Germany

Author: Sandra Kreiner, Sascha Düerkop, Franziska Blendin

Forgotten Pioneers: The Hidden History of Women’s Football in Germany (1900–1990)

When Germany’s women took the field in Berlin for an unofficial European Championship in 1957, the team proudly wore the national eagle on their jersey. The national team had only been founded the year before, and Lore Barnhusen (née Karlowski) had set up the first goal ever in 1956. Decades later, when asked if any celebration was planned to honor that pioneering tournament, her answer was poignant: “No, we have been forgotten. That is more than sad ” [1, 2]. The story of women’s football in Germany is indeed a tale of forgotten heroines – a saga of early passion and persistence in the face of scorn, bans, and neglect. From secret matches on prairies to triumphant European titles, generations of German women fought a relentless battle to play the game they loved.

Early Sparks in a Conservative Era (1900s–1930s)

The true beginning of women’s football in Germany is lost to history — not because it didn’t exist, but because no one thought it could be worth recording. Oftentimes, reports about the ban of women football thus serve as indirect proof that women did actually play football, before the male-dominated governing bodies of the sport saw a need to intervene. 

We do not know when the first German woman kicked a football. But it is likely that, as the game spread across Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women played it alongside men — perhaps at school, in parks, or on the edges of factory grounds. Football at the time was mostly recreational, even for men. Matches were informal, played in long trousers and street shoes, far from the stadium culture we associate with the sport today. In such a setting, there is no reason to believe women were absent. But their presence left almost no trace.

The first known reference to a women’s football team in Germany appears in 1907, with FC Fortuna 02 Leipzig reportedly forming a women’s side [3]. Yet this mention stands alone, an archival fluke that surfaced in a local football association’s publication decades later. What happened to those players? Who were they? We don’t know. They disappear from the record almost as quickly as they entered it. The same is true for other early flickers: isolated training sessions in Bergedorf (1920) [4], a ‘Kranzspiel’ (transl.: festival match) in Pulsnitz (1921) [5], or university teams in Berlin (1923) [6]. 

Notably, women also participated in a 1927 German University Championship match, officially played under men’s rules [6]. Each event is like a faint signal from the past, hinting at a richer, hidden history — a game being played without spectators, without headlines, and without institutional support.

There are two main reasons this early era remains so obscure. Firstly, women’s football simply wasn’t seen as newsworthy. Even men’s football was still finding its footing in the public consciousness. Women playing it recreationally — especially without formal clubs or leagues — rarely merited a mention in the press. Secondly, and more decisively, there has been almost no serious historical research into the beginnings of the women’s game. The DFB (Deutscher Fußball-Bund/German Football Association) has never commissioned or funded a comprehensive study of women’s football history, especially prior to 1970. That absence is ideological: since the DFB formally banned women’s football in 1955 and only ‘recognised’ it in 1970, everything before then lies outside the federation’s official narrative. It is not ‘their’ history — and so it remains unexamined until now.

Worse still, the infrastructure for research is lacking. German newspaper archives are not centralized, and many local newspapers from the early 20th century have not been digitized. Researching women’s football history would mean traveling to hundreds of municipal archives, digging through yellowed papers and fragile bound editions, hoping for a match report or photograph. Funding for such painstaking work is scarce. Football historians — often focused on the men’s Bundesliga, World Cups, and tactical developments — rarely make space for women’s stories. As a result, the early players have vanished into a void of neglect.

Yet occasionally, someone breaks through. In 1930, a 19-year-old named Lotte Specht from Frankfurt placed a newspaper advertisement seeking women interested in forming a football team. She was inspired by the club close to her heart, FSV Frankfurt, and thought to herself “why shouldn’t I play, too?” [7]. To her surprise, 35 women responded [8]. Specht founded the 1. Deutscher Damen-Fußballclub, the first exclusively female football club in the country. They trained with improvised kits — baggy men’s shorts, oversized boots, even berets for head protection — and played a few matches against men’s teams or among themselves. They were not revolutionaries; they were just teenagers who loved to play the beautiful game. But their joy was met with mockery.

