Opinion

Our sporting bodies were set up not just for men, but for a very definite type of man

Paul Rouse: An ocean of chauvinism, ignorance, neglect and denial has surrounded the history of women’s participation in sport

The flags, bunting and posters that have transformed Irishtown and Ringsend in honour of Abbie Larkin will surely redraw the imagination of at least some girls growing up in the area. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho

Paul Rouse
Fri Jul 21 2023 - 06:15

Men walked on the moon before women played competitive football matches in Croke Park, Lansdowne Road or Dalymount Park.

For many years, it was simply assumed by sportsmen that a woman’s enduring role in sport should be as part of the scenery. Almost all of the national and international bodies that now govern sport were founded in the five decades between 1850 and 1900 (a notable exception, Fifa, came just later, in 1904). These organisations were not just set up for men, but for a very definite type of man.

The sporting male was to be strong, vigorous and tough. To be good at sport was to be naturally male. More than that, games were what made boys into men. Sport was presented as the perfect academy to learn the skills that made life possible. It was where men were supposed to learn the wider virtues of courage, stamina and integrity.

Sport, a weekly newspaper dedicated to coverage of Irish sport in late 19th century, wrote that playing organised sport was crucial to discourage effeminacy in an age of “gentleman’s corsets” and of men writing “maudlin poems in praise of each other”.

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This was not a peculiarly Irish condition. The founder of the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, argued in the 1890s that women’s sport was “against the laws of nature” and that “the eternal role of woman in this world was to be a companion of the male and mother of the family, and she should be educated towards those functions”.

This discrimination was not merely a social construct; medics fed the belief that men and women were complementary opposites. Basically, women were considered only to have a fixed amount of energy and excessive sporting activity actually diminished their capacity to have children.

Further, when women sought to redefine sport for themselves and to defy the conventions of their age, they were met by a popular tendency to patronise and to parody. In newspapers, for example, women’s sport was immediately belittled, trivialised or simply ignored.

Nationally, and internationally, the sporting mould shaped in the Victorian world proved exceptionally difficult to break. The boundaries began to shift – but only slowly.

Indeed, it is only 50 years ago this month – July 29th, 1973 – that what is described as the first-ever intercounty ladies’ Gaelic football match was played when Kerry met Offaly in O’Connor Park, Tullamore. “Perfume took over from embrocation as the prevailing odour in the dressingrooms yesterday when Offaly hosted Kerry,” was how the Evening Press began its report on the match.

The reporter noted that the game had initially been seen as something of a joke, and that some diehards and other freestyle sneerers had turned up just to mock the idea of women attempting to play Gaelic football. He also claimed, however, that by the end of the match those same sneerers had been converted: “Two dedicated teams quickly earned their admiration, and some of the combined movements proved that these girls have little to learn from their male counterparts.”

With men in the GAA showing no interest in integrating women’s games, the only logical step remaining was the establishment of a separate governing body for women’s Gaelic football. When that did eventually happen, the historical symbolism of the moment was stark. On July 18th, 1974 a small group gathered in Hayes Hotel in Thurles, Co. Tipperary; fully 90 years had passed since the Gaelic Athletic Association had been founded in 1884 under the same roof.

[ Female intercounty players escalate equality dispute with media silence ]

A similar process of organisation was under way in soccer. Women in Waterford and Dublin, and in Irish universities, began to organise in clubs and to play matches in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This led to the establishment of the Women’s Football Association of Ireland in 1973 and the playing of the first women’s soccer international involving Ireland in that same year. That association initially used the word ‘Ladies’ and not ‘Women’ in its title and it, too, was independent of the male Football Association of Ireland.

In the week that Ireland’s women are playing for the first time in the Fifa World Cup finals, it is worth remembering the depth of the discrimination – societal and organisational – that restricted girls and women playing soccer to the very margins of Irish sport decade after decade.

For its part, rugby was even slower than its rival football codes: the first international national rugby match involving Irish men was played in 1875, whereas the first international rugby match involving Irish women was played in 1993. That sentence, in the baldness of its detail, reveals an ocean of chauvinism, ignorance, neglect and denial.

[ Irish women’s soccer pioneer who conquered Europe ]

In all of this, sport was reflective of society. It can be that sport is a platform which allows for the type of actions that change perceptions and allow for wider society to itself be changed. This has undeniably happened – and is happening – in Ireland. For example, the flags, bunting and posters that have transformed Irishtown and Ringsend in honour of Abbie Larkin, who is part of the Ireland squad at the World Cup, will surely redraw the imagination of at least some girls growing up in the area.

But it is also the case that the structures of sport are not easily shifted and organised sport is run by institutions that are ordinarily themselves deeply conservative.

Paul Rouse is a Professor History at UCD whose main research interest is in the history of sport. Diarmaid Ferriter is away

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