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The history of women's football: everything you wanted to know
00:46:34
From 17th-century invasion games to the Euros-winning Lionesses, Jean Williams traces female footballers' long battle for recognition
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Who was Nettie Honeyball? Why was the First World War a golden age for female factory football teams? And why did the English Football association move heaven and earth to stamp them out as the women's Euros grips fans? Jean Williams answers the big questions on the roller coaster history of women's football in conversation with Spencer Mizzen.
- [02:38]
Interviewer
So, Gene, what's the earliest evidence we have for women playing football in Britain? Do the historical sources suggest that they were playing the game in significant numbers, say back in the Middle Ages?
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Meditation Guide
We have different records of Women playing football for as long as football has been played. And so pre the codification of football in 1863 by the Football association, we call that period before 1863 folk football. And there are all sorts of examples from all over the British Isles of women playing different forms of what could be called football or rugby football type games. Specifically. We have things like married women versus single women matches in Scotland. And you also tend to get quite a few matches linked with the kind of agrarian calendar. So at times of harvest you'll get women playing football in terms of celebrations, Shrove Tide football, and equally in the autumn in September, where the ball was a kind of symbolic seed going into the earth and a festive football game would be played to celebrate and to urge forward, you know, a good harvest.
- [04:04]
Interviewer
So what exactly are we talking about here?
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Meditation Guide
We're talking about in the 1600s, 1700s into the 18th century.
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Interviewer
And what would these games have looked like? I mean, would they have been in any way similar to the modern game?
- [04:19]
Meditation Guide
Not at all similar to the modern game. If you can picture your Shrove Tide folk football, there was a long history of different villages playing games of football against one another, often for a keg of beer. So the football was not actually a football. It was something that was going to provide a greater reward at the end of the match. And it essentially an invasion game whereby one village tries to get into the other and to win this football. The women's football games were not strictly 11 aside as such, but were played in that kind of folk spirit of an invasion game, essentially.
- [05:01]
Interviewer
Now I'd like to fast forward to the end of the 19th century and 2 of the biggest names I believe in the evolution of women's football is in Britain, and that is Nettie Honeyball and Lady Florence Dixie. Because they were, weren't they, the driving force behind the formation of the British Ladies Football Club. Why is this an important moment in our story?
- [05:25]
Meditation Guide
It's a really important moment for two reasons. Lady Florence Dixie was the non playing aristocratic patron of the British Ladies Football Club. So she didn't want to because of her class background. She was an equestrian and an explorer. So she didn't actually want to play football herself, but she was an advocate for women's rights and wrote a number of books and articles around gender equality. And she insisted that the British Ladies Football Club, when they were formed, were going to play in a regulation football kit. So there was to be no concession to femininity in terms of, you know, wearing skirts or dresses. And although the costumes there are A number of photographs of the British Ladies Football Club, which I'd urge people to look up online. And although it looks a little bit antiquated to us today, because they're effectively wearing what looked more like bloomers than football shorts, it was the fact that they were wearing a male costume and a male silhouette that made it particularly challenging to public perception. And the very clever thing about Nettie Honeyball, which for historians of women's football, the name is too good to be true, right, that she would be born Nettie Honeyball and then take up football. And of course it was a pseudonym. What she very cleverly did was she realized that it was challenging to public perceptions, and she used that to garner publicity by advertising matches at least six months before they're actually going to be held in the press and talking to the press. And in the same way that a kind of Instagram influencer today would build up to a drop of their merchandise or whatever it is that they're selling, you know, she effectively dropped that first match on a paying public. And they got 10,000 people paying to watch women's football in Crouch end in 1895. And so that's what makes it a really significant element of our story, because even going back to 1881, women's football began as a public entertainment that people would pay to watch. And one of the misperceptions around women's football today is that it's becoming professional, whereas actually it started as a professional entertainment.
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Interviewer
So she instituted quite a sophisticated kind of marketing campaign. And it seems like it worked. I mean, what kind of press coverage did the British Ladies Football Club get? I mean, what did the papers write about them?
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Meditation Guide
Well, you know, every kind of shade from horrified to morally outraged, but actually in the way that, you know, very canny media influences can, she used the moral outrage to actually schedule something like 144 matches throughout the whole of the UK. And obviously that was facilitated by the newspapers themselves because you could announce a match ahead of time and get spectators to the event. And it was facilitated by the new national rail timetable. And again, I don't know how much football and team sport you've played, Spencer, but just getting 11 people together to to play a match is challenging enough. Imagine doing that via a national rail timetable if you're female at the end of the 19th century. So they really, really wanted to play football.
