Pretexts used to ban women’s football in the world – 07/19/2023 – Sport

Former Brazilian national team player Miraildes Maciel Mota, better known as Formiga, was born in Belo Horizonte on March 3, 1978, a year before the practice of women’s football was legalized in Brazil.

That is, women were only allowed to practice the sport in the country 44 years ago, after almost four decades of prohibition.

And this type of veto was not exclusive to Brazil. United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany and Paraguay were some of the countries that also installed restrictions on the women’s sport. Understand next.

Brazil and Decree 3199

Although not the only one, the case of Brazil is one of the most emblematic and well-known when it comes to banning women in football.

This is because, unlike other countries, the government not only prevented the existence of female associations in the sport, but the practice of the modality as a whole.

The veto was published in the form of a law, during the Getúlio Vargas regime, in 1941.

Decree 3199, which established “the bases for organizing sports throughout the country”, stated in its article 54 that “women will not be allowed to practice sports that are incompatible with the conditions of their nature”.

In addition to football, sports considered to be tougher were also banned, such as any type of fight.

The document did not mention sanctions, leaving room for each police station to impose its own. There are no records, however, of women arrested for violating the order. Generally, they were arrested and released shortly after giving evidence.

The legislation followed the rise in popularity of women’s football between the 1930s and 1940s, according to historian Aira Bonfim, who specializes in women’s football.

According to the expert, the sport ended up encountering resistance in society at the time, which led to the ban.

In addition, the holding of an exhibition game between two clubs from the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Casino do Realengo and Sport Club Brasileiro, composed entirely of women, in the newly opened Pacaembu, caused controversy, dividing public opinion and the press. The match took place in May 1940, about a year before the prohibition decree.

While part of society supported the initiative, the other half rejected it, supported by the conservative social context of the time and the prevailing idea that men and women should play specific roles.

Bonfim also claims that a letter from a Rio citizen named José Fuzeira, addressed directly to President Vargas and released 10 days before the match, helped to build the speech that led to the veto.

The document mainly argued that football was a violent sport that could “seriously affect the psychological balance of bodily functions” and harm women’s ability to be mothers.

“This letter was published in some of the newspapers of the time, it reached the public knowledge very quickly and spread,” Bonfim told BBC Brasil.

“But the truth is, nobody was really worried about this idea of ​​biological health or about women getting hurt,” he says. “What there was was a certain prejudice, mainly because many of the players were from lower social strata.”

“They were still often associated with social disruption, as if they were prostitutes or did things that couldn’t be said in those environments.”

But for historian Brenda Elsey, a professor at Hofstra University and author of the book Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin Americawomen’s health or fertility was not the real concern of supporters of the law.

“In the 1940s, it was already well known that sport was not harmful. In fact, there was a whole school in Rio de Janeiro carrying out research on how physical activity benefited maternal health”, he says.

“In other words, it was nothing more than a tactic to limit women’s freedom, their free time activities and their ability to express themselves, as well as a huge demonstration of homophobia.”

Decree 3,199 was in force for 38 years. And, despite the repeal in 1979, women’s football was only properly regulated in 1983.

Despite the ban, many women never stopped playing and created strategies to circumvent the law, according to experts. Some dressed like men or played at night in private spaces. Others would run in multiple directions when discovered to disorient the officers and avoid being stopped.

Even so, according to Júlia Barreira, professor of Physical Education at Unicamp, the period of prohibition profoundly affected the development of women’s football in Brazil.

“The girls and women defied the decree, occupied the floodplain fields and organized themselves in peripheral spaces to continue practicing the modality, but they completely lost the competitions and sports organizations that supported them”, he says.

“We spent almost four decades without official competitions for them to practice and develop, structure to support them or training of coaches with qualification to work specifically with this group.”

For Barreira, this past helps to explain the current situation of the sport in the country: while the men’s team is the most successful in the history of world football, with five World Cup titles, the best position conquered by the women’s team was the second place in the 2007 World Cup.

UK

Another well-studied case of vetoing women’s football is that of the United Kingdom.

During World War I, many men who played football were called up to serve, and the English football league had to be suspended. This created a gap that began to be filled by women.

They were already gaining more space in society by taking up jobs in factories for the first time – again because most of the men had gone to fight – and, to stay in shape, many started playing football.

In this context, the big factories of armaments and other supplies began to organize tournaments between their female teams for charitable purposes.

One of the teams, called Dick, Kerr’s Ladies, became one of the best teams in women’s football during the war and even toured to face other teams. Some of their games attracted more than 50,000 spectators.

The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies also featured one of England’s all-time leading scorers, Lily Parr. She scored nearly a thousand goals in her career.

But with its popularity, so did concern that the success of women’s football would undermine the attention men’s football received once the war was over.

The English Football Association (FA) did not have the power to ban any woman from playing altogether, but ruled on 5 December 1921 that women’s games were banned on FA-affiliated football pitches.

The official version of the ban uses a justification similar to the one that would be given by the Brazilian authorities years later: that the practice of soccer is bad for women’s health and fertility.

And although there has not been a total ban on women’s football, the determination has limited the performance of teams and diverted the spotlight from women. With no income from ticket sales to cover the players’ expenses, most clubs disbanded.

The ban was only lifted almost 50 years later, in 1969, after pressure from FIFA on the FA. Then the Women’s Football Association (WFA) was formed.

Europe and Paraguay

The 1921 veto in England also spread to other countries in Europe.

In Germany, professional women’s football was banned between 1955 and 1970. The determination was only valid for West Germany, where players could not participate in championships and clubs that allowed women to play on their premises were sanctioned.

According to the German Football Association, the “aggressive sport” was unusual “to the nature of a woman”.

In the 1920s, Belgium installed a similar ban, using the same baseless medical justifications as neighboring countries.

The ban lasted until 1970, when the Royal Belgian Football Association allowed men’s football clubs to create women’s sections after international and player pressure.

In France, during the Vichy government, which divided between 1940 and 1944 the administration of the country’s territory with Germany itself, the practice of sport by women was prohibited in 1941.

After years of clandestine practice, the French Football Federation only officially recognized the existence of women’s football in March 1970.

In addition, according to historians, there are records of similar bans in Paraguay and the former Yugoslavia.

In the South American country, a 1960 decree also prohibited women from playing, claiming that the sport went against “woman’s nature” and could affect their fertility.

The measure was only reversed more than 30 years later and the first national experimental women’s soccer tournament was held in 1997.

“In many cases, as sport becomes more popular and an important part of countries’ national identity, women are pushed aside by men and the organizations in control,” says historian Brenda Elsey.

Still according to Aira Bonfim, even though there are no prohibitions in the form of law or decrees that currently prevent the formation of national women’s football leagues, vetoes are still applied in the form of lack of investment or structure.

“When you don’t structure (women’s football), it’s almost like banning it,” he says. “There are more and more conditions that will make it difficult for smaller or poorer countries to have representation within the rankings to reach a World Cup.”