Spectators hurled insults — and sometimes stones — from the sidelines. Newspapers derided them for being unfeminine. Local residents boycotted Specht’s father’s butcher shop in protest. With no other emerging women’s clubs to play against and constant public harassment, the 1. DDFC disbanded after just one year. “We weren’t revolutionaries, we just enjoyed football… but they even threw rocks at us” Specht later recalled. “After a year, the dream was over.” [8]

Her dream may have ended, but she and the 1.DDFC left behind a powerful example. Even before the war, German women were forming clubs, organising matches, and claiming public space on the football field — however briefly.

In the 1930s and 1940s, these flickers all but disappeared. The Nazi regime enforced a strict gender ideology that exalted women as mothers and homemakers. Sport was encouraged only as a means of preparing women for childbirth. Football, viewed as rough, competitive and male-coded, was considered wholly inappropriate. [9]

And yet, the game never truly vanished. It retreated underground, into backyards and behind closed gates and was passed along by those who refused to forget how to play.

Kicking Against the Silence: Women Reclaim the Pitch in the 1950s

In the aftermath of World War II, as Germany lay in ruins, women quietly returned to football. They had no institutional support, no official teams, and no federations behind them — but they had footballs, fields, and a desire to play. In the industrial regions of the Ruhr, the Rhineland, and even scattered towns across the country, female factory workers, secretaries, housewives, and students began forming their own teams again — often after their shifts or on Sundays. By the early 1950s, footballs were once again flying between women’s feet in parks, backyards, and on improvised pitches.

These games weren’t acts of rebellion, at least not initially. They were expressions of joy, community, and physical freedom – as the movie ‘Mädchen können kein Fußball spielen’ (transl.: girls can’t play football) highlights. In a society still steeped in conservative gender norms and postwar trauma, kicking a football could be a release, a claim to public space, a simple thrill. Women gathered after work, changed into their baggy shirts and borrowed boots, and simply played. Crowds came too — curious neighbors, local boys, sometimes whole families. There are reports of spontaneous matches drawing thousands of spectators, not for spectacle, but because it was good football [10].

It was precisely this visible, growing popularity that began to worry the men in charge. The German Football Association (DFB) — dominated by men who believed football was inherently masculine — watched uneasily. To them, women playing ‘das Spiel der Männer’ (transl.: the men’s game) was not a harmless trend but a challenge to tradition, masculinity, and control.

In response, at the DFB’s annual meeting on 30 June 1955, delegates voted unanimously to pass a motion banning women’s football from all affiliated clubs and competitions [10]. Clubs were forbidden to create or support women’s teams, referees barred from officiating their matches, and pitches withheld. The rationale was wrapped in medical paternalism and sexist dogma: football was too rough, they claimed; it would damage a woman’s body and soul; erase her femininity, and even endanger her fertility [11]. DFB president Peco Bauwens, a former member of the Nazi party who once ran a forced labour camp, dismissed it altogether: “If a dozen women form a club, that’s not our business.” he scoffed [10].

But he was wrong. The women refused to disappear.

Such as Duisburg, for example. There, just weeks after the ban, a match between DFC Duisburg-Hamborn and Gruga Essen went ahead and over a thousand spectators came to watch. Police stormed the field, only twenty minutes into the match, acting on a tip from a local DFB loyalist.The women were forced to stop playing, their boots pulled off, their names recorded [9]. The next day, newspapers captured the farce with biting sarcasm: “Then women’s football was liquidated. So much for equality this time.” [10]

Rather than scare them into submission, these crackdowns hardened the women’s resolve. They continued to play — if not officially, then anywhere else they could. On empty lots, behind factories, in rented halls, or on borrowed pitches when no one was watching. They organised their own matches, often between factory teams or even across cities. Women refereed their own games, designed their own rules, recruited one another through word of mouth. Some used false names to avoid being identified by employers or DFB officials [12].

