Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League

Abstract

Followers of professional football in the United States will be hard-pressed to have missed the increasing number of women who have taken to the field as coaches and officials. Off the field, as scouts and as senior figures in football operations, women continue to make their mark on the sport. However, the history of women's involvement in the sport continues to be sparse. Hail Mary fills a significant gap by uncovering the history of the National Women's Football League (NWFL), a league that existed between 1974 and 1989. The authors are journalists who focus on the intersection of sports, gender, and sexuality. Their background means that the book is eminently readable and is suitable for both academic audiences and fans of football and women's sport.The book has a broadly chronological structure. Part I focuses on the Oklahoma City Dolls’ opening match of the 1976 season against the Dallas-Fort Worth Shamrocks and their rivalry with the Toledo Troopers. In beginning the book in the middle of the story, readers are not only brought straight into the action but are introduced to many of the key themes; namely, women's agency in organizing the league and teams, the physical nature of the game they played, problematic media coverage, but most importantly, their passion for the sport. Part II provides a brief history of women playing football. While it misses some examples of very early attempts by women to play professional football, it demonstrates that organizers have often utilized women's football as a novelty. While the authors discuss Sid Friedman's role in bringing together women who wanted to play football as a novelty act, they do not lose sight of the importance of the players’ role in moving away from this format and toward a serious league. The uniqueness of women playing football sets the scene for the authors’ discussions about how the media framed the NWFL. Parts III, IV, and V track the league's trajectory from its birth, through the heyday, to its downfall in the 1980s. Throughout these chapters, the authors weave personal stories with the broader development of the league.The final part of the book focuses on the legacy that the NWFL left behind and how this has impacted women's efforts to form similar leagues in the intervening years. The authors provide suggestions on how professional women's football can progress, including increased sponsor support, media coverage, and the streamlining of the various leagues into one league. The authors reject the suggestion of working alongside the NFL in a similar setup to the WNBA because of their concern about the NFL's exploitative nature, concerns that are echoed by those that they interview. The book demonstrates that women's sports are rarely given the same time and money to develop as male sports. The authors contrast the swift decline of the NWFL due to financing issues with the early years of the NFL, which suffered from similar issues of poor attendance and funding.Woven into the narrative are vital issues central to women's experiences in sport and the barriers they face, including media coverage, sponsorship, sexism, and sexuality. Sexuality is an important theme in the book. Some in the media attempted to insult the players by dismissing them as all being lesbians. Still, those that were gay found that the sport was a safe place for them. The authors discuss the importance of the sport, supportive teammates, and meeting other lesbians as a critical element of the league and their experiences. In fact, far more central to the book are women's experiences and what the sport meant to them rather than the outcome of matches, and women's agency is key. The authors also explore how the women identified with the burgeoning women's liberation movement of the 1970s. The broader social context behind the rise and fall of many NWFL teams is also a core element of the book, including the decline of the cities in which teams were based.This focus on women's experience is the result of the authors’ extensive research through interviews, made necessary by a lack of remaining documentation and scant media attention. While the women's voices give the story vibrancy and depth, it also reminds us that it is essential to conduct such interviews to preserve the stories of women's involvement in sport, which researchers might otherwise miss. The authors acknowledge that there are gaps, partly because of a lack of media interest in the league. Consequently, the book is a rallying call to uncover more of these histories where women challenged gender norms and to ensure that we record women's experiences so that these stories, like that of the NWFL, are not lost.