On 10 May 1873 the satirical British magazine Punch mockingly warned that women’s involvement in cricket would only lead one way. ‘Irrepressible woman is again in the field,’ it exclaimed. ‘“Ladies’ Cricket” is advertised, to be followed, there is every reason to apprehend, by Ladies Fives, Ladies Football, Ladies Golf etc. It is all over with men. They had better make up their minds to rest contented with croquet, and afternoon tea, and sewing machines, and perhaps an occasional game at drawing-room billiards.’

The jesters weren’t wrong. The first women’s association football match was played just eight years after these words were written. And in fact, while match reports in the traditional sense only began to appear in the late nineteenth century, there are hints of women’s involvement in football significantly earlier.

One of the earliest such mentions in British records occurs in ‘A Dialogue Between Two Shepherds’ by the poet and scholar Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), in which one character says to the other:

There are also a number of accounts from eighteenth-century Scotland that tell of annual matches played between single and married women, with an audience of bachelors casting their eyes over the footballing skills of potential partners. The Rev. Dr Alexander Carlisle wrote of one such fixture in the village of Inveresk in East Lothian in 1795: ‘As [the fishwives] do the work of men, their manners are masculine and their strength and activity is equal to their work. Their amusements are more of the masculine kind. On holidays they frequently play golf; and on Shrove Tuesday there is a standing match at football between the married and unmarried women, at which the former are always victors.’

Putting aside the reality-TV-style sexual politics, what is interesting about this decidedly working-class form of matchmaking is that the most desirable attributes weren’t looks or femininity, but rather a woman’s physical strength and sporting prowess. In many ways this feels a thoroughly modern attitude, bringing to mind the ‘This Girl Can’ era of sports promotion, with muscles bulging, sweat dripping, make-up removed or smeared and all types of bodies welcomed. But here is an example from over two centuries ago demonstrating that frailty, paleness and slightness have not always existed as desirable features of women. Those views are man-made, products of various societies over the years that have devalued the role of women and placed men at the head of the metaphorical table.

Beyond Britain’s shores can be found even earlier examples of women’s involvement in sports closely related to the modern game. In China a game called cuju, or ‘kickball’, was played as far back as the Han dynasty, which ran from 206 bc to ad 220. Some aspects of cuju would be recognisable  to the modern spectator: teams wore different coloured kits and competed to kick a ball into a net. Rather than today’s armbands, however, captains wore hats with straight wings, differentiating them from the curling wings worn by other players. The game was popular among women, as indicated by a poem from the ninth century ad lauding the cuju performance of General Li Guangyan:

And women were not merely spectators to cuju matches: paintings from the Han dynasty depict women with hair up, long sleeves and flowing dresses kicking and flicking balls in gardens. Again, any suggestion of the impropriety of women kicking a ball and daring to take an interest in the universally accessible sport is demonstrably a more modern invention.

Fast-forward to 9 May 1881 and we have the first formal reporting from a women’s football match, in a game widely considered to have been the first recorded women’s international. The Glasgow Herald described the match, which took place at Easter Road in Edinburgh, simply as ‘rather novel’:

The match report, which was far more balanced than you perhaps would have expected, also included what is seemingly the first teamsheet of the women’s game. This artefact offers a helpful insight into the women involved in that historic first outing, including the three Hopewell sisters, early counterparts of today’s foremost footballing siblings such as Rosie and Mollie Kmita, Phil and Gary Neville or Ada and Andrine Hegerberg:

This first match was the brainchild of Edinburgh-based theatre entrepreneur and actor Alec Gordon, who had watched the growing popularity of men’s international football and saw an opportunity to capitalise on the interest by using women players. Working with Charles Scholes, the head of a theatrical empire, and Scholes’s theatre manager, George Fredrick Charles, they drew players from dance and performing circles. The majority of the England side and several of the Scottish team were members of Lizzie Gilbert’s Juvenile Ballet Company, while the remaining Scots were recruited from the Princess’s Theatre house company. Gordon and Charles themselves appear in a later account of the match in the Glasgow Herald as ‘umpires’ managing Scotland and England respectively.

Today there is a clamouring for society to recognise the potential value of the women’s game, both from an economic and social point of view. Slowly the momentum has swung behind the women’s game as the men’s game begins to top out, with the marketplace saturated when it comes to sponsorship opportunities and broadcasting slots. Yet here, in the late 1800s, you have the earliest records of individuals drawing conclusions on the potential of the women’s game far ahead of schedule.

News of the game would spread across the country, filtering into local newspapers, and even gaining international attention with the New York Sun, Sydney Evening News and Montreal Daily Mail all carrying reports of the game.

Several reports mocked the quality of the game but it is frankly ludicrous for the women, playing in ‘high-heeled boots’ in their first advertised fixture, to be expected to be playing to the same standard as the men. The Dunfermline Journal noted that more than half of those in attendance,...