Archive for June, 2011

The FIFA Women’s World Cup 2011 is currently taking place in Germany and so in this post we feature a reading from 2002 by Tony Leighton on the history of women’s football. The pdf worksheet contains exercises on skimming, note taking, vocabulary building and summary writing – complete with answers. Download the worksheet here

Question – What do the Football Associations of, England, Holland and Germany have in common with China’s Qing Dynasty (founded 1644)? Answer – All four governing bodies at some stage banned women’s football.

Surprising though it may seem in the light of the boom in women’s soccer during the last decade of the 20th Century – and with the fourth Women’s World Cup finals set for 2003 – the game was cripplingly held back in earlier times through the prejudice of male-dominated organisations. The first known records of the game are frescoes of women playing football at the time of the Donghan Dynasty (AD 25-220). How far women’s football had progressed before the Qing Dynasty came to power is not known, but it quite obviously never became the Sport of Qings. continue