Gaining a foothold in football: A genealogical analysis of the emergence of the female footballer in New Zealand

Introduction

The growth in female participation in various sports since the 1960s has been dramatic, particularly given that the sporting world had long been considered as a masculinity validating context or as a male domain (Hall, 1996; Messner, 1996; Theberge, 2000). Football, or soccer as it is known in some countries, is one such sport that has witnessed spectacular growth. Female footballers were virtually non-existent in the early 1960s but by the mid-2000s, FIFA (2006) estimated that 26 million females were registered players. Within New Zealand, the Sport and Recreation Commission (SPARC, 2001) reported that an astounding one-third of all females under the age of 16 had played football.

In conjunction with the growth in participants, a number of international tournaments such as the FIFA Women’s, U-20 and U-17 World Cups and the Olympics have developed to offer opportunities for females to play, coach, administer and referee on the world stage. Media interest in female football has also grown. In November 2008, the inaugural FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup was held in New Zealand. According to Michele Cox, FIFA Ambassador for this event, 159 countries purchased live television coverage rights and spectators within New Zealand could watch all 56 matches on television (personal communication, 10 August 2008). Not surprisingly, lucrative commercial endorsements have become available for some players and several countries run professional leagues. Although the income earned by female footballers pale in significance to the exorbitant sums earned by some males, we surmise that football now appears, at least within New Zealand, to be generally accepted as a sport suitable for participation by females of all ages.

Within this article we examine various socio-historic factors in the early 1970s that allowed for this transformation in football. Our interest in undertaking this research was spurred by three interrelated factors. First, examinations of the historical growth of women’s football in New Zealand remain marginal. In two definitive books written by men on footballing history in New Zealand, women’s football received a scant four pages in each (see Hilton, 1991; Maddaford, 1987). Relatedly, we aim to make the history of women’s football more visible. Second, by examining the factors of importance underpinning the significant growth, and apparent acceptance, of women’s football in New Zealand, we aim to gain understanding of factors associated with feminist social transformations. Although we are doubtful that such knowledge could then be applied in other contexts or time periods to promote further change we, nevertheless, believe that understanding the complexities associated with socio-historic transformation is of value. Finally, the existing histories of women’s football are primarily stories of exclusion and marginalization rather than one’s of growth, proliferation and success in the face of challenges. Socio-historians, for example, have clearly revealed that for almost two-thirds of the 20th century ruling organizations banned women from playing the game, limited their use of football fields and forbade young girls to play in teams alongside boys (e.g. see Knoppers and Anthonissen, 2003; Macbeth, 2007; Pfister, 2004; Votre and Mourao, 2004, Williams, 2003). Many sport feminists have also used gender as a central analytic in their research to highlight women’s struggle to be involved in sport (e.g. see Hartmann-Tews and Pfister, 2003; Magee et al., 2007; Obel et al., 2008; Vertinsky, 1990). These studies reveal that female sport participants faced and still continue to face harassment, trivialization, discrimination and homophobic prejudice in a manner that limits their sport participation choices and pressures them to perform femininities in a relatively narrow manner. The circulation of homophobic discourse has also been shown to render players who identify as lesbians, silent and relatively invisible (Griffin, 1992). Yet in the face of these now well documented struggles and victimizations, women’s football not only gained a foothold within the male domain but has subsequently grown significantly. However, little is known about how the pioneering footballers in the early 1970s manoeuvred their way into playing a so-called man’s sport and how, therefore, they set the scene for football to become a mainstream female sport in New Zealand. Our recognition of the lack of examination became the prime impetus for undertaking this study.

The pioneering footballers’ stories have been typically hidden from the official eyes of history but in this article we reveal and analyse their memories and lived experiences to gain further understanding of the development of women’s football in New Zealand. We begin this article by detailing how we used Foucault’s genealogical approach in order to analyse the emergence of the female footballer. We then draw predominantly from newspaper articles and NZ Football Association documents to provide a contextual overview of various discursive factors that were of socio-cultural significance when the first women’s teams started playing. This contextual overview is followed by our examination of the footballers’ stories of their formative experiences and our related analysis.

Notes on performing a genealogical method

Although it is now common for sport feminists to draw on Foucault’s concepts of power to examine the female body (e.g. Chapman, 1997; Chase, 2006; Markula, 1995; Shogun, 1999), his genealogical approach has been rarely used in sport studies (see Barker-Ruchti, 2007 as an exception). In this article, we drew on Foucault’s understanding that relations of power do not just produce discourses and form knowledges, they also ‘induce pleasure’ (1980a: 119), to examine the historical development and institutionalization of women’s football in New Zealand circa 1973.

