Terrain de lutte

Abstract

This article traces the development of women's football in France in the context of the evolving political and social status of women over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. It specifically examines football alongside women's broader struggle for social, political and sexual emancipation. In the early 1920s, football was championed by the French feminist movement. Subservient not to men but to a team ethic, robust female players rebutted the myth of women's fragility — seen then as a major obstacle to women's suffrage. Football also appeared to offer a means to rally a new generation of working-class women to what had been a middle-class cause. Sponsored by the feminist movement and administered by the Fédération féminin sportive de France (FFSF) with state funding, French women's football flourished domestically and abroad. However, by the late 1920s it had been abandoned by the feminist movement and the FFSF in the midst of a sexual panic caricaturing participants as unnatural, `masculinised' and lesbian — a charge levelled at feminists in general with increasing vehemence as the suffrage issue made progress. This discussion links football's fall from favour over the course of the 1920s to the increasingly hostile political climate that faced the feminist movement and imperilled the survival of groups such as the FFSF who associated with it.