Breaking the Grass Ceiling: a Pioneer of the Women's Game in Conversation

In 1967, a teenager in north London wrote to her local paper to ask why girls didn’t play football. A dozen turned up, and the club that grew out of it was called White Ribbon. The Football Association’s 1921 ban on women using its grounds was still in force, so they trained in a school sports hall and played wherever they could. They paid for it with jumble sales, car washes and babysitting. Patricia Gregory went on to help found the Women’s Football Association, which brought those scattered clubs together, and she is likely its last surviving original officer. That makes it an honour to have her on the show to tell the story of the organised women’s game in the motherland of football, which she lived and has now set down in her book, winner of the British Society of Sports History’s Lord Aberdare Literary Prize. It’s a story of tournaments in Kent, a Czechoslovak team asking for ketchup on Mum’s roast pork, and a long fight to get women onto television. It also reaches a Wembley Way full of tens of thousands of people at the 2022 Euros final, and the anthem that moved her to tears. The early days were dark, but this is a hopeful story about how far the game has come and the women who made it happen. British Society of Sports History on Breaking the Grass Ceiling Patricia Gregory's Wikipedia Patricia Gregory at the National Football Museum Patricia's book (on amazon , but feel free to order elsewhere!) NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup) Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE . Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me. Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/