Genealogy is not a traditional history that assumes definitive causes and linear continuities or focuses on famous individuals (Hawkesworth, 2006). Nor is it a traditional project undertaken by many to find their ancestors. Instead, Foucault (1980a) suggested that genealogy was:

… a form of history that can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a subject that is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history. (p. 117)

Foucault’s genealogical approach differed from traditional histories in that he sought out subjugated knowledges. While Foucault (1980b) acknowledged that this could refer to historical erudite knowledges buried under or disguised by established regimes of thought, he suggested that subjugated knowledge should also be understood as:

… a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated; naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. (1980b: 82)

Foucault believed that a critical examination of ‘particular, local, regional knowledge’ (1980b: 82) combined with an examination of buried erudite knowledge would uncover ‘a historical knowledge of struggles’ (1980b: 83). Foucault’s genealogical approach, accordingly, opened up ways to historically examine ‘knowledge struggles’ in a manner that Jana Sawicki (1991) suggested might lead to alternative ways of thinking about contemporary social issues. Knowledge of women’s football, for example, has been ranked much lower than that of men’s football. Indeed, the lack of historical knowledge concerning women’s football is emblematic of a form of gender struggle. Jean Williams (2003), for example, pointed out in her research of women’s football in England that no single archive existed and, for some reason, the minutes and various materials of the Women’s Football Association were ‘misplaced at the point of take-over [by the English FA] or are otherwise unavailable’ (p. 5). We suggest, in following Foucault, that the resurrection of this marginalized knowledge might allow for different sociological ways of thinking about sportswomen, gender and football. Our related aim was to analyze the memories (i.e. knowledges) of the pioneering footballers with respect to their understandings of how they began playing club football in New Zealand.

Foucault’s approach to genealogical analysis revolved around analyses of emergence and descent. The analysis of descent was concerned with examining the articulations between discourses and bodies with respect to social change within a historical period (Markula and Pringle, 2006). In this manner, we wanted to examine how the female footballers were constituted via discourse in a mode that justified or allowed their embodied participation. Foucault (1972) did not conceptualize discourse as a simple translation between reality and language but as social practices that produce and regulate the production of statements and, correspondingly, shape understandings and perceptions of reality. The analysis of emergence, as connected to the analysis of descent, focused on the productive workings of power. Thus, in this study, we wanted to examine the historical workings and shifts in the relations of power that allowed the female footballer to emerge. One of the prime aims of genealogy is to show that social phenomena are not teleological processes of history but processes of contingency, chance and even mistakes. Foucault stated (2003), as example, that through genealogy one could:

identify the accidents, the minute deviations–or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things which continue to exist and have value for us. (p. 355)

Foucault (2003) did not leave a set recipe or ‘how to’ guide on genealogical research, apart from advising readers that genealogy ‘requires patience and a knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material’ (p. 351). The data we analysed were, accordingly, drawn from a wide range of sources. Barbara, as the lead researcher, collected this diverse data via her ‘insider status’. This decision stemmed, in part, from Normal Denzin’s (2001) advice:

… because interpretation is a temporal process, researchers are wise to study those areas of social life in which they already have some intimate familiarity. By doing so, they can draw upon the stocks of knowledge that they have built up out of previous life experiences. (p. 123)

Barbara has been involved in football for more than 37 years as a player, coach and administrator at all levels. She also played in the first competitive games under the auspices of the Northern Women’s Football Association (NWFA) and later, went on to captain the first New Zealand Women’s Football team in 1975. This involvement had given her an ‘intimate familiarity’ (Denzin, 2001: 123) with women’s football. Her footballing services were recognized in 1995 by induction into the New Zealand Soccer Hall of Fame and in 1996 by being awarded a MBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours list. As a consequence of this insider status, Barbara had free access to all the minute books and correspondence of the NWFA and the Auckland Football Association (AFA). Newspaper articles were also sourced from the University of Auckland’s library (on microfiche) and from the ‘official’ scrapbook compiled by the first NWFA secretary. While this scrapbook was helpful in triggering leads to other information sources and, in this sense, could be considered part of what Foucault (1980b) termed subjugated knowledge, often the media articles had no date of publication or reference to the name of the newspaper. For this reason, we have included as much information as possible in the references to identify the year in which they were published.

The eight interview participants were purposively selected on the basis that they had started to play football between 1973 and 1975 and had gone onto to coach and/or administrate football. In order to record a wide range of experiences, the selection of participants were varied so all levels of involvement were represented, for example: club players and representative players; coaches with coaching qualifications and those without; those coaching junior girls and boys and those coaching senior women; those administering at club level and those administering at national/international level. In this way, we were able to gain access to what Foucault (1980b: 83) termed ‘local memories’. All the interviewees (seven European and one Maori, with ages ranging from 45 to 60 years) were based in Auckland and the subsequent interview ‘conversations’, which lasted between one and two hours, were primarily carried out in the lead author’s home. The interviewees were initially asked to tell their stories of how they began playing football, the challenges and support received, and their rationales for continued participation. The interviews were audio-taped and transcribed verbatim.