Cut off from official clubs, the women formed their own networks and leagues. As early as late 1955, new independent clubs with names like Fortuna Dortmund and Rhenania Essen sprang up in West Germany’s cities [13].

In 1956, a coalition of these clubs led by enthusiast Willi Ruppert founded the Westdeutscher Damen-Fußball-Verband (transl.: West German Women’s Football Association) in Essen [13]. Soon a counterpart for South Germany was organised out of Munich, and by 1957 a national umbrella group – the Deutscher Damenfußball-Verband – had been created by another promoter, Josef Floritz [8]. These breakaway women’s associations were entirely outside DFB control, which meant they could arrange matches freely (albeit always looking over their shoulder for disapproving officials).

They hosted training camps, coordinated travels to matches, and even arranged international friendlies — all outside the DFB’s jurisdiction. A fully-fledged unofficial women’s football league began to take shape. Teams of factory workers, office secretaries, students – women from all walks of life – trained wherever they could. Often they were chased off of official training grounds by angry club caretakers, so they played on park lawns and farmers’ fields instead. “We were constantly driven off the training pitches and had to move to any meadow or even big backyards we could find,” recalled Christa Kleinhans, who played in Dortmund in the late 1950s [14]. Sometimes the women snuck onto empty football fields at night; their husbands or boyfriends would park cars around the pitch and illuminate it with headlights so they could practice after dark [14]. Their determination was incredible: no ban could extinguish their love of the game.

To their credit, the cities refused to back down. Matches went ahead. The DFB never followed through on its threats. But for the women, the message was clear: your passion is not welcome. They were not just ignored — they were actively suppressed, bullied, and erased.

And yet, they played on.

That is the most powerful truth of this era: they played anyway. In the face of mockery, police raids, and institutional bans, they kept showing up. In boots too big, on pitches too rough, without funding, without permission — they played. And in doing so, they laid the foundations for everything that followed.

Before long, these unofficial clubs were drawing serious crowds and media attention. The West German Women’s Football Association organised a milestone event on 23 September 1956: West Germany’s first ‘international’ women’s match. In a private stadium owned by a coal mine in Essen, a hastily assembled German women’s selection (mostly local Ruhrgebiet players) faced the (unofficial) women’s team of the Netherlands. Despite the unofficial nature of the team at the time, it has since been recognised as the first official match of the Dutch national team by the KNvB. Despite little time to train together, the German women triumphed 2–1 [8]. An astonishing 17,000 spectators packed into the venue to witness this forbidden spectacle [8]. The players were awestruck – many had never seen such a crowd. In fact, to comply with perceived female limitations, the match was shortened from the standard 90 minutes (the women played two halves of around 25–30 minutes each) [15]. But it hardly mattered – the experiment was a rousing success. Enthusiastic fans tossed bouquets onto the field, and newspapers reported admiringly on the skill and courage of the female players.

Buoyed by that success, more ‘Länderspiele’ (transl.: international matches) followed. Between 1956 and 1965, Germany’s unofficial women’s ‘national teams’ (run by the rival women’s federations) played roughly 150–200 international matches against teams from England, Austria, the Netherlands and beyond [10]. These games were technically not recognised by any official body, but to the players and thousands of fans, they were as real as any World Cup. The women donned white jerseys with the Federal Eagle crest and stood for the national anthem – even though the DFB refused to acknowledge them. Often the same core of players formed the team: pioneers like Anne Droste, who captained many games. Droste later admitted that during the 1950s she played under a false name to avoid getting in trouble at her day job [12]. Such was the stigma around women’s football that many players feared being recognised and punished socially or professionally. Still, they kept playing for the sheer joy and pride in representing their country, even if only unofficially.

