Book review: Female football spectators in Britain 1863–1939: a historical analysis, by Robert Lewis

Huggins, Mike ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2789-4756 (2025) Book review: Female football spectators in Britain 1863–1939: a historical analysis, by Robert Lewis. Victorian Studies, 67 (2). pp. 305-307.

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Abstract

Mike Huggins, Emeritus Professor at the University of Cumbria, reviews the book: 'Female Football Spectators in Britain 1863–1939: A Historical Analysis', by Robert Lewis (New York: Routledge, 2023).

Robert Lewis’s original and fascinating study of early female football spectators needs to be set in its context. Soccer, now the most important global spectator sport, reaching perhaps four billion fans, began in Britain. In 1874, fewer than fifty clubs existed, and crowds were small. Even the English Football Association cup final only attracted about two thousand spectators. By 1913, however, the cup final drew 121,919 to the Crystal Palace venue, and soccer had become a vitally important British societal leisure phenomenon. Scholars have often adopted a gendered approach, in which crowds have generally been assumed to have been composed almost entirely of men, enjoying male stadium space. There has been a paucity of serious studies of women’s attendance, backgrounds, attitudes, and behavior, and female fans attending soccer at any period are still largely marginalized in academic research. Stacey Pope’s study of modern female fans, The Feminization of Sports Fandom: A Sociological Study (2017) has been a rare exception. In this first detailed study of the women in the crowds at this early period, Female Football Spectators in Britain 1863–1939: A Historical Analysis sets out “to address the lack of historical research into the phenomenon of female football fans” (119). The book had a long genesis. After completing a doctorate on Lancashire’s soccer crowds from 1879 to 1914, Lewis worked as a librarian while continuing to publish further crowd-focused scholarly articles and chapters, which, inter alia, revealed the first firm evidence of women’s and girls’ presence at male soccer matches. He had submitted a book proposal to Routledge which broadened out the topic to cover Britain with six well-developed draft chapters, more largely focused on the Victorian period, though there is some coverage [End Page 305] of the period up to 1939, when his premature death caused a halt to his work. One of the editors of the Routledge Soccer Histories series, Dilwyn Porter, has worked hard to convert existing material into this relatively short book.

In chapter 1, Lewis shows that there was a female market for soccer as a spectator sport within the public sphere. While stadia were male-dominated spaces, and women and girls were always a small minority in overall attendance, they were normally present at games, even when women’s attendance was restricted, as in other leisure activities, by disposable income, lack of free time, work, family and parental responsibilities, and other life-cycle restrictions. Women were, he eventually argues, “transgressive, authentic and not invisible.” Most reports referred to women, possibly more middle-class, in the seated, covered grandstands, an area where some clubs initially allowed women free entry, but there were others who stood on the increasingly crowded terraces. Some were clearly working class. In 1889, for example, at a match between Fleetwood Rangers and Blackpool, where fishermen attended with their wives, “there were fully 100 women with babies in their arms. They were too excited to sit down” (Football Field qtd. in Lewis 112). The major source of empirical evidence on which he draws is the local and sporting press, especially the ever-growing British Newspaper Library collection, along with published photographs of crowds. English newspapers dominate, especially from Lancashire, with few Scottish or Welsh papers, and only two Irish ones, but he shows an awareness of the biases of his coverage. Soccer material was written by male reporters, making many references indirect. Chapter 2 explores the evidence for attendance, country by country, over time and space. Lewis finds no firm evidence that there were increased numbers of women attending in the interwar years, something challenging the work of Eric Dunning and other Leicester University sociologists who had suggested that it was increased female presence that civilized the interwar crowds. Lewis also notes occasional examples from the 1880s right through to the interwar period of distinctly inappropriate hooligan-type female behavior.

Item Type:	Article
Journal / Publication Title:	Victorian Studies
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
ISSN:	1527-2052
Departments:	Institute of Arts > Humanities
Additional Information:	Professor Mike Huggins, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Institute of Education, Arts and Society, University of Cumbria, UK. Published PDF made accessible with kind permission from Victorian Studies and Indiana University Press.
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	22 Sep 2025 10:34
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2025 08:00
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/9061

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