A few times during the first thousand words my eyebrows arched when a new nugget of information was dropped. But it was page 16 when Girls with Goals began raising my blood near the boiling point.
Not only do I have a wife, daughter, mother and two sisters, for more than two decades during my life I have worked with girl’s and women’s athletics. I was in junior high when Title IX became law and a young father by the time I worked the 1999 FIFA World Cup. I was well aware of the enduring grind for equal rights leading up to that triumphant final before a record throng in the Rose Bowl.
Yet on page 16 of Clelia Castro-Malaspina’s history of women’s soccer, she details the early meetings between England and Scotland picked teams, in 1881.
She writes: “Many people – mostly men – showed up to watch them, but not so much as fans. They were there to gawk and heckle and yell obscene things. There seemed to be anger in the air among the male attendees over the fact that women were playing ‘their’ sport. At two separate matches, rowdy spectators stormed the field. That’s right, the earliest female footballers were literally chased off the soccer field by men.”
It’s Been a Long, Long Journey
If you’re an amateur footy historian believing that the long slog to respect had taken most of your lifetime, you now had to accept that for at least two more generations women had been facing this open resistance to them joining the game. Boomers can recall a cringe-worthy Virginia Slims cigarette advertisement from the late Sixties, about women having come a long way, “to get where you’ve got to, today.” And in chapter upon chapter Castro-Malaspina, a player herself, illustrates that the war on women’s soccer dates back a long, long, long time – all the way back to the late 19th Century.
Readers of Girls with Goals will become engrossed early on, then frustrated by the fits and starts, and finally – finally! – vindicated by progress in the events of the last decade, namely two World Cup championships, plus equal pay. This is a book that should be circulated among every team, every class and every library and especially those populated by young teens.
“I wrote this book for anyone who loves women’s soccer (and that’s a lot of people!),” Castro-Malaspina wrote to me, “but the real target audience are girls who are like whom I was when I was a teenager – the girls who love to play soccer and/or who are huge fans of the USWNT and the NWSL. As a girl this book would have been the most important book in my library, and I really believe this book can hold a lot of meaning for many young girls and women.”
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