PLAY ON! The
Hidden History of Women’s Australian Rules Football
Brunette Lenkić and Rob Hess
Echo Publishing, 2016, 324
pages
Review by Phil Shannon
It was feared, over a hundred
years ago, that allowing women to play Australian Rules football would be a
slippery slope to giving them the vote and other rights enjoyed by men, say
Brunette Lenkić (footy fan) and Professor Rob Hess (sport historian) in Play On! The Hidden History of Women’s
Australian Rules Football. It was to
take a century, and then some, of Australian women footballers’ “resilience in
the face of indifference, ridicule, hostility and limited support” for them
to win their right to play football.
Women’s football has had a
long, but strictly second-class, history.
Early twentieth century games were scratch matches, one-off novelty
affairs between work-based teams (mostly seamstresses and sales staff from
retail stores), used as a gimmick by businesses to market their millinery,
including athletically-unfriendly skirts, in fund-raising matches staged as fund-raisers
for the war effort or forsupport for the unemployed during the Depression.
Playing footy from women’s
sheer love of it (including their “often overlooked” love of the ‘unladylike’ physicality
of Australian Rules football) was not a consideration and many barriers to
regularisation of the women’s game remained.
The Vatican’s 1934 outlawing of women’s soccer as ‘unwomanly’, enforced
by Mussolini’s fascists, flowed over into official Catholic distaste for women
kicking the oval-shaped ball as well as the round ball whilst Protestant
churches, as late as the 1960s, were still denouncing women’s football as a
‘Godless trend’ violating ‘the Christian concept of womanhood’.
Religion also decreed against
sport being played on Sundays, one of the few timeslots available for women to
fit regular club-based matches around the male, even the most junior boys’,
football schedule. Access to ovals and
other facilities continued to be monopolised by men whilst the press was condescending,
mocking, trivialising and patronising in its coverage of women’s games, only
reluctantly acknowledging the women’s competitive spirit, skill and
athleticism.
Routine sexism dogged the
women’s game. In 1947, one woman player
recalled the women’s teams running onto the field to ‘a chorus of
wolf-whistles’. Revered icons of the
men’s game like the legendary and tough captain-coach of Richmond (Jack Dyer,
aka ‘Captain Blood’) said that women were physically and mentally unsuited to
football, ‘their minds would be bewildered by the rules’, injuries could ruin
their ‘chance to become mothers’, and the hardening of their muscles would
‘spoil the shape of their legs’. Women,
who had long kept the men’s game going through volunteering rarely had the
favour returned by men.
As post-sixties feminism
challenged all aspects of a male-dominated society, women’s football gradually
made progress. Feminism was invoked by the
founder of the organised Victorian women’s competition, and the sexist
headwinds slowly abated though not without occasional oppositional gusts – a
commercial television channel filmed one training session of a women’s team in
WA in 1988 but edited it as “a blooper reel set to circus music”.
Momentum for women’s football
has continued to grow, however, with a real spurt from 2007 when the Australian
Football League (AFL) Commission, the game’s governing body, formally got
behind it. The decision was based less
on high-minded, abstract equalitarian principle, than on commercial grounds,
however. Uniquely amongst the football
codes, Australian Rules has always appealed strongly to women, with females
accounting for 45% of current AFL attendees whilst 284,000 women and girls now play
organised competitive football.
As a “business enterprise”, the
AFL has sniffed market potential and revenue from television rights to the
women’s game. A televised Footscray-Melbourne
women’s exhibition game in 2015 rated its boots off, drawing half a million
viewers, more than watched a lacklustre Adelaide-Essendon game the same
weekend. Television networks have caught
the heady whiff of advertising dollars.
It may have taken crude capitalist calculation to make a go of women’s
football but a formal, financially-viable, eight-team, unionised (two hundred
new members of the the AFL Players’ Association face their next frontier – pay
parity) elite national women’s competition, finally becomes reality in 2017. Up
There, Kaz!