Although Foucault (1981) offered some methodological advice, he never fully described how he went about analysing his own data nor did he set out a clear-cut method for others to follow. We nevertheless followed Foucault’s advice for analysing ‘the tactical polyvalence of discourse’ (1978: 100). Thus, in our analysis of discourses surrounding female footballers, we read each interview transcript closely several times, trying to build up a picture of how female footballers were spoken of during this time period. To do this, we examined the multiple elements of discourses which came into play: that is, we observed what was said, and conversely what was not said; we identified speakers and the discursive positions from which they spoke and the institutions to which they belonged; we looked particularly for groups of words or statements that had similar meanings which regularly appeared in the texts as well as identifying counter-discourses which challenged or offered oppositional meanings. Finally, we broadened our search and examined how social practices, subjects or objects were enunciated in the context of female footballers, to gain an understanding of how female footballers were enmeshed in a wider network of power relations.

The development of football in the 1970s: A contextual overview

Although a short-lived attempt to develop and institutionalize women’s football within New Zealand occurred in 1921 (Cox, 2010), another 50 years would pass before the discursive context changed significantly enough to allow for women’s football to gain a concrete foothold in the territory of sport. In order to shed light on this time period, we begin our results by offering a contextual overview of the development of women’s football during the early 1970s. This is followed by an examination of our interviewees’ narratives.

In attempting to explain the dramatic growth of women’s sport, Coakley et al. (2009) postulated that since the mid-1960s a series of interrelated factors – such as the women’s rights movement, anti-discriminatory legislation, new opportunities for sport, increased media coverage and the fitness movement – coalesced in a manner to produce a context conducive for increased female sport participation. These factors, as we will now illustrate, were significant in the growth of female football in New Zealand. We argue, however, that the politicization of gender prejudice was paramount.

During the late 1960s to early 1970s, the women’s liberation movement, as it was known in New Zealand, emerged and in conjunction with the improved education and economic capacity of women, the life opportunities for many women began to change (Aitken, 1980). May (1992) proposed, however, that it was Germaine Greer’s visit to New Zealand in 1972 to promote The Female Eunuch which galvanized many women to demand, for example, free contraception, equal pay, abortion on demand and non-discriminatory education. Such demands, as Macdonald (1993) noted, were related to a more radical desire to confront and eradicate the discursive view of women as passive, submissive, sexual ‘objects’ for male heterosexual pleasure.

While feminism did not necessarily play an active role in the lives of all women in the 1970s, the feminist movement and associated Government legislation, such as the Equal Pay Act (1972), were of considerable social significance. The media were active, relatedly, in circulating news concerned with the advances of females into ‘male domains’: although we suggest that they did so in a manner that simultaneously reinforced and challenged understandings of femininities. A front-page headline from The New Zealand Herald, for example, advised: ‘BEWARE THAT SIREN SOON – IT MAY BE A FAIR COP’ (The New Zealand Herald, 1973a: 1). The article subsequently informed that the Auckland City Council had decided to employ female traffic officers at the same rate of pay as their male counterparts. A similarly themed headline stated ‘WITH WOMEN’S LIB NO ROCKING BOAT’ (The New Zealand Herald, 1973b: 13), in which readers were advised that ‘with the arrival of these days of women’s lib perhaps it was only a matter of time before the fairer sex set their sights on rowing as a competitive sport’. These articles positioned females as capable of undertaking strenuous and potentially dangerous activities but also reaffirmed discourses of femininity, as linked to the notion of the ‘fairer sex’, with understandings of innocence, justice, passivity and as objects worthy of visual attention (e.g. fair refers to blond, pleasing in appearance and free from blemishes). As such, we contend, the discursive tone of the articles possibly countered the threat of radical change to the gender order by affirming that females were still valued for their beauty and submissiveness.

Within this context of gender transformation and reaffirmation, new opportunities for females arose, one of which was women’s football. In the following we provide a brief sketch of the documented ‘history’ to illustrate some of the mechanics associated with the early growth of the game. With no record of the women who played football in 1921 in official football histories (see Hilton, 1991; Maddaford, 1987), the beginning of women’s football as an institutionalized sport in New Zealand is commonly accepted to be 1972 in Wellington (Lee, 1989) and 1973 in Auckland (NWFA minutes, 1973). The decision for women to play ‘official’ football in Auckland was preceded by a letter circulated to all football club secretaries in March 1973 asking, ‘Does your Club have a ladies team? Is there sufficient interest in your Club to form a team?’ (NWFA minutes, 1973). With these words, clubs were urged to send two delegates, preferably the team coach and captain of the women’s team to attend a meeting on 12 March 1973 (NWFA minutes, 1973). Perhaps encouraged by the knowledge that women were playing football overseas, the representatives of the six clubs who turned up for this inaugural meeting believed it was the right time to establish what was known as a ‘ladies competitive football league’ (NWFA minutes, 1973).

