Game of two halves

The members of the club do not play in fashion’s dress, but in knickers and blouses. They actually allow the calves of their legs to be seen, and wear caps and football boots! Terrible! Is it not? ‘Quite too shocking!’ as an old society dame remarked to me with a shudder, adding squeakily, ‘And I certainly should never allow dear Mynie to so demean herself!’… I wondered which looked most decent, my lithe, agile football teams, in their dark blue knickers and cardinal and pale blue blouses, [or] this old slave of fashion and her unnaturally attired charge, with their naked shoulders and arms, pinched in waists, high-heeled shoes, and grotesque balloon-like shoulders hunched and blown out for all the world like huge tumours?”

So wrote Lady Florence Dixie in her essay about football for women, published in the on 8 February 1895. This well-known campaigner for women’s rights had just become