When Brazil banned women from football

The country may be synonymous with the beautiful game, but it banned women from the sport for nearly four decades until 1979.

Ahead of Brazil’s opening match on Monday at the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, Mendes recalled the lengths she went to in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a footballer.

As a girl in the 1970s she gave ice cream to the boys she played with in Camacari in Brazil’s impoverished northeast in exchange for an early warning of the arrival of police busting girls flouting the prohibition. She used to dig a hole next to the pitch to hide in until the enforcers left, then crawled out again to continue kicking the ball around with her male friends.

When they let her, which was not always the case. Sometimes all her precautions failed and Mendes found herself hauled off to a police station. “When I was a child I thought the police stopped those who did something wrong, and I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong,” Mendes, now 59, told AFP. “The cops treated me well, but some said I couldn’t play because football was for men.”

Then-president Getulio Vargas promulgated a decree in 1941 to ban girls and women from football at a time many believed that participation in sport could inhibit childbearing ability. The decree prohibited women from practicing “sports incompatible with the conditions of their nature.” No specific sanctions were mentioned, leaving it open to individual police officers to decide how to deal with offenders. Football associations in other countries, such as Britain, Germany and France, also barred women from the sport, but Brazil’s ban was the only one decreed by law. It remained in place until 1979. While many like Mendes continued to play, the 38-year prohibition stunted development of the sport among Brazilian women during a period in which their male counterparts lifted three of their five World Cups.