On Sunday 29 April 1973, 10 club teams subsequently took to the field and played their first competitive game of football under the auspices of the NWFA. This regional association was later affiliated to the New Zealand Women’s Football Association (Lee, 1989). After the national representative team won the inaugural Asian Cup in 1975 in Hong Kong, women’s football began to receive small amounts of media coverage. The following year, the number of teams in the women’s leagues increased from 27 to 38 (Auckland Women’s Football Association, 1983). This historical sketch lends support to the assertion of Coakley et al. (2009) that new opportunities for women to participate in sport and increased media coverage were of importance in fuelling participation numbers. Yet it would be mistaken to believe that the historical growth of women’s football was a smooth linear process.

Hargreaves (1994), for example, argued: ‘time and time again the evidence suggests that female sports have been riddled with complexities and contradictions throughout their histories’ (p. 3). We argue that these complexities and contradictions stem from competing discourses that make it difficult for some to understand the phenomena of women’s football. The consequences of these competing discourses were evident, for example, in a quote from the Chairman of the New Zealand Women’s Football Association published within a newspaper article titled, in a sexualized manner, ‘Kickers in knickers’ (NWFA scrapbook, 1975). He stated:

I’m not a person for women’s lib because I believe women should retain their femininity. They can do this in football, but not in rugby. I think women should retain their femininity, but they should have the same basic rights as men. Nothing should be for men only. My daughter plays football. I don’t see why she should go to ballet classes just because she’s a girl. (NWFA scrapbook, 1975)

The Chairman appears to support a liberal feminist agenda as long as it does not threaten a female’s ‘femininity’ and, in this confused manner, he was supportive of women playing football but not rugby. In this quote, therefore, we suggest that the Chairman’s confusions stem from competing discourses concerned with feminism, femininity and football. Other newspaper articles also pointedly revealed confusion surrounding the advent of women playing football. One headline, as an example, titled: ‘Our soccer gets a (shapely) leg up: GRANDAD would turn in his grave. Women playing soccer!’ (‘Our soccer gets’, NWFA scrapbook, 1973) which discursively constructed female footballers as sexual objects by drawing attention to their ‘shapely legs’ but also constructed football as a male domain given the possessive use of ‘our soccer’. The discursive confusion that underpins ‘Grandad’s turn in his grave’ relates, accordingly, to the conflict of having heterosexually attractive women playing a man’s sport.

Given our brief contextual analysis of the times, we speculate that the pioneering footballers would have faced ridicule and questioning upon entering the hallowed masculine turf of football. Our research questions, accordingly, asked: how did the pioneering female footballers begin playing the game and how did they live the challenges and joys of football into existence? What were the discursive contexts that allowed and/or encouraged the pioneering footballers’ participation? And, how were these women constructed as objects of discourse that enabled them to play a ‘man’s game’? To help answer these questions we were interested in hearing the stories told by the pioneering footballers and in analysing documents that were concerned with their emergence.

On becoming footballers

In this section we first reveal our interviewees’ narratives of how they came to play football and illustrate some of the problems that they faced in the process. In highlighting these problems we then analyse their experiences to provide a discursive analysis of how they understood football and how they were positioned as footballers as a means for understanding the initial growth of women’s football.

In common with findings from early sport socialization research in New Zealand (e.g. Bruce, 1987) and United States (Greendorfer, 1983) and more current research from Europe (e.g. Fasting et al., 1997; Macbeth, 2004), the interviewees’ revealed that their families or close social contacts were significant in augmenting their initial participation into football. The eight interviewees either had husbands, ‘boyfriends’, brothers or fathers that were closely involved in playing, coaching or administrating football and mothers and sisters who were supportive of new sporting opportunities. Within these close-knit social relations, football was positioned as a sport of social importance: topics of conversation and weekly schedules, accordingly, revolved around (men’s) football. And within the broader social context of a burgeoning liberal feminism the concept of women playing football was soon lived into existence by our interviewees. Three of the interviewees told stories of how their participation grew from supporting their brothers’ participation. Hannah, as an example, talked about ‘watching my brother play from a young age and getting dragged along to the football games to support him’. As she grew older, however, she said she would join in with her brother’s friends to help ‘make up the numbers at the local park’. Malia and Iva told similar stories. Within these informal contexts, skills were mastered and the discourse that females could play football circulated.

Performing the patriarchal duties associated with being a ‘good’ wife, by supporting one’s husband, was linked to Gaye and Patria’s entry to football participation. Both of their marriage partners were successful footballers. Gaye reported that her husband played for a National League team and that over time the female supporters of the club decided, ‘it would be a good idea to get up a girls’ team’. Patria similarly attested:

I was interested in watching my husband playing, there was other women interested and wanted to knock the ball around that’s basically how we got started. People within the soccer team, the male soccer team had family members who wanted to knock around and so that’s what we did.

