Fémina Sport Paris
Fémina Sport Paris was an extremely successful women's football club from the French capital, Paris . The early development of women's football can be exemplified by its history between the world wars .
The club was founded in 1911 as a gymnastics club; There is a press report in L'Auto , the predecessor of L'Équipe , at the beginning of October of the same year about a football match between two Fémina Sport teams on September 30, 1917 . Fémina Sport was the only French women's club that had its own football field (the Stade Élisabeth in Paris). At the end of 1937 the club dissolved again.
Social framework conditions for women’s sport
The period around the First World War was also shaped in France by the patriarchal image of women in the 19th century; Broad demands for equal wages for equal work, the opening of all educational institutions, women's suffrage and complete social equality were only just beginning to emerge and, moreover, were largely confined to the urban intelligentsia . Of course, this also had an effect on sport; Even the establishment of gymnastics departments was widely rejected, which was justified, among other things, with the allegedly unsuitable physical constitution of the women.
Two quotes may illustrate this:
- "Motherhood is also a sport, even the true sport of women, the most exalted and sacred!" (R. Miles, 1894)
- “If women want to play football or box, it is up to them, provided that this takes place without spectators; because spectators of such competitions certainly do not come to see sport. ” ( Pierre de Coubertin still 1928)
At the Olympic Games , women were only allowed to play a few sports, especially against de Coubertin's bitter resistance: 1900 golf and tennis, 1904 archery, 1908 tennis, archery and ice skating, and swimming was added in 1912. This led to the holding of its own “ Women's Olympics ” (1922 in the Stade Pershing in Paris with participants from 5 countries and in 1926 in Gothenburg with athletes from 10 countries).
Nevertheless, the number of young French women who did not want to be deterred from participating in a wide variety of sports - including football - grew. As in the footballing "childhood" years of men, a number of women also pursued several sports disciplines at the same time: Suzanne Liébrard of the female soccer players, for example, had also successfully participated in long jump, running and javelin competitions, while others did gymnastics or boxed.
In 1917 the women of Fémina Sport either played club-internal games or competed (practically every Sunday) with school and youth teams, i.e. with young men. That changed from 1918 when, first in Paris, other women's clubs and teams were formed: these included En Avant , Cercle Sportive , Académia , AS de la Seine , Les Sportives , Association Féminine and Stade Français . In 1918/19 clubs in Reims, Rouen, Lille, Toulouse and Marseille as well as new Parisian clubs like US Clodoaldienne were added, and in the 1920s in Bordeaux and other places. Even in France's North African colonial areas , women - not Muslims , but women from Christian and Jewish immigrant families - played organized football.
Women's football associations
As early as 1913/14, the Comité Français Interfédéral , the umbrella organization of the four male football associations at the time, had refused to allow women's clubs to join. The unified French football federation FFF also refused to accept clubs like Fémina Sport and others after it was founded in 1919.
Since 1912 the Union Française des Sociétés de Gymnastique Féminines existed (alongside the men's sports associations) ; However, since the UFSGF did not want to take on women playing kicking, cycling or other "unfeminine" sports, they founded the Fémina Sport in 1917, the Fédération des Sociétés Féminines Sportives de France (FSFSF), which was called FFSF from 1922, but in 1933, in parallel on the decline of women's football, her football section disbanded. When the Ligue Féminine de Football Association was subsequently founded , Fémina Sport was once again the driving force; From this new association (renamed Fédération Française de Football Féminin from 1934 ), the Fédération Française d'Athlétisme Féminin (FFAF) emerged in 1936 as a cross-sport organization. The decline in women's football that began around 1930 could no longer be stopped. It was not until the second half of the 1960s that women's football emerged anew, in France as in other countries.
FSP, the French championship and the cup competition
The first * French women's championship under the auspices of the FSFSF (1919) consisted of just two games: Fémina Sport won the title against En Avant Paris 2-0 and 0-0. In 1920 Académia was added; En Avant won the final, which was required because of a tie, against Fémina Sport 1-0. From 1921 the number of participants grew steadily, so that local championships were initially held in the individual regions of France, the winning teams of which then determined the national champions in a final round; In 1921 it was again En Avant (for the first time in the final against a woman from the provinces, the Sportives de Reims ) and in 1922 Les Sportives Paris who won the next French title. Fémina Sport won its second title in 1923 (4-0 win over Reims in the final), and with that began a unique series of successes: up to the last championship (1932) FSP was ahead of the game every year.
* Whether a championship took place in 1918 is a matter of dispute between the two sources listed below.
Fémina also emerged as the winner three times from the soon-to-be-introduced women's cup competition (1920–1921 Coupe de l'Encouragement , in German “Encouragement Cup ”; 1922–1926 as Coupe La Française ).
So it was not surprising that numerous female players from Fémina Sport were also considered in international and international matches: the first French selection, which in May 1920 in England four charity games against British company and club teams (in front of 20,000 to 40,000 spectators), including the Dick Kerr's Ladies , carried out, consisted of nine women from FSP, seven from En Avant and one from Les Sportives. The first real international match (February 1924 in Brussels, 2-1 against Belgium) also saw a majority of Femina players in the blue national jerseys.
The decline of women's football, the end of Fémina Sport
The end of early women's football was caused by several factors:
- the persistent rejection of women's football in large circles in French society
- in the province there was a lack of opponents and therefore a lack of match practice (Reims, for example, was several times regional champion of Champagne without playing a single game)
- only Fémina Sport had its own sports field, while other women's clubs were allowed to compete on the grounds of a men's club less and less or only at impossible times
- declining public interest among viewers and media
- With the onset of the global economic crisis , the state and sports umbrella organizations canceled all financial subsidies for women, so that, for this reason, games outside Paris could no longer be maintained from 1928 (exception: Marseille, where Olympique maintained a women's team until 1932/33)
- Football was in competition with other leisure activities of young women, so that the clubs increasingly lacked young talent
Therefore, from 1933 onwards, no more French champions were determined.
While twelve clubs took part in the Paris City Championship ( Championnat de Paris ) in the 1928/29 season , there were only eight in 1931/32 and only seven in 1936/37. In the 1930s, Fémina's 2nd and 3rd teams also played in this round. But that could not stop the end of the game and, based on this, ultimately the dissolution (turn of the year 1937/38) of the performance-oriented and still most successful French women's football club.
Successes of the association
- French Master of the FSFSF: (possibly 1918 - see above), 1919, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932
- French cup winner of the FSFSF: 1921, 1923, 1926
These titles are not counted as official championships by the FFF, which has only organized women's football with national championships since the mid-1970s.
literature
- Pascal Grégoire-Boutreau: Au bonheur des filles , Editions des Cahiers intempestifs / FFF, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-911698-25-8
- Laurence Prudhomme-Poncet: Histoire du football féminin au XXe siècle , Ed. L'Harmattan, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-7475-4730-2
Notes and evidence
- ↑ On September 30, 2017, the French Football Association also took this duel as an opportunity to look back on a century of women's football .
- ^ With Roland H. Auvray: Le livre d'or du football pied-noir et nord-africain. Maroc – Algérie – Tunisie. Presses du Midi, Toulon 1995, ISBN 2-87867-050-7 , p. 67, there is a photo with the women of the Gallia Club Oran from 1930.