Perhaps the boldest venture of this era was the unofficial Women’s European Championship of 1957. In early November 1957, Berlin’s Olympic Stadium hosted a small tournament organised by the new International Ladies’ Football Association (ILFA) – a fledgling women’s football federation that briefly united teams from West Germany, England, Austria, and the Netherlands [2]. Hopes were high; it was styled as Europe’s first female ‘Europameisterschaft’. Local star Lore Barnhusen led the German side. However, the event was chaotic behind the scenes. Willi Ruppert, one of the organisers, allegedly mismanaged funds and wildly overestimated ticket sales [2]. When only about one-fifth of the expected crowd turned up for the matches in Berlin’s cavernous stadium, the organisers couldn’t even pay the hotel bills for visiting teams. The German team itself, thrown together again from disparate clubs, performed poorly and failed to win the trophy. In the aftermath, arrest warrants were issued for Ruppert and his colleague on suspicion of fraud. It was an embarrassing flop financially – the kind of fiasco the DFB had gleefully predicted [2].

And yet, even in failure, the 1957 Berlin tournament carried symbolic weight. The 18,000 fans who attended the opening game saw German women proudly wearing the national colors with the eagle emblem on their chests (a sight officially forbidden at the time). The press coverage, while mixed, praised the quality of the women’s play and marvelled at their technique [2]. Crucially, Berlin’s authorities had stood up to the DFB’s pressure by allowing the event, just as Frankfurt and other cities had done. In doing so, they proved that an appetite for women’s football did exist in Germany, ban or no ban. By the 1960s, the DFB’s prohibition looked increasingly untenable. Despite operating in the shadows, women’s football had taken firm root: an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 women were actively playing in West Germany by the end of the 1960s – some openly in independent clubs, others surreptitiously under aliases in men’s clubs’ [16]. The women had essentially built a parallel football universe, complete with clubs, star players, and enthusiastic crowds, all without any support (and often outright hostility) from the establishment.

A Parallel Story in the East

While West Germany’s women fought authority outright, on the other side of the Iron Curtain the situation was only slightly kinder. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) did not formally ban women’s football – but it was hardly encouraged either. Through the 1950s, a few women in East Germany kicked footballs informally (often inspired by the same post-war trends), yet no official teams existed in those years [7]. Sports functionaries in the East were just as skeptical about women on the pitch, questioning whether football was ‘appropriate’ for women.

Throughout its existence, GDR women’s football was part of leisure and recreational sport. When the GDR government classified sports into “worthy of special funding” and others, men’s football was considered worthy of special funding, while women’s football was not. The political goal was to place the GDR men’s national team ahead of West Germany at the Olympic Games [17]. 

The consequence of these decisions was that the female footballers were generally organised in company sports clubs [18]. However, there was also evidence of women’s football outside the company sports clubs, for example ‘Die neue Fußballwoche’ reported on a match in Dresden as early as 1960 [19]. The main breakthrough came in 1968, when the worker’s sports club/working-class sports club BSG Empor Dresden-Mitte in Dresden quietly formed the GDR’s first women’s football team [8].

At first, even the socialist authorities frowned – but unlike the DFB, they did not forbid it. As more factory teams and community clubs followed Dresden’s lead and started women’s sides, the GDR’s football association decided it was better to include women’s football in some capacity rather than to fight it. This bureaucratic nod gave the women’s game a modest but crucial boost: it legitimised the formation of regional leagues and tournaments for women. Indeed, by 1969–70, parts of East Germany (notably around Dresden and Leipzig) already had local women’s leagues functioning on a district level [8]. Now, with official sanction, those could expand.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, women’s football in the GDR remained a niche passion – never as widespread as in the West, but steadily growing in its own contained way. Dresden paving the way led to an early, rapid growth in the number of clubs. At the end of 1971 there were 150, but they were not connected to each other [20]. Also, female representatives were soon represented at the 1974 Football Association Day with Gisela Liedemann publicly criticising the association “…the draft decision was obviously only made for men…” [21] As a result, a further resolution was passed to promote women’s football, which was unfortunately too vague to have any direct impact. But the rethink had begun [22]. With state sports funding focused on Olympic sports, female footballers in East Germany received few resources and often had to improvise their way to games. One anecdote from a Baltic Sea coast team recalls how the women piled into the back of a fishery company’s flatbed truck – sitting on makeshift bench planks with a crate of beer for refreshment – to travel to away matches on weekends [23]. The few hundred women who played in the GDR did so purely for love of the sport, often sacrificing personal time and money. Older players would even work extra shifts at their factories so younger teammates could get time off for games [23]. 