- [09:13]
Interviewer
And what kind of women were predominantly playing football at this point? I mean, was it chiefly like the men's game, kind of seen as a working class sport?
- [09:22]
Meditation Guide
I would say not so much. I think that. Cause most working class women had what we as historians called the double burden of working outside the home and then the burden of all the domestic responsibilities once they returned home. So most of them probably were time poor and financially poor. And so playing football was something of a luxury. It was more middle class women. And don't forget, it's very much linked with the suffrage campaigns of the time. It was about women assertively entering male public spaces, which most sports grounds were at the time. So if we think of the Married Women's Property act, it was a campaign for women to be able to own property in their own right, mostly for married women. So most sports grounds were owned by men. You might have had a few women who owned a few shares in different football clubs, but it was assertively entering male spaces physically and saying, we are here, we are not the delicate creatures that you might think middle class women are in the domestic sphere. And consequently it was very much linked with suffrage and women's rights.
- [10:37]
Interviewer
So on that point, and I'm talking here more generally across the whole span of women's football, I mean, do you see any correlation between sort of advances in the feminist cause in wider society and advances in women's football or in the degree to which women's football is accepted by the wider society?
- [10:57]
Meditation Guide
Yeah, that's a really good question. And the broad answer to that is yes, when you get the campaigns for suffrage, you get women not just entering the football field, but you get women using bicycles for their own personal transport. And women were. It was suggested in the press also that women would get bicycle face by the same press who didn't like women's football because, you know, they would have to grimace as they went through major cities and women were pushed off their bicycles and they were attacked. And it was the same kind of principle of bifurcated garments like bloomers, enabling women to sit, cross, saddle and cycle to wherever they went. So if you were wearing those kind of garments and you were taking part in this kind of assertive physical activity, then definitely it's linked with first wave suffrage. Then we get another major move forward during World War I, when with conscription, traditionally men's jobs were given to women. And that gave another big boost to women's football. And then in one of the bitterest decades for gender relations in the 1970s, we get another advance for women's football. But the reason that it's really nuanced around these so called advances is that if you look at things like Sparerib and The women's magazines. I was involved in a cross European project where groups of researchers looked at the women's magazines in the 1970s and how they were responding to sport. And the feminist movement didn't really know in the 1970s what to do with sport. It didn't like sport as a kind of male domain, but it didn't really know how to narrativize women entering into those fields. So you tend to get very little commentary around women's football in things like sparerib.
- [12:55]
Interviewer
So why were they so conflicted about women's sport?
- [12:58]
Meditation Guide
Because the values of sport are very masculine. If you can think about the kind of radical feminist movement of the 70s and 80s. So you were tending in the 70s and 80s to get things like, you know, Greenham Common and those kind of separatist campaigns by the radical feminists who were rejecting the values of a very misogynistic society. And football essentially is an invasion game. It's something that by the 1970s had been constructed institutionally by the FA, by FIFA and a number of other professional clubs as a real male domain. To the extent that a lot of people don't even realize that some of the earliest female directors, for instance, in the 1970s were not allowed into the boardrooms of the football clubs and they were not allowed to buy a drink at the bar. A male director had to buy them a drink. And the first female player agents for male players were not invited to the PFA annual dinner. So football's worked quite hard to keep women out of the industry and women have had to be fairly determined to get into the industry.
- [14:13]
Interviewer
Nige, you mentioned the First World War there a few minutes ago, and this, as you alluded to, is a real boom time, wasn't it, for women's football in Britain? Can we dig into that a bit further? What was the driver of that?
- [14:26]
Meditation Guide
The driver? I often liken the period before the First World War for most young working class women as being what we see in episodes of Downton Abbey, which is that young women hoped to go into service. And what that meant is that you lived and worked in somebody else's home and very often you were given board and lodging. The actual wages from that were very, very poor indeed. That's why Mother's Day is so important in this country, because a lot of those young servants only got to go home to see their mothers on Mother's Day. So if you think of the implication of that for a right to leisure is that most young women only had Sunday afternoons to walk out with Whoever it was that they were going to marry. So with the First World War and conscription, the men go to the front, but the country still needs munitions made. And young working class women in their droves went to the factories for two reasons. One is because they earned more money in the factories than they could in service, although it's exactly half the wages of what the mail workers were paid. And the second is that by working outside the home, it gave them a right to leisure outside the home. And you had mates. So instead of being isolated in somebody else's house, you got friends who you could start to have a kick about with breaks. And from there the women's football teams emerged.
