Women's football has fought a long battle for recognition -- but after several false starts the women's game has grown and grown in popularity and this year's World Cup in France promises to be the most-watched in history.
The women's game first emerged in Britain after World War I and found a new wave of support again in the late 1960s, before receding only to emerge again in the 1990s.
The emancipation movement after World War I triggered what many historians consider to be the golden age of women's football.
As men were drafted to the front, women took their place on the factory floor, and in their breaks, some of them enjoyed a kick around in the yards, a tradition the male factory workers had previously enjoyed.
The era had its great team, the "Munitionnettes", from Dick Kerr's munitions factory in Preston, northwest England, and their star player, Lily Parr, remains the sole woman in English football's Hall of Fame. She was inaugurated in 2009.
On December 26, 1920, over 53,000 fans filled Everton's Goodison Park to watch Dick Kerr's Ladies beat St Helen's 4-0.
But the following year, the Football Association banned women from playing on Football League grounds, saying "the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged".
- Feminist movement shapes attitudes -
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"We could do what the men did and if we wanted to pursue physical pastimes, we could."
- 'A man's world' -
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"There were great fears, both medical and social, that by making their bodies more 'masculine' they could even put their reproductive organs in danger and that they were refusing to submit to the role that had been alloted to them."