Gaye and Patria’s husbands, in somewhat reciprocal fashion, subsequently became their biggest supporters by coaching or managing their teams. The support from heterosexual partners was eventually noted by sports reporter Maddaford who observed in The Sunday Herald, ‘with competition play on Sunday, rather than Saturday, women find they are getting much more support – often from soccer-playing husbands or boyfriends’ (NWFA scrapbook, 1975).

In 1973, by the time that the first clubs and formal leagues were organized, the interviewees typically found that they also gained tremendous support from their parents. Some parents reportedly never missed watching their daughters play. As Gaye put it, ‘they loved it, they loved watching it. It was something totally different to them, I think’. Jayne similarly remarked that her parents thought her playing ‘was great’ and they welcomed the opportunity to watch her games as they had ‘always been involved with my brother’s football’. The support from their mothers was particularly significant. Chelsea’s mother, for example, not only supported her daughter from the sidelines but also helped promote the growth of women’s football by becoming a NWFA administrator.

From a discursive perspective, our interviewees revealed that they had initially understood the game of football as a man’s sport but over time, as they gained support and encouragement for their participation, football was spoken into being as a ‘family sport’: a sport within which families supported involvement irrespective of gender. The support from their loved ones was significant in encouraging their continued participation and in countering the prejudice and discrimination that the interviewees subsequently experienced in relation to being a female footballer in the early 1970s.

Gender troubles

In the early years of women’s football, NWFA and female club administrators reported that they struggled with three major problems: the lack of grounds, the lack of referees and a general lack of acceptance that women could or should play football (Cox and Thompson, 2004). The last issue, as a struggle against the discursive positioning of women, was one that was a particularly troubling for our interviewees. Many of the interviewees experienced discrimination in a manner that implied they had transgressed the normative and acceptable boundaries of femininity. In some cases the discrimination was overt. Jayne, for example, reported that when her team applied to join a club, the male secretary told her bluntly: ‘Oh that’s not a women’s sport. That’s a man’s sport. Women can’t play in this club. We are not going to recognize them.’ Yet Jayne did not question who she was, as a footballer, but remembered thinking, ‘Who do they think they are?’ Moreover, she was annoyed as ‘they wouldn’t give us a strip, and they wouldn’t let us play on the playing fields next to the clubrooms’. Her confidence, in being a footballer, meant that her frustrations were not internalized but directed at those who voiced sexism.

The discrimination faced by some of the interviewees, in the formative years, was often less direct but still had a negative impact. Trendi remembered, as an example, how people were quite astonished when they discovered she had given up netball in order to play football. She reported that people would question her judgment by asking: ‘Why on earth have you given up netball when you are so good at it?’ Although flattered by their recognition that she was a good netballer, Trendi understood that their questions stemmed from a belief that football was not suitable for a girl and this made her feel uncomfortable: ‘I didn’t really have an answer. I don’t actually know why I gave up – why I wanted to do soccer so much.’ In other words, Trendi found it difficult to answer a question that by default, asked: ‘why are you, as a female, playing a male sport?’ The interviewees, more broadly, revealed that numerous people would discuss their football participation by comparing football with other ‘socially approved’ female activities. Malia, as example, reported that her aunt was concerned that she was playing football but was specifically horrified when Malia suggested that her daughter could also play. The aunt replied: ‘Oh no! She’s not playing that! She’s a ballerina.’

The extent to which the interviewees reported that their football participation was discussed in relation to other activities resonates with Foucault’s (1977) argument that ‘comparison’ is one of the prime disciplinary technologies. Through comparing football with activities normalized as feminine, such as ballet or netball, football is positioned as abnormal. Thus, comparison, in this context, worked as a dividing practice in an attempt to discipline or control femininities.

The various attempts to discipline the interviewees’ femininities did not, however, result, in the abolition of women’s football, as was the case in 1921 (see Cox, 2010). In contrast, football gained a foothold that strengthened over time. So what discursive factors allowed football to prosper?

Being taken seriously?

In a seemingly paradoxical manner we argue that the broad-based discursive positioning of football as a man’s sport was one factor that worked indirectly to allow for the initial growth of women’s football. We suggest, more specifically, that given this sexist way of knowing football, many football administrators did not take women’s football seriously and, as such, did not recognize that significant social transformation was underway: without such recognition there was no need to feel threatened or challenge the growth of women’s football. Several interviewees, for example, reported that club administrators believed that women’s football would be a short-lived phenomenon and by the end of the year the ‘novelty factor’ would have worn off and women would stop playing. Patria stated that the majority of the male footballers understood that women’s football was ‘just a big laugh, nothing serious, couldn’t kick a ball, couldn’t control it, all that stuff’. Similar sentiments were even circulated within the print media. The New Zealand Herald reporter, Terry Maddaford, reinforced this point by describing women’s football as ‘a game of kick and giggle, with more giggle than kick’ (NWFA scrapbook, 1973). Another article published in the 8 O’Clock, written by Dorothy Simons, was titled ‘Soccer’s definitely not a joke for the girls’, which implied that other people had potentially thought it was (NWFA scrapbook, 1973).

