How ladies Gaelic football grew from ‘novelty act’ to national association

After first emerging in the 1920s, ladies Gaelic football was soon sidelined; breathless women chasing after a football was just too unladylike for the powers that be.

Despite this resistance, the sport became a popular novelty act at local carnivals. And when the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) was founded in Tipperary in July 1974, fifty years of extraordinary growth were set in motion. From writing the rule book to a membership of nearly 200,000, the earliest All-Stars to game-changing partnerships, this definitive history captures that unstoppable journey to becoming a national sport and so much more.

Lavishly illustrated and drawing from national, club and personal archives, Unladylike is for the players, the fans, the kit-washers, the sandwich-makers and the supporters alike, and confirms the best is yet to come.

Read on for an extract from the newly released title…

Ladies Gaelic football matches (and they were advertised as ladies’ matches rather than women’s matches) first began to appear as early as the 1920s. However, the game lacked support, both socially and organisationally, and it was not until the 1960s that ladies Gaelic football began to take off. As shocking as it may seem to contemporary readers, it was at local carnivals that ladies Gaelic football burst onto the scene. Alongside the likes of tug-o-war competitions, children’s races and fancy-dress parades, it was considered a novelty event.

A few years later, the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) was founded in Hayes Hotel in Thurles, Co. Tipperary in 1974. The setting up of the LGFA, also known as Cumann Peil Gael na mBan, was significant as it meant that, for the first time ever, an association would actively manage and promote the playing of Gaelic football for women in Ireland.

The location of the inaugural meeting was significant, too – it was the same place the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) had met for the first time, ninety years earlier, in November 1884. The intention of the GAA when it was established had been the ‘preservation and cultivation of national pastimes … for Irishmen of all creeds and classes.’

It was hugely successful in doing this, turning Gaelic football and hurling into some of the most popular sports in Ireland by the early twentieth century. However, at the founding meeting of the GAA there had been no discussion about facilitating Gaelic games for women. Perhaps this is not surprising, considering that the social norms of the time laid down that sport, generally speaking, was for men only. Women were assumed to have a naturally weaker disposition, which made them unsuitable for strenuous activities; furthermore, the idea of breathless women chasing after a football was deemed quite ‘unladylike’.

As a result, the traditional roles that women went on to assume within the GAA were those of kit-washer, sandwich-maker or supporter. These were important roles, of course, ones that meaningfully contributed to the running of the GAA. But it did also highlight how limited women’s roles were within the association.

Some people of the time likely argued that women already had enough of a Gaelic sporting outlet with camogie, a version of hurling adapted for females that was reported to have first been played in 1898 in Navan at an event commemorating the 1798 Rebellion. The setting up of the Camogie Association in 1904 certainly did fill a small gap in the sporting market for women who wanted to take part in Gaelic games.

Still, for a long time, the prospect of women playing Gaelic football was not entertained by the GAA, nor the Camogie Association. Despite this, they eventually managed to push ahead. The emergence of women’s Gaelic football as a competitive sport was part of the wider ascent of women’s sports worldwide that began in the latter half of the twentieth century and coincided with the Second-Wave Feminist Movement (which began in the early 1960s and ran until the early 1980s). The movement’s drive to attain equality between the genders highlighted the discrimination, disadvantage and under-representation that women experienced in Ireland under the law and in politics, in private and public life, and in society and culture. This led to a re-evaluation of the position of women in Irish society in general, with sport being one of the spheres seeing change.

It was not just in Gaelic football that Irish women broke new ground during and following this period, but also in soccer, rugby, athletics, swimming and boxing. Neither was it just on the field of play that women were afforded new opportunities, but also in sports administration and coaching. These efforts and achievements signalled that women were more than capable of practising sports and excelling at them. All of which reminds us that while the history of women’s Gaelic football is a story about sporting achievement, it is also a story about challenging the status quo.

Perhaps the status quo in Irish sports writing needs to be challenged too. Until now, after all, no history had been written on women’s Gaelic football and the LGFA. In fact, the historical position of women’s sport has largely been ignored by Irish historiography. So, this book aims to record the history of women’s Gaelic football and the LGFA over the last fifty years, documenting the key moments, developments, teams and figures that have contributed to the growth of women’s Gaelic football and, in doing so, have helped change the position of women’s sport, and women in society, in Ireland.

‘Unladylike: A History of Ladies Gaelic Football’ by Hayley Kilgallon (€24.95) is on sale now.