In the early 1920s, some of the biggest crowds in English football did not come to watch men. They came to watch a team of women from a factory in Preston — and the authorities responded by banning them.
Football in the factories
During the First World War, hundreds of thousands of women went to work in munitions factories while men fought at the front. Many factories formed women's football teams, and their matches raised money for wounded soldiers and war charities. The most famous came from the Dick, Kerr & Co. works in Preston, which built locomotives and, during the war, produced munitions.
The team was formed in 1917 and organised by Alfred Frankland, who worked in the factory's offices. On Christmas Day 1917 they played their first public match at Deepdale, home of Preston North End, in front of around 10,000 people, raising money for a local military hospital.
Packing the stadiums
After the war, Dick, Kerr Ladies became a sensation. In 1920 they played a series of matches against a team from France, among the first women's international matches ever staged. On Boxing Day 1920 they faced St Helens Ladies at Goodison Park in Liverpool. Around 53,000 spectators crowded inside, with thousands more reportedly locked out — an extraordinary figure for any football match of the era.
Their star was Lily Parr, a tall, powerful left winger from St Helens who joined the team as a teenager. She was famous for the force of her shot, and over a career that lasted more than three decades she is credited with scoring hundreds of goals.
The ban of 1921
The popularity of women's football worried the men who ran the game. On 5 December 1921, The Football Association passed a resolution declaring that football was "quite unsuitable for females" and ought not to be encouraged. Clubs that were members of the FA were forbidden from allowing women's matches on their grounds. The FA also raised doubts about how money from charity matches was being handled.
The effect was devastating. Without access to proper stadiums, women's teams were pushed onto parks and small grounds, and crowds and newspaper coverage faded away.
Refusing to stop
Dick, Kerr Ladies did not give up. In 1922 they toured the United States, playing against men's teams, and they continued for decades — later under the name Preston Ladies — until 1965. Lily Parr played on into the early 1950s.
The ban lasted for half a century. It was lifted only in 1971, after the Women's Football Association had been formed and UEFA had encouraged national associations to support the women's game.
Recognition at last
In 2002, Lily Parr became the first woman inducted into the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame. Twenty years later, England's Lionesses won the European Championship at Wembley in front of more than 87,000 people — a record for any European Championship final, men's or women's — and they successfully defended their title in 2025.
The women of Dick, Kerr & Co. did not live to see those triumphs. But a century earlier, they had already proved that women's football could fill the biggest stadiums in the land.
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