The NWFA minutes (1973) similarly revealed that the majority of clubs did not take the women’s teams seriously and, as such, did not want to invest financially in the growth of their football. This was despite the fact that some males within the clubs were supportive of women’s football with respect to training and development. The clubs refusal, however, to not purchase uniforms forced players to either fund-raise for their own strip or accept ill-fitting hand-me-downs from the men’s teams. Moreover, some teams were not allowed to train on the club grounds if the men’s team were going to play on it on Saturday (Ruane, 1999). Although we thought our interviewees would have found this lack of support frustrating, not all did. Indeed, four of the interviewees reported that in their first year of playing they did not take themselves, as footballers, particularly seriously. Gaye pointed out, in a seemingly self-defeating manner, that there was belief that they were never going to be good players:

It wasn’t taken seriously – and because we didn’t start playing in the juniors, it was women trying to learn a game that men had learnt from when they were young. So we would never be as good as them. You always felt that you would never be as good as a male. We played to get a bit of enjoyment – a bit of different enjoyment sure – but not as serious as the men’s game.

This discourse of gendered difference in ability to play football circulated amongst the pioneering footballers and had the residual power effect that they did not feel overtly marginalized by the lack of club support. They appeared to believe, we speculate, that they were not as proficient at football as the men, women’s football was not as serious and, relatedly, they were not entitled to equal provision of football resources. As such, the players did not publicly protest the inequitable treatment. The club officials, correspondingly, did not believe that women’s football posed a future threat with respect to use of limited football resources (e.g. use of fields). Hannah, as a related example, remembered in her first year of playing that the club grounds were not available for the women’s team because no one would pay for the floodlights, so they had to find ‘whatever patch of grass they could’ and improvise:

We used to line all the cars up along the side of the field so that we would only have to have the car beams on one side. It made you play one-sided football because you really only ever wanted to play with your back to the lights cause every time you turned with the ball into the lights, you couldn’t see the ball. (Hannah)

The interviewees’ lack of overt concern about the differential treatment was also reflective of their broader understandings of gendered relations of power. More specifically, we suggest that as influenced by the discursive context of the times – within which the ideals of liberal feminism were only beginning to gain public support – our interviewees’ understandings of gender relations were conservative rather than radical. Their stories of football participation did, however, reveal that they were influenced by liberal feminist ideals. Malia, as an example, reported that after a man within her club told her: ‘Playing football? You’re playing women’s football. It’s not a woman’s game, it’s a bloody men’s game’, she retorted with: ‘Well if you can play the ruddy game, so can we.’ Yet the interviewees’ accounts of their initiation into club football typically revealed that they were acquiescent, submissive and even subjugated.

Jayne, as an example, recollected that her team had initial difficulties in being accepted by some of the male committee members, but rather than protest they did a tremendous amount of work around the club:

Gradually the women’s team would do things, like we would get involved. I remember when they had a working bee our team came and painted the changing rooms. We weren’t greasing to get in but just letting them see that we were valuable club members. We used to sell toasted sandwiches in the canteen to make money for them and often used to take our turn at collecting the gate-money.

Jayne did not view this response as reflective of subjugation but as a necessary strategy in order to become accepted. Sports feminists such as Shona Thompson (1999), however, might argue that their ‘servicing’ of men’s sport was an extension and reflection of their domestic domination. Indeed, some of the interviewees told stories of their domestic ‘duties’ that were reflective of subjugation. Certainly this was the understanding of Patria as she described how she routinely washed, without payment, the playing strip for the men’s team her husband coached:

On Sunday night the guys would come off the plane from Otago at midnight. My husband would come home with the gear bag and I would be washing gear at 1 o’clock in the morning. I would wash all the dirt off the socks first and then put them through with the shorts. The shirts I would leave to soak and then put them through the next day.

Many of our interviewees told stories of how their support of male football was not reciprocated. They were often ‘required’, for example, to bring plates of food to men’s after match functions but the men did not do the same at theirs. In the early days, as an example, only the men had changing rooms: the interviewees told of changing behind bushes outside, in public toilets or in their cars. Yet they did not demand equality or even question the lack of it. Nor did the pioneering footballers appear to question that they should have been entitled to train to become referees. In contrast, Jan Innes, Secretary of the NWFA in the Soccer Weekly thanked the Auckland Referees’ Association for permitting three women to sit an examination in order to become qualified referees: ‘Our appreciation to the Referees’ Association for allowing our girls to enter this hitherto male domain’ (NWFA scrapbook, 1973, emphasis added). By showing gratitude rather than demanding equality, the footballers demonstrated that they were neither a threat nor a challenge to the current understanding that men were entitled by ‘right’ to have control of all footballing resources.

