Women’s Football in Rio de Janeiro: Media Representations in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Football is a social, political, cultural, and economic construction of the societies in which the sport is played. Thus, from a historical perspective, football can reflect a variety of aspects of life, and it is no overstatement to say that we can read a society through sport. This chapter analyses women’s football in Brazil, with a focus on the city of Rio de Janeiro in the first decades of the twentieth century. The research intersects with gender studies and the theory of representation, and its main source is Jornal dos Sports, one of the first newspapers dedicated to sport in Brazil. Our analysis shows that in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the twentieth century, women resisted the sexist and moralist representations and assumptions that female bodies were unsuitable to play football. In a society in which women’s bodies were represented as fragile and limited, women from different contexts constructed their own stories and left a legacy proving that football is also a sport for women.