- [16:05]
Interviewer
So can you tell us about some of the most successful teams of this period?
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Meditation Guide
Yeah, there was one continuing the theme of women's rights. There was one called Atalanta Ladies from the Hull area. And Atalanta were all professional women. They were either nurses or teachers or women who had had post compulsory education. And it was definitely kind of feminist in impulse. Others that people will have heard of, like the Ditko Ladies of Preston, were works factory teams. So Dick Kerr's had been a tram manufacturer and then went into munitions during World War I. They already had a male works team, as a lot of factories and manufacturers and producers did, almost as a form of corporate social responsibility. But it was also a little bit more smart than that because there was an element of surveillance in that if your workers were playing football, they weren't in the ale house and they weren't messing around in town. So, you know, there was a strong kind of moral element to that as well.
- [17:20]
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- [18:47]
Interviewer
And how big were the crowds that, say, Ditka's ladies were drawing for their biggest games?
- [18:52]
Meditation Guide
Well, you have to remember the National Football League, which had been in existence since 1888, suspended nationally for the advent of World War I. And therefore that meant that the large stadiums like Preston North End were available. And so they played their first game to large crowds, 15, 20,000 in Preston North End. And again, it helped that the people who went along to watch were paying their money to raise funds for charities. And so it was both a form of patriotic civic duty. You know, here I am paying into charitable funds helping the war effort, helping Britain. But also by the same token, it was great entertainment. And the crowds here were really celebratory. And the thing I think that is not often said about these crowds is that they were largely made up of men because men had the spare time and the spare cash to go with their mates to the football. But the men went regularly. They didn't just go once, they went week in, week out. So it must have been fantastic entertainment and they must have taken it as, you know, we're going to the football and yeah, it'd be great to see our local team, Preston win, but we're going along to support them. And it was a very celebratory event. And the women players became local heroes and indeed some of them became international celebrities because we had some of the first internationals, home internationals in 191920 season, and international's England v France in 2021 season. So the newspapers were behind them, the local community were behind them and they played really, really good football. And we know that it was significant because we have evidence from Pathe newsreels and that means that it would have gone into the cinemas in the same way that we consume news now. It would have been given as infotainment within cinemas and so reached a much larger audience even than made it into the stadiums.
- [21:17]
Interviewer
So tell us about a couple of these heroes then, who were the biggest footballing stars of this period.
- [21:22]
Meditation Guide
Well, I absolutely love the story of Lily Parr. And again, what I'm going to say about Lily Parr, don't we do this with football heroes? Our football heroes become larger than life. So whether lily pole was 5 foot 10 or 6 foot, she's often described as 6 foot 2. She's said to have a kick like a mule. She's said to have scored over 900 goals. There is a story that I so far consider to be apocryphal because the player who is spoken about has never been named and I think it would have made the newspapers had it actually taken place. But she is said to have had a kick strong enough to break a male goalkeeper's arm. I've never seen the male goalkeeper named, so I don't know that that ever took place. So we get this larger than life hero and we know she enjoyed a Woodbine and she enjoyed a drink with her mates. And there's a rather wonderful story of. Because again, if you look at the scrapbooks, it's really rich source material. You will as often see them in their posh frocks at a civic reception with the mayor or the local alderman as you will on the football pitch. But there's a rather wonderful story that Lily over endured herself at one civic reception and the coach had to stop for the players to relieve themselves of no public toilets. So they had to stop to relieve themselves. And Lily was actually sick only for a couple of miles down the road for her to tap the driver on the shoulder and say, can we go back for my teeth?
- [23:08]
Interviewer
That's a wonderful story.
- [23:10]
Meditation Guide
So whether it's strictly speaking true or not, you get the sense of a young woman kind of enjoying herself and becoming. She was the captain when Dick Kerrs went over to America and all these kind of opportunities from a very poor family in St Helens. She would never have had that had it not been for football.
- [23:30]
Interviewer
So you say that Dick Kerrs went over to America. What happened there? How did that come about?