Liberal feminism, nevertheless, did play a role in opening up footballing opportunities for females. As Malia expressed there was a belief circulating that ‘if men could do it, we could do it’. And, although our interviewees did not receive equal treatment, they did tell stories of how many of the men were also influenced by this discourse of gender liberalism. The decision of the Auckland Football Association (AFA) to allow the NWFA women’s representative team to play Wellington as the curtain-raiser for an international men’s match in their first year of existence (NWFA scrapbook, 1973) was, we suggest, likely influenced by ideas of equal access. This decision was significant as the AFA gave tacit approval for women’s football and the public, possibly for the first time, witnessed the best of women’s football.

The Auckland print media coverage of women’s football in 1973 typically portrayed the players as feminine and consistently referred to them in terms of their heterosexual relationships, identifying them as wives, girlfriends or mothers. Simons reported in the 8 O’Clock that: ‘Margaret Hodge, secretary of the East Coast Bays club and wife of its Chairman, did a good job in goal for Bays’ (NWFA scrapbook, 1973). The Auckland Star, in similar manner, advised its readers that ‘Football is a family affair for Ray and Gay Mears’, depicting the parents dressed in football gear with their two daughters in dresses, one of whom was kicking a football (NWFA scrapbook, 1973). And The Sunday News made the assumption that in spite of playing football a beautiful girl must have a husband or boyfriend by rhetorically asking in the headline: ‘Why does a beautiful girl play a knicker-ripping, pantyhose-laddering game, hair-style-flattening game like soccer? And what does hubby or the boyfriend think?’ (NWFA scrapbook, 1973).

We suggest that the female footballer in 1973 was discursively constructed as non-threatening to the gender order within their clubs and family lives: they were not known as feminists, serious footballers, radicals or for demanding equal use of resources. They were, in contrast, positioned as heterosexual, acquiescent, family members with an interest in football and a desire to support men’s footballing interests and social entertainment. The sexualities of our interviewees were, accordingly, never questioned and homophobic taunts were non-existent. In fact, some interviewees reported that it was not until the 1980s that a discourse positioning female footballers as ‘lesbian’ or ‘butch’ began to circulate (see Cox and Thompson, 2001, for further discussion) and this occurred, we add, when women footballers were serious about their sport and demanding of equitable treatment. The discursive construction of the emergent female footballer was, therefore, in alignment with the normalized women of the early 1970s. Thus, given the unintended consequences of seemingly competing discourses, as linked to sexism and liberal feminism, the active, muddy, competitive, skilled female footballing body emerged into the male domain in a non-threatening manner and gained a foothold in the hitherto male domain of football. Yet what sustained the desire of these women to keep playing football given the inequitable treatment?

I just love football . . .

All of the interviewees expressed a delight in and a love of the game after playing it for the first time. They gave examples of specific footballing pleasures by talking of the delights, as examples, associated with the freedom to move with speed on the field, the thrill of heading a goal past the outstretched hands of the keeper and the sense of accomplishment in tackling an opponent and coming away with the ball. Hannah expressed how she loved being able to move with ‘the ball at my feet’ and how she ‘didn’t care if it rained or shined as long as I could play football. I just wanted to play and I wanted to be the best.’ For some, like Malia, it was more than love, ‘it was a passion’. This passion has sustained her for 37 years, as she is still involved in coaching young players today. The interviewees also explained that the camaraderie and socializing after the game were equally as important in maintaining their commitment and passion, as Jayne recalled nostalgically:

We played because we loved playing but we also liked the social gatherings afterwards. Metro and Mt Wellington had a wonderful relationship and we would all bring our guitars and we would be sitting there at 5 o’clock in the evening singing away. You know it was just fantastic. My boys still talk about how much they loved those days.

Patria also talked about how she felt ‘bonded’ with not just the players in her team but all the men and women who had been involved with her in the administration of the game:

I remember when we went to that reunion – I’m not going to say the love and the comradeship, I don’t really call it that – but the bonding from those people was still there although it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. I think now if you walked into a room with a lot of those people, the girls that played, the women that played, all those guys, you would just be the same as normal, just pick up [from] where you left off.

