Thursday, March 28Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Tag: female football

Lily Parr: the lesbian football icon I didn’t know I needed
Culture & Literature, News

Lily Parr: the lesbian football icon I didn’t know I needed

I'll start off by saying that I don't like sports. I have little to no knowledge about most sports, P.E. was my least favourite lesson at school, and I spent the majority of Sports Days at home 'sick'. But while brainstorming ideas for this LGBT+ issue of Orbital and researching how many premier league footballers have come out as gay (hint: really, really not many at all), I stumbled across a woman who has now introduced me to the incredible history of women's football. Lily Parr's football career began in 1919, at a time when the popularity of women's football was at an unprecedented high, until the Football Association banned women from playing on their member grounds in 1921 (due to women's teams playing charity matches to raise money for the families of striking miners, and also...