- [23:35]
Meditation Guide
Yeah, so what happened was that in 1921, and this is the presiding issue over Women's Football in 1921, the National Men's Football League, which had been suspended for the duration of hostilities, relaunched itself and it already had two divisions and they wanted to add a north division and a South division. So not quite doubling the size of the male football league, but almost. And the male football clubs and the FA wanted to protect the revenues for Male football. So they issued a ban on women playing on any pitch affiliated to the Football Association. And that included the big stadiums such as I've already mentioned, but it also included your little local club sides. And when women then went on to try and play in cricket grounds and rugby grounds, the FA used its influence with other sports to prevent women from playing on any sports ground, which effectively pushed it underground and onto parks. They also said that they thought the game of football was unsuitable for women, that women were too basically delicate, which we knew they weren't because we got lots of examples during World War I of the munitions workers pulling a 10 hour shift and then going and playing a game of football. And then, most spiteful of all, the FA issued its consideration that too much money had been absorbed in expenses by the players and not given to charity. So they really went after the reputation of women's football as respectable war work. And that ban was in Place until 1970. It was lifted formally in January 1970. And so to evade this ban, Dick Kurtz thought, right, we'll go abroad and we'll see if we can develop the popularity of our team abroad. But the problem was, once they got to the United States, which did have women's soccer at the time in the women's colleges, the women in the women's colleges were middle class and they did not want to put themselves up against factory women, especially a good factory team. So the Ditko's ladies had to play against male professional teams in the us and they were supported by a lot of people from the north who had been forced over to America in the Great Cotton Crisis. So it was a bit like supporting people from home.
- [26:17]
Interviewer
I'd like to return to America briefly in a little bit, but if we could just examine even more detail the FAA decision to effectively ban women's football. Do you think the FA were seriously worried that women's football might be as big as men's football following the first award?
- [26:35]
Meditation Guide
Yeah, I've never thought as big as. It's not a line that I've ever taken. I think that massively exaggerates because There were only 150 women's teams and some were much longer lived than others during World War I. But I go back to this point of from 1888, the football league grounds were all male owned, so there still has never been a women's football club in the UK who owned their own stadium. So just in terms of access to resource, women's football was never as big as men's football. It might have been highly popular and topical and all of those kinds of things, but I think you've got to keep it in proportion. And even though the Football League suspended nationally During World War I, it was still going on regionally. And if you look at your little local newspaper, wherever you are in the country, let's just pick Birmingham as an example. If you look at the local Birmingham press, there was loads of men's football going on during World War I because it was seen as a form of morale on the home front, in the same way that theatre and entertainment came back. And so that's when football became subject to the entertainment tax. So I think you do have to really keep it in proportion. But what I think they were threatened by was that they just didn't know how to regulate it and indeed didn't want to regulate it. And even if there were small revenue streams available, they wanted to protect that for male professional football. Because don't forget, at the time, male professional footballers were subject to the retain and transfer transfer system, where the clubs owned the contracts, not the players. And they had a maximum wage of something like, you know, five pounds during the season and two pounds in the off season, which is why so many professional male footballers had second jobs. So it's just got to be nuanced, that argument.
- [28:44]
Interviewer
But how much of a chilling effect on women's football did the FA's decision have over the following two or three decades? What did women's football in Britain look like, say, between the mid-1920s and, say, the 1950s?
- [28:58]
Meditation Guide
It was entirely marginalized because of the legitimacy of the FA by the time the ban came into force. So The FA was 50 years old by the time the ban came into force, and it was perhaps the most influential national governing body in the world at the time, which was why the band was so influential globally. It gave a kind of authority to the view that if you were female and you wanted a game of football, you were unfeminine, there was something wrong with you, and therefore it became, you know, known as something that either lesbians did, or women who were in some way deviant or did not conform to certain stereotypes. And if you talk to a lot of the women who actually played, they actually had to have some sort of male endorsement, male allyship. So if I go to the Corinthians, the Manchester Corinthians team, who were formed in 1949, they were formed by an ex referee, Percy Ashley, for his daughter, who was deaf and had a speech impediment. And Doris, his daughter, was the kind of cog around which Percy built this team. But with him having such a football background and him saying, it's fine for my daughter to do this, and he managed Manchester Corinthians until his death in the 1960s, it gave a kind of legitimacy to their activities. And again, another thing that they did, although they played on Fog Lane park and the players will talk about having to wash in duck ponds and taking two buses to get to play, they were enormously proud to play for Manchester Corinthians. And in terms of civic recognition, they again played their matches for charities, which helped. It kind of helped to give a legitimacy and an altruism to their activities that kind of was able to overcome some of the gender biases that the FA had created and which we're still dealing with today.
