When soccer was banned for women in Brazil

Dilma Mendes has lost count of how many times she has been detained by the police. Your crime? Play soccer, a sport that was banned for women in Brazil for almost four decades.

Considered a pioneer in the sport, Mendes even created strategies to escape the police who were complying with a decree enacted in 1941 by then President Getúlio Vargas and which was in force until 1979.

The ban affected the development of football in Brazil, which will participate, led by striker Marta, in the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand (July 20 to August 20).

“My idea as a child was that the police arrested people when they did something wrong, and I didn’t feel, as I still do, doing something wrong,” the former midfielder, now 59, told AFP. .

In the early 1970s, in his hometown of Camaçari, 51 kilometers from Salvador (BA), Mendes would offer ice cream to friends so that they would warn of the arrival of the police. She even dug a hole, which he called a “pit”, next to the field to hide.

When the policemen left, she returned to do her kicks, a right won with a firm hand and patience, since the boys refused to play with her at first. But the plan sometimes failed, and she was caught and taken to the police station.

“The policemen treated me well, but some said I couldn’t play because football was for men. Then I asked: where was it written?”, she remembers. “I didn’t know there was a law that prohibited women from playing football.”

– Strategies to “beat the law” –

Football associations in countries such as England, Germany and France also banned it, with several restrictions remaining in effect between 1921 and 1970, but only Brazil adopted the measure as a law.

The veto emerged during the Vargas regime and was supported, among other things, by a “biomedical discourse” that considered women more fragile than men, which is why their “physical integrity should be protected”, according to researcher Silvana Goellner .

“This presence of women in the public space challenges a norm, representation of femininity, which was very potent in that period as a mother figure, reserved for the domestic space”

adds Goellner.

The rule did not allow women “the practice of sports incompatible with the conditions of their nature”including football, rowing and wrestling, although they were not mentioned explicitly.

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

“They never stopped playing, they created strategies to circumvent the law”says the researcher, co-author of the book “Football pioneers ask for passage: to know to recognize”.

Some dressed as men, played games at night, in private spaces, ran in different directions when discovered to disorient the police and avoid arrest.

Useful for “dribbling” the agents, the maneuvers did not avoid opposition from their families. Also that of men, who didn’t want to play against or alongside women.

Delay in development

Dilma Mendes, youngest of seven siblings, five of them men, remembers sitting in a chair at the Camaçari police station, praying that her father, her great accomplice, would rescue her. If her mother caught her, she knew she would get a “beating” for playing a “man’s sport”.

“It was tough, you get home and are beaten by your brothers, you are beaten by your mother and the next day you are ready to go back and play. It was a ‘you die today and you’re born again on the same day’ thing, because if you leave it for another day, you’re still dead. I saw many friends give up because of a process that was very cruel”

he says.

Mendes did not give up and built a career in futsal and professional football, regulated in 1983, four years after the ban fell amid pressure from feminist movements, at the end of the military dictatorship (1964-1985,) and the dispute of the first international women’s tournaments.

Brazil had “Big Players” who didn’t have “opportunity”he says. “The ban was cruel, because it takes away your dream”tells Mendes through tears.

After retiring in 1995, she devoted herself to her coaching career. It was she who discovered the legendary Formiga, a former midfielder for the national team, and who won the 2019 FIFA World Cup 7 as coach of the Brazilian team.

The veto, says Goellner, hampered the historical documentation and development of women’s football in Brazil, five-time world champion in men.

“Without the ban, Brazil would already have a World Cup or an Olympic gold in women’s football”

said Aline Pellegrino, coordinator of women’s competitions at the CBF, to the Spanish newspaper El País, in 2021.

*With information from IstoÉ

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