Get married, have children and take care of their upbringing and home care. This was what British women of the late 19th century could aspire to.
The fact that one of them, Victoria, occupied the throne did not mean great advances for the other half of the population. Thus women did not have the right to vote, to sue and if they were married they could not own property.
In the case of those who belonged to the less disadvantaged classes, education was a luxury and although they were incorporated into the labor market, especially in textile factories, their salaries were lower than those of men, despite the fact that they often faced conditions tougher than them.
For their part, women from the upper classes could receive education, but only in certain areas and the possibility of working and pursuing a professional career was not something that was well regarded. And as if the above were not enough, they were not allowed to exercise either, because it was considered a danger to their reproductive capacity.
However, This began to change thanks to the attitude of women like Florence Caroline Dixie, a Scottish aristocrat who in 1894 headed the British Ladies’ Football Club (BLFC).which today is considered to be the first women’s football team in the United Kingdom.
of arms to take
Dixie, whose maiden name was Douglas, was born on May 24, 1855 in the Scottish town of Cummertrees and was the youngest of the six children of the Marquis of Queensberry, Archibald William Douglas, reports the Oxford Dictionary of Biographies.
Despite his privileged position, he had a life full of tragedies. Thus she lost her father shortly after birth, while one of her brothers died while climbing Mount Matterhorn (Switzerland) and her twin, James, to whom she was very attached, committed suicide in 1891. .
The strict upbringing she received in a convent for Catholic nuns, far from molding her for Victorian life, made her question it, particularly regarding the treatment of women.
“It’s all very well to declare that it’s a woman’s business to have children, raise them, attend to domestic affairs and leave the rest to men, but some women seek a different kind of life,” she said.
face to face with Darwin
At the age of 19 Dixie married Baron Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, with whom she shared a love of adventure and the outdoors.
Her husband’s drinking and gambling problems not only came close to ruining her, but also allowed her to launch scandalous companies for the time, according to her biographers.
In 1878, after the birth of their second child, the couple traveled to Patagonia for six months. The aristocrat thus became the first woman to explore the region.
What he saw and experienced, including a dangerous encounter with a family of jaguars, he narrated in his book Across Patagonia (Through Patagonia), published in 1880 and which became a bestseller.
In the Chilean city of Puerto Natales there is even a hotel named after the Scottish adventurer.
The popularity that Dixie gained after the expedition helped him to exchange letters with the then already famous naturalist Charles Darwin, to whom he made observations – not to say corrections – to some of his writings.as recorded in the records of the Darwin Correspondence Project managed by the English University of Cambridge.
Shortly after returning from South America, Dixie became the first woman appointed foreign correspondent for a British newspaper: the Morning Post (now the Daily Telegraph).
The newspaper sent its new star to South Africa to report on the wars between British troops and Afrikaners (descendants of Dutch or Boers) and also against the native Zulu.
Breaking down barriers at the point of goals
Back in the United Kingdom, Dixie meddled in politics and especially in the fight for women’s rights, supporting campaigns in favor of the female vote, equality in marriage and the use of comfortable clothes.
And to promote these objectives, he embarked on another risky adventure: In 1894 he accepted the offer made by Nettie Honeyball, considered one of the first English soccer players, to assume the Presidency of the newly founded British Ladies’s Football Club (BLFC), the the country’s first organized women’s soccer team.
“(I joined the team) with a steadfast determination to prove to the world that women are not the ‘ornamental and useless’ creatures that men have imagined,” Dixie told reporters.
“There is no reason why women cannot play football and play it well, as long as they dress sensibly and relegate to limbo the straitjacket garb in which fashion delights to dress them,” she added.
The participation of the aristocrat attracted the attention of the press, but not only because of her revolutionary ideas and her adventurous past, but also because of her last name. His late father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accused the writer Oscar Wilde of having a homosexual relationship with his son, a crime at the time.; and the scandal not only ended up in court, but made many headlines.
At that time, women’s sports were ridiculed and scorned, due to the outfits and concerns for women’s reproductive health.
“Football is dangerous to (women’s) reproductive organs and breasts due to sudden jolts, twists and blows,” a scientific publication claimed at the time. This was highlighted by an article published in Dangerous Women, a project of the University of Edinburgh that seeks to highlight women who had ideas ahead of their time and that is why they were considered “dangerous”.
“It would be better if they were content with afternoon tea and sewing,” a satirical magazine added upon learning of the club’s founding.
hard attacks
Despite the fact that the first game of the BLFC, held on March 23, 1895, in south London, drew a crowd of 10,000 people, according to data from the English Football Association (FA), the press continued their attacks.
This was reflected in the book “Women Soccer Players and the British Press”, by the American historian James F. Lee, which compiles dozens of scathing questions against the team.
“The viewers were just out of curiosity, the same curiosity generated by a dog walking on its front legs,” reviewed the Penny Illustrated Paper.
For its part, the now-defunct Sketch magazine published: “Women are not fit for rough soccer. As an exercise in the backyard it cannot be condemned, but as a public spectacle it is deplorable.”
For Lee, these statements “reflect the class prejudices of the time.” “Soccer was a sport played almost exclusively by blue-collar workers, while the BLFC players were mostly middle-class women who were getting paid for it,” she said.
Beyond machismo
The team, however, did not have a long run and after two years it disappeared due to financial problems.
And despite the fact that during the First World War there was a boom in women’s football, in 1921 its practice was banned in the United Kingdom by the FA, although at least three clubs continued to operate clandestinely. Why this setback?
“The fact is that it was considered a game for men only,” Richard McBrearty, curator of the Scottish Football Museum, said in a documentary.
However, the participation of women in this sport goes back a long way. In 1881 several matches were held in Scotland and there is a belief that Queen Mary Stuart, the first of Elizabeth I of England, had a ball to play with.
“In the late Victorian era, women faced two fundamental disadvantages when it came to playing football,” said John Dewhirst, who has studied the history of some English teams.
“The first was that the men’s game was well established at the time with a monopoly on resources: the playing fields and the organizational infrastructure (clubs and regulatory bodies to organize competitions). And the second was that women had much less time to practice sport and were even discouraged from doing so,” he added.
For her part, Professor of Sports History at the University of Wolverhampton, Jean Williams, believes that Dixie’s contribution was not limited to breaking down the sporting barrier between men and women.
“One of the most interesting things about the British Ladies’ Football Club is the way a middle-class woman (Nettie Honeyball) cooperated with an aristocrat (Florence Dixie),” he explained to the BBC in 2013.
The professor, who is the author of the book “The History of Women’s Soccer”, did not hesitate to describe Dixie’s role as “significant” so that women could play footballalthough she ruled out that she herself has ever played it.
Dixie was very fond of hunting, shooting and fishing and was a great explorer.
In addition to promoting equality, recreation and health, the aristocrat sought to do away with corsets and long garments that women had to wear in her time and believed that football would help this.
“Football is everyone’s pastime that will ensure health and help destroy that hydra-headed monster that is women’s current dress,” Dixie once said.
However, in 1905 diphtheria took her away before she could see some of the changes she fought for.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cjejeeg1vwzo, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-02 00:00:11
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