- [31:21]
Interviewer
Now, I wonder if we could go to 1971 in another, you might say, sort of landmark moment in British women's football, and that's the unofficial World cup that took place in Mexico and England's participation in it. Can you describe what went on there? And was it a milestone? Was it where you could see the proceeds of a sort of renaissance in.
- [31:43]
Meditation Guide
Women'S football in Britain in 1971? Women's football was at a crossroads. And what happened in the 1971 unofficial Women's World cup signaled that women's football could go one way and actually it went another way. And what I mean by that is, so there were professional women's leagues in Italy in the late 1960s, which drew a lot of international players. Quite a few England players moved to Italy to play in the professional leagues. But what happened then was that there was an unofficial Women's World cup in Italy, sponsored by Martini and Rossi, the aperitif manufacturer, and it drew large crowds. It was sold in the same way that a Men's World cup would be. Don't forget, we just had Mexico 1970, off the back of England. Men, women, winning the 66 World Cup. So it was sold in the same way that Men's World cup would be. It played in large stadia. There were sponsors, there was hype, there was media coverage in Italy. And what the organizers did was invite people to bid to host. And Mexico won for 1971. Now, the Mexican FA did not want to get involved in women's football, but rather brilliantly, Guadalajara and Azteca Stadium were privately owned, so the Mexican FA had no control over what matches they hosted. And the organizers went to those two major stadiums and just sold it as a big, ambitious event. Less than a year after men's World Cup. And so the final in The Azteca was 110,000. And there were lots of people who couldn't get into the ground. And that was driven by. As soon as each team got off the plane, they had a television crew who followed them around and everything was just put on TV to promote it. And they also had newspaper crews following them around and reporting it. So it was sold as a big old razzle dazzle event. You could access seats at different price points. Same with the Men's World Cup. And, you know, it was amazing and incredible. But FIFA got worried and presenting themselves as paternalistic. Oh, this is the wrong direction for women's football to go. Business interests are moving in, whereas we want to maintain it as a sport and protect it. So FIFA then got interested in women's football and after 71, held a conference where they told all of their national associations to start taking control of women's football, which they did, but effectively smothered the growth of women's football because we didn't have a Women's World cup then for another 20 years, until 1991.
- [34:56]
Interviewer
So for those England players traveling to Mexico in 1971, that obviously used to play in England without much, I imagine, media attention, relatively small crowds. I mean, what did they make of that whole experience of playing in front of tens of thousands of people in Mexico?
- [35:15]
Meditation Guide
They couldn't believe it. I don't know how they. Some of them were very young, like 13, 14, 15. So I think in some way they were protected by their youth in terms of quite a few of them were the first person in their street to get a passport. Yeah, you know, there have been a few pilots who had flown planes during World War II, say, and people were generally starting to go on foreign holidays. But for a lot of the players, it was a special trip to get a passport. In fact, one of the players spoke about her father selling an item because the passports were £5. Her dad sold an item that was quite dear to him to pay for her passport. And they had to get permission from the local school authorities to go on this trip to Mexico because they were out there for a month. So you'd never been much further than, you know, wherever your local hometown is. A lot of them were based in Aylesbury, and the first leg of the journey was to New York and then from New York to Mexico. And Chris Lockwood, who was one of the teenagers, has this great line of when they got off the plane in Mexico, she turned to the others and said, there's somebody Famous on this plane. Look at the crowds. And the crowds were there for them, so they were followed. They were quite frightened at times because the bus from the airport to the hotel, people were banging on the sides. And initially, you know, there's a lot of bad feeling. Wasn't there after Mexico 70 around the England men's team, but people were banging on the sides to say hello and they were actually throwing gifts into the windows. And the players, because they'd never traveled and didn't have that life experience before, had so much stuff by the time that they came home, they just dumped a lot of it at the airport, which for, as a heritage professional and somebody who works with museums, we would love to have had that stuff, but it just got dumped at the airport.
- [37:23]
Interviewer
Now, you mentioned a couple of minutes ago, 1991, in the first official Women's World cup, which am I right in saying that was won by the USA and it took place in China.
