Soccer History | Goodison Park — The Crowd That Got Women's Football Banned

On the Boxing Day holiday of 1920, 53,000 people paid into Goodison Park to watch Dick, Kerr Ladies play St Helens Ladies. Around 14,000 more were locked outside.

Eleven months later the Football Association banned women from every ground it controlled.

Dick, Kerr Ladies won 4-0. Jennie Harris opened the scoring, and Alice Kell — normally the captain and right back — moved to centre forward after Florrie Redford missed her train, then scored a second-half hat-trick.

The match raised £3,115 for unemployed and disabled ex-servicemen. The newspaper notice reproduced here records that the arrangements were in the hands of Mr P. Godwin of 70 Argyle Street, Birkenhead, and that Miss Ella Retford would kick off.

Now the date, because almost everything written about this match calls it 26 December 1920.

The 26th of December 1920 was a Sunday, and organised football was not played in England on Sundays at that time. The Boxing Day holiday fell on Monday the 27th, which is the date the standard reference work uses, with a footnote attached.

The contemporary notice on this entry does what period sources usually do: it names the holiday rather than a number. Later writers converted Boxing Day into the 26th, and the conversion stuck.

The ban arrived on 5 December 1921. The FA Council recorded its strong opinion that the game was unsuitable for women and ought not to be encouraged, and forbade member clubs from letting women play on their grounds.

The reason given was accounting — too much of the gate absorbed by expenses, too little reaching charity. The women's teams had been raising very large sums for exactly those charities.

A second date worth handling carefully: the National Football Museum's own account calls 5 December 1921 a Sunday. It was a Monday.

The ban held for around fifty years, and sources disagree on whether the FA Council rescinded the 1921 resolution in 1970 or in 1971. Both years are in print.

Dick, Kerr Ladies carried on playing in parks and public fields, and folded in 1965, six years before the ban was lifted.

That 53,000 remained the largest crowd at a women's club match in this country for more than a century. The bigger crowds that eventually passed it were internationals at Wembley.

Goodison Park still stands in Walton, north of Stanley Park.

Sources: Wikipedia; National Football Museum; BBC; Spartacus Educational; dickkerrladies.com.

Cover image: contemporary newspaper notice, author unrecorded, public domain. Goodison Park: Rodhullandemu, CC BY-SA 4.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.