Due to the non-existent association funding and the limitation to the local level, the clubs were faced with the challenge of maintaining the joy of the sport despite always having the same opponents. Sabine Seidel of Turbine Potsdam commented on this in an interview for a dissertation on football in the GDR: “As far as point matches are concerned, we’re pretty much stewing in our own juices. Always playing against the same four or five teams is no fun in the long run.” [24].

However, the clubs were not discouraged by the lack of variety and found ways to offer more. The indoor tournament organised by Ascobloc Neubrandenburg was particularly important here. Teams not only from the GDR, but also from Poland and the CSSR competed in this tournament. It took until 1976 for the tournament to be won not only by teams outside the GDR. The most successful teams were Chemie Leipzig and Turbine Potsdam [25]. 

The latter was the most successful team of the GDR by far, they even played a total of 76 international matches, including games in Slovakia and Poland [26]. 

By 1979, the GDR organised its first national women’s competition, the Bestenermittlung (transl.: Determination of the Best). This followed a resolution passed at the association’s conference on 12 April 1979: 

“To further revitalise and promote women’s football, district best matches are to be held and, starting in 1979, tournaments of these district best teams are to be organised for the first time until the GDR best women’s team is determined” [27].

Much like the West’s early championships, it was a short knockout tournament among regional winners. Clubs like Motor Mitte Karl-Marx-Stadt and BSG Turbine Potsdam dominated these East German championships in the 1980s. Women’s football in the GDR expanded to its peak after that initial start of the championships, the amount of clubs and players reaching an all-time high in 1981/82 [28].

While crowds and coverage remained limited, by the late 1980s the women’s game was sufficiently established that the GDR finally formed a national women’s team. History would give this team only a bittersweet moment: it played just one official match ever – on 9 May 1990. On this day in the last months before German reunification, East Germany’s women lost 0–3 to Czechoslovakia in front of 800 fans in Potsdam. For 90 minutes, at least, the GDR women’s XI stood proudly on equal footing with their male compatriots. Soon after, East German football (and its women’s league) merged into the unified German system, ending the separate chapter of the GDR’s women pioneers.

Liberation and Struggle: After the Ban, 1970s Progress

Back in the West, the winds of social change in the late 1960s finally reached the football pitch. The women’s liberation movement, the student protests, and a general questioning of traditional norms created an environment where the DFB’s ban looked archaic. By 1970, talk was in the air of founding a national women’s football federation outside the DFB – possibly under the umbrella of the more progressive German Gymnastics Association [15]. Facing the prospect of completely losing control over the growing women’s sport, the DFB’s old guard reluctantly gave in. On 31 October 1970, at a conference in Travemünde, the federation officially lifted the 15-year ban on women’s football [29]. German women could finally play within the DFB structure – a momentous victory earned through years of persistence.

Yet this ‘liberation’ came with strings attached. The DFB, still unconvinced of women’s abilities, imposed a separate set of quirky rules for the female game in 1970: matches would be limited to 60 minutes (30 minutes per half), played with a lighter ball, and women were barred from wearing cleated boots to ‘protect’ them from injury [30]. It was as if the patriarchs of the DFB said, “Fine, you can play – but only as delicate ladies.” The patronising regulations highlighted that while the ban was gone, true acceptance was still a long way off.

