By Alan Black

Soccer player Lily Parr “had a kick like a mule,” said Joan Whalley, her teammate. “She was the only person I knew who could lift a dead ball, the old heavy leather ball, from the left wing over to me on the right and nearly knock me out with the force of the shot.”

In 1919, at fourteen years old, Parr played for Dick, Kerr Ladies, in Preston, England. Dick, Kerr and Company manufactured munitions for the British war effort during World War I. With hundreds of thousands of men fighting in the fields of France and Belgium, women took up jobs in industry. The company founded an all-women team to boost morale, and play charity games for veterans. Parr became a star player, and one of England’s greatest footballers of all time.

Parr grew up in the working-class town of St. Helens, where coal mines and lime pits dotted the landscape. In her book Dick, Kerr’s Ladies: The Football Team That Changed History, Barbara Jacobs described Parr’s neighborhood as a place where few strolled “after dark, when pickpockets, rough sleepers, falling drunks and gin-sodden fishwives would be likely to lurch from doorways.” Parr’s family resided in a cramped townhouse with a separate outhouse. Pigs and chickens filled the backyard, and butchered hogs hung from the door.

Parr stood almost six feet tall. She smoked lung-shredding Woodbines cigarettes and spoke in the voice of the street. Lily turned her back on rules that applied to girls. She played rugby and soccer with the boys, kicking her ball against a wall for hours, mastering technique, building up the power for her remarkable shot.

Goalkeepers feared her. Once, she broke the arm of a goalie with her cannonball shot. In her first season for Dick, Kerr Ladies, she scored 43 goals. The local press reported, “There is probably no greater football prodigy in the whole country.”

The Dick, Kerr Ladies soccer team in 1922 (Wikimedia Commons)

Modern soccer started in England in the 1860s, and by the dawn of the 20th century, a business model had developed welding the sport to the working class. Men and boys spent their Saturday afternoons at the stadium supporting the local team. Soccer weaved itself into England’s national fabric. Players were usually working-class themselves. If women were at the stadium at all, one would likely have found them serving tea at the concessions stand or perhaps working as medics attending to men who had fainted while standing amid the throng.

The war changed attitudes. 700,000 British soldiers had perished in the conflict. The nation was exhausted. Women had borne the brunt of hardship at home while working jobs and raising families. Returning veterans needed help. Women’s soccer stepped up.

In December of 1920, 53,000 people showed up to see Dick, Kerr Ladies play against St. Helen’s Ladies at Goodison Park, the home of Everton FC, a professional men’s team in Liverpool. The game raised much-needed funds for unemployed vets. All across Britain, more charity games with packed stands followed. Dick, Kerr Ladies were the talk of the town.

By 1921, in Lily Parr’s hometown of St. Helens, demand for coal had plummeted with the end of the war. Miners, in a bitter labor dispute with mine owners, were locked out of their jobs. Communities were suffering.

“The miners’ lockout had an effect on women’s football, too,” wrote Barbara Jacobs. “It politicised it. Taking heart and inspiration from the success of the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies’ efforts, local women in the mining districts around St. Helens formed themselves into makeshift teams and put on spontaneous exhibition matches on any piece of wasteland they could find to entertain the locked-out miners … collections would be taken from the onlookers, and the money raised was used to support the miners and provide them with food after the strike funds ran out. Women’s football had come to be associated with charity, and had its own credibility. Now it was used as a tool to help the Labour Movement, and the trade unions. It had, it could be said, become a politically dangerous sport.”

Women’s soccer upset the old order — those who wanted to see women return to the servitude of their pre-war roles. England’s Football Association, the sport’s governing body, did its part to aid that regressive endeavor. The group banned women’s soccer from being played in stadiums owned by its clubs, declaring, “Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, the Council feel impelled to express their strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged. Complaints have been made as to the conditions under which some of these matches have been arranged and played, and the appropriation of the receipts to other than Charitable objects.” The ban on women’s soccer lasted 50 years.

Dick, Kerr Ladies set off for a tour of Canada and the United States. Canada followed the English lead and refused to allow the team to play. The Canadian soccer authority commented that “a woman was not built to stand the bruises gotten in playing football.” This thinking did not apply so much in the States. The welcome mat was thrown down and, in another break with convention, the Ladies took to the field against nine men’s teams, winning three, tying three, and losing three. After a 4–4 tie with a Washington, D.C. team, the Washington Post reported, “Miss Lily Parr, at outside left, put up an aggressive game registering two goals in seven tries she had at the net.”

Lily Parr went on to score almost 1,000 goals in a career that spanned three decades. She lived openly as a lesbian. Her day job employed her as a nurse. She was honored through the Lily Parr Exhibition Trophy, a soccer tournament played between 2007 and 2009 as part of LGBT history month in London. In 2002, she was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame at the National Football Museum in England, the first female inductee.

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Alan Black works as a bartender and teaches creative writing to prisoners.