- [37:34]
Meditation Guide
That's correct. And it wasn't called a World Cup. It was the first world championship for the M and M's cup. So it was sponsored by M&MS. But FIFA was so tentative, they didn't want to tarnish the World cup brand by calling it a World Cup.
- [37:53]
Interviewer
But one question that raises for me is, so it's won by the States. Why has America been such a powerhouse in women's football when obviously you can't say the same for the American men's team?
- [38:05]
Meditation Guide
It's because of something called Title 9. And Title 9 was enacted in 1972. So you can see that in terms of the timeframe of this, the US women who won in 1991 were the daughters of Title 9. And what I mean by that is it was an education act that said if federal funds had been used in any educational facility for male students, an exactly comparable amount had to be used for female activities. And that was things like in the classroom. But it had the unintended consequence within the physical education curriculum of. Because if you go out to U.S. colleges and U.S. high schools, the whole physical education culture is dominated by American football. And we all know that they have huge rosters because there are so many positions and they're specialised positions. But what soccer comparably did was it was perceived to be less hyper masculine than American football and involved more players than basketball. But it also enabled comparable amounts to be spent on female athletes within colleges. And it was a way of the colleges to develop a reputation as a kind of winning college. So if you think of the North Carolina Tar Heels, then They became kind of the winningest team. And it reflected very well upon that particular college. And there were college scholarships and it made young women want to go to North Carolina. Lucy Bronze spent a little bit of time even in North Carolina more recently. So it's really Title nine and this unintended consequence of how Resource was used that meant that a lot of those women who won in 1991 had gone to college on a soccer scholarship. And it's really telling the status that women's soccer has in the US that Julie Foudy, who was one of the winners of the 1999 World cup in Los Angeles, could either go to Stanford to study a medical career or she could go on a soccer scholarship. And she's probably made as much money out of football as she could have out of medicine, which you kind of can't still argue within the UK context.
- [40:41]
Interviewer
So coming back over to this side of the Atlantic, then, I mean, when did the FA finally resume its direct involvement in women's football? And what spurred it into action in.
- [40:51]
Meditation Guide
The end, honestly, I think it just knew that it was a bad look. They took over women's football formally in 1993. It wasn't very popular amongst the women's football community. So a lot of people who kept women's football going since the formation of the Women's Football association in 1969 is a group of unpaid volunteers who just kind of kept the whole thing going. A lot of people who had been volunteers at that point left. And the FA slowly developed women's football and it's really, really piecemeal. So Hope Powell became the first full time England women's coach in 1998. She was in post for 15 years, which kind of tells you how little competition there was for that job, shall we say? And so this is why I talk about the Serena Weigman revolution, because until Serena Weigman was appointed in 2021, England had never had a manager for the women's team that had proven international experience.
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Interviewer
How transformative, in your opinion, was that victory in the Euros in 2022. What did that do for the exposure and the visibility of women's football in Britain?
- [42:18]
Meditation Guide
I think it was huge. It was seismic. So I was in the stadium in 1999 when the US won with 93,000 people watching in the Rose bowl, with the Clintons in attendance and all of that. I compare 2022 for being our Rose bowl moment, because it was in a capacity Wembley Stadium. It was a completely joyful Wembley Stadium, unlike the scenes that we'd seen at Menduros. And it was a huge moment where it proved that women's football could sell out major stadiums, it could get the whole country behind the women's national team, a degree of celebrity endorsement and celebration and excitement about it. And I must admit, so I was in the crowd not only with my niece who I used to play football with, she started playing in the women's team when she was 14 and I was 34, but also with her two daughters who thought by the end of the day that it was very normal that we all get together and go to Wembley and win. So, you know, that was very meaningful for what I've done. But I was also in the stadium with one of the players from the 71 woke up in Mexico as her guest and for her to have been banned on her return from Mexico from women's football. But then to see that at Wembley again was very kind of meaningful.
- [44:00]
Podcast Host
That was Jean Williams, professor of sports at the University of Walter Hampton, speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.
- [44:17]
Yoga Instructor
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- [44:47]
Meditation Guide
This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [45:00]
Interviewee
You know, he would look at these.
- [45:01]
Meditation Guide
Men and he would say, don't worry.
- [45:03]
Interviewee
Sunny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [45:06]
Meditation Guide
Join me Alex von Tanzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.