Before Football: The Beginnings of Women’s Involvement with Sport in Brazil’s Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In Brazil, football only began to become known and structured during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. At this time, the country already had a well-shaped sports scene that enabled the rapid spread of football across its communities. Sports such as rowing, horse racing, tennis, athletics, swimming, cricket and skating started to grow and become organised in Brazil in the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in Rio de Janeiro, then the country’s largest city and national capital. Later on, when women started to play football, they could then seek inspiration from the early trailblazers who, defying the constraints of their time, pioneered these other sports. Such a feminine presence was marked by a double social dimension: it was a sign that its importance increased during the nineteenth century, but it was also a sign of a new framework from the point of view of the male world, an ambiguity typical of societies that go through processes of adherence to the ideal and imaginary of modernity. In this chapter, we intend to discuss these pioneering female experiences, arguing that understanding these initiatives is relevant to better appreciate the challenges that surrounded the practice of football by women a few decades later.