Football became incorporated into these women’s lives to such an extent that Chelsea exclaimed: ‘it has given me my lifestyle’. Indeed, football offered many opportunities for our interviewees to learn new skills, travel to foreign countries, meet new people, hold decision-making positions and move their bodies skilfully, aggressively and in, what some might call, a masculine manner. Thus, through footballing their understandings of what it meant to be a woman and to be feminine changed and over time these women were no longer submissive and docile, but voiced opposition to the gendered inequalities in football. Indeed, some became political in lobbying for change. Football, accordingly, provided opportunities for them to transgress the ‘normalized’ femininities that they performed in their first year of club participation.

Pringle (2009) argued that pleasure ‘can be understood as a prime existential project, an organizing principle of social life, and a productive force in the constitution of desiring sport subjects’ (p. 213). In similar manner, we argue that the football pleasures experienced by our interviewees can be understood as productive in that they helped produce their desires to continue participating in contexts of gender inequality, shaped their winter weekly schedules for years to come, and played a prominent role in underpinning their stories of self (identities) and even, as Chelsea claimed, individual lifestyles. More broadly, we suggest that these footballing pleasures can be understood as socially significant in understanding the historically recent emergence of the object/subject known as the female footballer, and, the related role that this discursive formation has played, via contingency, in the subsequent circulation of transformative discourses of gender.

The pleasure response through playing football is, we argue, an important aspect of the history of women’s football and continued participation. Yet strangely it has been marginalized within critical feminist studies of sport history (e.g. Macbeth, 2007; Magee et al., 2007). In contrast, these histories have emphasized the struggle and issues associated with gender injustices. We concur that these injustices are socially important to reveal and analyse. Yet we add that without an added focus on sporting pleasure the story of the emergence of women’s football is incomplete. Indeed, as our interviewees’ stories revealed, it was their love of kicking a ball and socializing in the football context that provided a strong desire to continue their footballing involvement – even in a gendered context that they knew was unfair. And, over time, these pleasures were such that they were willing to struggle against these inequities.

Barcan (2002) argued that critical examinations of pleasure are uncommon as such a focus might indirectly suggest that the researcher is politically naïve:

I have experienced critical theory as a practice marked by its suspicion of hope or joy, perhaps because they are seen as religious values. I have also found a tacit equation of optimism with both intellectual inferiority and political betrayal. If you are optimistic or joyful about the world, it’s because you’re not bright enough to realize how corrupt it is, or not politically committed enough to jolt yourself out of your bourgeois comforts. (p. 345)

Yet we argue, in light of this study, that pleasure is an aspect of social life worthy of critical study as it lays at the heart of political issues in sport: for if there was no pleasure to be gained in sport there would be no need to struggle against sporting injustices. With similar sentiment, Morgan (2006) even questioned whether a life without pleasure is a life worth living:

. . . the purpose of life is to accomplish those things we have to do in order to be able to do the things that we want to do. So the point of working is to get to the point that we do not have to work any longer so that we can devote ourselves to those things we find intrinsically rewarding. . . . After all, what would be the point of work or of political brinkmanship or, for that matter of life, if there were no pursuits we humans find intrinsically satisfying that make life worth living in the first place, that is, worth all the struggle and hardship that are in escapable part of life. (p. 102)

In light of Morgan’s argument we reiterate that our interviewees’ experiences of footballing pleasure were significant to reveal and analyse and that pleasure, as inherently linked to struggle and power relations, is a central aspect of the historical emergence of the female footballer.

Concluding words

Within this article we have provided the results of a genealogical analysis of the emergence of the female footballer in New Zealand. The discursive changes associated with gender relations in the late 1960s helped to initiate discussions of equity that enabled women in the early 1970s to start playing football. Yet our results suggest that rather than conceptualizing the institutionalization of women’s football as a planned, linear and rational political process, its emergence was more closely linked to the interplay of an array of contingency factors and competing discourses. The female footballers, in their first year of play, were not feminists or playing because of any firmly held feminist principles. In contrast, they were discursively positioned as submissive, subjugated, heterosexual, family members who were supportive of male football. The power effect of this positioning was that female football was not perceived as a threat to the existing gender order or to the limited football resources, such as access to fields, floodlights and changing rooms. This finding was significant, as other researchers have illustrated that when women’s sport poses a threat to men’s sport or the gender order backlashes can occur (Macbeth, 2007; Nelson, 1994). Thus, paradoxically, we argue the female footballer emerged into the male domain because they were disciplined by discourses of normalized femininity: they were, within this framework, bodies not worthy of serious consideration, a fleeting phenomenon, and participants in a game of ‘kick and giggle’. Hence, there was no need to invest political concern or future money to their existence. This miscalculation, or accident of history, provided a window of opportunity that allowed the neophyte players to taste the pleasures of ‘running with the ball at their feet’ and to develop a love of the game. We suggest that it was these productive pleasures, in combination with discourses of feminism, that enabled the pioneering footballers to endure and eventually challenge the gender inequities that have been well documented in socio-historic studies of women’s football.