# Playing football

The munitionettes started to play football and formed teams in the factories. Gradually a competition was organised and in 1918 the Munitionettes Cup was held with 30 teams.

Even David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister in 1916, encouraged these games as it helped to reinforce the image of women doing activities traditionally executed by men. These matches also helped to keep morale high and to get money for wartime charities.

The matches attracted thousands of spectators, specially when Bella Raey, of the Blyth Spartacus Munitionettes from Northumberland, played.

At the end of the war, when most women lost their jobs in the munitions factories, their teams also came to an end.

> "Nor surprisingly, it was extremely difficult for many men to accept the idea of ladies playing what had always been regarded as a male preserve, their sport. Those who had been away at the front during the Great War would have had no real idea as to how the country was changing in their absence; how the role of their womenfolk within society was beginning to change quite dramatically, responding to the opportunity they had been given."

> David J. Williamson

From David J. Williamson Belles of the Ball, 1991, quoted by John Simkin in Spartacus Educational web site.

# Activity

- Which is the main idea of the text?
- Do you think that in our society women´s sport has a different regard (by the media, institution, sponsors) than men´s sport? Explain your answer in a few lines.

Football had also the prominence in one of the most popular events in the First World War, the Christmas Truce, when around Christmas 1914, in some areas of the Western Front, British, French and German soldiers left trenches and met in No Man´s Land to exchange gifts, take photos and play football. In the future, fraternising was forbidden by military authorities on both sides.

Paul McCartney recreated this event in the video of his song Pipes of Peace.

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