!

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A variety of sources was used for this article, including a tv documentary, and wikipedia items, as well as other on-line journals and web sites, all of which show up readily through a simple on-line search.

Wattpad authorises a you tube link, but as this is being read in 90 countries, I have decided the post of women playing may cause some embarrassment and have taken the video down. It is still available on you tube of course. Just check the Dick Kerrs Women's football team, or something similar to find them:))