Cinesound Review 0409: Women Play Soccer

When women’s club soccer (as it was known then) began to make a comeback in the late 1920s, the matches and players were not always taken seriously – as seen (and heard) in this Cinesound Review newsreel excerpt.

Titled 'Women Play Soccer', it shows coverage of a 1939 match between the Yagoona Eleven and Deepwater in Bankstown, NSW.

The newsreel makes plain the patronising and chauvinistic attitudes that women athletes faced at the time.

The camera pans across the players’ legs and the narration is full of sexist and inappropriate comments about the women's gender, bodies and their talent as footballers.

While the aim of this commentary may have been designed to be lighthearted and to amuse the (presumably majority male) audience, the attitudes expressed were not acceptable then and would be unthinkable today.