Forbidden years: veto, resilience and gender resistance among practitioners of football acts (1941-1979)

Abstract

This article examines the dynamics experienced by women in the face of the moral and legal restrictions imposed on their participation in football in Brazil throughout the twentieth century.  The study draws on the trajectories of key figures – the journalist Cléo de Galsan, the club manager Carlota Rezende, and footballers who played both during the period of prohibition – in order to investigate how women confronted moralising discourses, state repression, and patriarchal structures that sought to exclude them from the sporting field. It is argued that, drawing upon hemerographic, documentary, and bibliographical sources, women's football did not disappear during the period under discussion; rather, it persisted through clandestine, community-based, and peripheral circuits that were sustained by local support networks and everyday acts of resistance. The analysis demonstrates how moral, biomedical and journalistic discourses have reinforced gender inequalities, while also revealing the subversive strategies mobilised by these women. The article's objective is twofold: firstly, to contribute to the history of Brazilian women by recovering trajectories that were erased from the official memory of this sport in the country; and secondly, to provide a comprehensive overview of the history of Brazilian women's sport.