Women's American Football: Breaking Barriers On and Off the Gridiron

Women's American Football: Breaking Barriers On and Off the Gridiron is a labor of love by historian Russ Crawford that chronicles the history of women playing American tackle football. Crawford's first six chapters focus on leagues, such as the Women's Football Alliance, and teams at the professional level where the best adult female practitioners play full-kit American football. These athletes, however, are not compensated, and virtually all pay fees to participate. Two additional chapters address the recent development of tackle football leagues for school-aged girls and the emergence of international competition beginning in 2010. This book fills an important gap by documenting the history of a sport almost completely ignored by the general public and the popular press.While working on the project, Crawford conducted extensive interviews with “more than 240 women and several men” who shared “their football stories” (vii). Their insights illustrate the book's principal themes and demonstrate clearly the central, often transformative, role the game plays in the lives of the athletes who participate. Many of these women played sports in their youth, and football provided them with the opportunity to continue competing as adults. As one told Crawford, “I needed that competition in life” (99). Many also enjoyed the chance to play a violent sport. “I'm an angry person . . . so I like being able to hit people without getting in trouble,” another reported (255). Above all else, the comradery and sense of family made the experience deeply meaningful to these players. “It's the most team sport out there—you need all eleven people,” one explained to Crawford: “It's basically a fraternity, and your team becomes your second family” (100).Women taking the field to play organized tackle football was something radically new when the first women's professional leagues formed in the 1970s. Crawford emphasizes, however, that “neither feminism nor ideas of gender equality motivated the players” (67). In fact, some expressed hostility to modern feminism. However, by doing what they wanted with their bodies and by choosing a violent sport so closely linked to masculinity and male aggression, they set a powerful example, demonstrating “that the fascination with aggression, once thought to be a male domain, actually cuts across gender lines” (246). Building on the work of Jean Williams and Andrew Linden, Crawford argues that these athletes displayed “a practical feminism” just as important as political activism in challenging traditional gender stereotypes and broadening women's opportunities (67).Female athletes encounter a prejudice their male counterparts are rarely forced to overcome—sexual objectification. Perhaps it is no irony then that, in terms of public interest and commercial viability, the most successful women's football league has been the Lingerie Football League (LFL), a league where physical attractiveness takes precedence over athletic talent, and players wear “cut-down shoulder-pads and hockey-style helmets” and “little more than bikinis” (157). The commercial power of the male gaze allowed the LFL to initially pay its players and win a television contract with MTV2 in 2010 (compensation ended when a group organized and demanded a minimum wage and employee rights). Games on YouTube today “often . . . (receive) more than two hundred thousand views” (191). Now known as the X League, the LFL's popularity generates “a great deal of disgust among the women who play full-kit football” and others concerned about exploitation and female equality (159).Crawford immersed himself in the vibrant world of women's football beginning in 2016—attending games, interviewing players, scouring websites, and following podcasts. He tracked down existing newspaper and magazine coverage and researched the status of several documentary film projects, some of which were probably never completed. As a scholarly work, the book is unconventional in that Crawford breaks the fourth wall and brings his readers along on his journey as both a fan and scholar. His technique successfully conveys the energy and passion surrounding the women's version of the game.Despite the inroads that have been made, women playing tackle football remains a curiosity to many Americans. However, “once the blinders fall away,” as Crawford phrases it, “women playing football can be seen everywhere” (1). There are currently around 150 adult women's tackle football teams who compete in ten leagues around the country each year. Joining them are thousands of other females of all ages who play flag football across the United States. Canada and Mexico both have women's teams and leagues as well, and, Crawford reports, women play American tackle football in almost thirty other nations. One thing is for certain, women's football is here to stay. And whether or not it gains a wider following or achieves commercial success, Crawford shows it will continue to play an important and meaningful role in the lives of the thousands of women who don helmets and pads and take the field.

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