Despite the constraints, women eagerly flooded into newly sanctioned clubs. Regional associations organised official women’s leagues almost immediately. In 1974, the DFB held the first national women’s championship, a knockout tournament among the regional league champions. In front of a few thousand spectators in Mainz, TuS Wörrstadt claimed the inaugural title, etching their name in history as West Germany’s first official women’s champion [31,32]. The West German women’s DFB-Pokal (cup competition) followed in 1981. Slowly but surely, a formal competitive structure was taking shape. Dedicated women such as Hannelore Ratzeburg took on leadership roles inside the DFB, pushing for resources and recognition. Ratzeburg would later become a long-serving DFB women’s football official, often called the “mother of women’s football” in Germany for her advocacy from the 1970s onward.

Internationally, however, the DFB remained cautious and conservative. In 1970, just months before lifting the ban, the DFB pointedly refused to send any team to the Coppa del Mondo – an unofficial Women’s World Cup held in Italy. Undeterred, one club side, SC 07 Bad Neuenahr, took it upon themselves to represent West Germany at that historic tournament [33]. The women of Bad Neuenahr traveled to Genoa at their own expense and competed against teams from Italy, England, Denmark and others in July 1970. A year later, when Mexico hosted a 1971 Women’s World Cup in front of massive crowds, the DFB again blocked participation – citing ‘insurance issues’ as an excuse. It was a lost opportunity, as 100,000 fans were attending women’s matches in Mexico City¹. Not until 1982 did the DFB finally establish an official West German women’s national team. In fact, the delay was so long that a German club, SSG Bergisch Gladbach 09, filled the void by winning the unofficial World Cup tournaments in Taipei in 1981 and 1984 [33].They effectively became de facto world champions on behalf of Germany before a DFB’s team even existed.

However, that was only the beginning of Germany’s journey in women’s football.

To be continued.

*1 The 1971 “Copa del Mundo” in Mexico saw attendances over 100,000, making it one of the best-attended women’s sports events ever at the time. (This was largely forgotten until the documentary Copa 71 revived interest.) 

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https://web.archive.org/web/20250713190738/https://taz.de/Als-Lore-den-DFB-besiegte/!288941/

[2] Legende Verloren (2024). Die erste EM der Frauen – 1957. https://web.archive.org/web/20250318142333/https://bolztribuene.de/2024/05/14/die-erste-em-der-frauen-1957/

[3] Leipziger Fußballverband e.V. (2010). 1900-1909. https://web.archive.org/web/20250426042028/http://www.leipziger-fussballverband.de/cms2/index.php?page=153

[4] Reinert, B. (2020). Früher Frauenfußball in Bergedorf?. https://web.archive.org/web/20250420215025/https://blogs.sub.uni-hamburg.de/bergedorf/?p=8623

[5] Hock, H.-P. (2012). Früher Frauenfußball in Dresden. https://web.archive.org/web/20240406050115/http://www.dd-henge-kickers.de/bilder/info/dd_f_fussball.pdf

[6] Lönnecker, H. (2013). „… das macht man doch nicht!“ Frauenfußball an deutschen Hochschulen 1919-1935. In: Herzog, M. (2013), Frauenfussball in Deutschland: Anfänge–Verbote–Widerstände–Durchbruch, pp. 201-222. Kohlhammer.

[7] Hellmann, F. (2019). Die mutige Pionierin. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. https://www.fr.de/sport/sport-mix/mutige-pionierin-11439001.html

[8] Tabarelli, P. (n.d.). Women’s football in Germany more than 50 years ago. In: Nachspielzeiten. https://nachspielzeiten.de/womens-football-germany-over-50-years-ago/ 

[9] Schlehahn, B. (n.d.). Charmante Mädchen. In: Im Schatten des Fünfecks. https://imschattendesfuenfecks.de/kick-it-like/charmante-maedchen/

[10] Hoffmann, E., Nendza, J. (2007). Damenfußball, Straßenfußball: der weibliche Kick bis zum DFB-Verbot im Juli 1955. In: bpb. https://www.bpb.de/themen/sport/graue-spielzeit/65060/damenfussball-strassenfussball-der-weibliche-kick-bis-zum-dfb-verbot-im-juli-1955/

[11] Hoffmann, E., Nendza, J. (2007). DFB verbietet seinen Vereinen Damenfußball. In: bpb. https://www.bpb.de/themen/sport/graue-spielzeit/65063/dfb-verbietet-seinen-vereinen-damenfussball/

[12] Hoffmann, E., Nendza, J. (2007). Das Ausnahmeteam: Fortuna Dortmund 1955-1965. In: bpb.

https://www.bpb.de/themen/sport/graue-spielzeit/65071/das-ausnahmeteam-fortuna-dortmund-1955-1965

[13] Hoffmann, E., Nendza, J. (2007). Damenfußball in der Verbotszeit. In: bpb. https://www.bpb.de/themen/sport/graue-spielzeit/65065/damenfussball-in-der-verbotszeit/ 

[14] 11Freunde (2020). Unerwünscht und ausgelacht. https://www.11freunde.de/welt-des-fussballs/unerwuenscht-und-ausgelacht-a-5c1699ef-0004-0001-0000-000002841194 

[15] Grüne, H. (2019). Der lange Weg zum Recht auf das Spiel. In: Zeitspiel Magazin, Ed. 14. https://www.zeitspiel-magazin.de/geschichte-n/geschicht-e/14-frauen-und-fusball/ 

[16] Wörner, S., Holsten, N. (2011). Frauenfußball – zurück aus dem Abseits. In: bpb. https://web.archive.org/web/20250212020836/https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/33342/frauenfussball-zurueck-aus-dem-abseits/

[17] Linne, C. S. (2011). Frei gespielt: Frauenfußball im geteilten Deutschland. Bebra-Wiss.-Verl., p. 37

[18] ibid, p. 27

[19] ibid, p. 39

[20] Meier, D. (1993). Damenfussball. Wissenschaftliche Prüfungsarbeit zur Ersten Staatsprüfung für das Lehramt an Gymnasien, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, p. 22

[21] ibid, p.32

[22] ibid, p.33

[23] Jaedicke, T. (2011). Unter dem Label sozialistischer Emanzipation. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur: Buchkritik. https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/unter-dem-label-sozialistischer-emanzipation-100.html

[24] Meier, D. (1993). Damenfussball. Wissenschaftliche Prüfungsarbeit zur Ersten Staatsprüfung für das Lehramt an Gymnasien, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, p. 28

[25] ibid, p.43

[26] ibid, p.45

[27] ibid, p.35

[28] ibid, p.36

[29] Hoffmann, E., Nendza, J. (2007). Der Deutsche Fußball-Bund hebt das Frauenfußballverbot auf. https://www.bpb.de/themen/sport/graue-spielzeit/65068/der-deutsche-fussball-bund-hebt-das-frauenfussballverbot-auf/

[30] Frantz, M. (2025). Frauenfußball in Deutschland: verboten, belächelt, erfolgreich. https://www.vereinsticket.de/neuigkeiten/frauenfussball-in-deutschland-verboten-belaechelt-erfolgreich 

[31] Becker, A. (2024). TuS Wörrstadt: 50 Jahre erste Deutsche Meisterinnen. Interview mit Bärbel Petzold. In: Bolztribüne. https://bolztribuene.de/2024/09/07/50-jahre-erste-deutsche-meisterinnen/ 

[32] Deutsche Wochenschau (1974). UFA-Dabei (Originaltitel) Nr. 930/1974. In: Bundesarchiv. https://digitaler-lesesaal.bundesarchiv.de/video/31934/692954 
[33] Rames, R., Erskine, J. (2023). Copa 71. https://frauenfilmfest.com/en/movie/copa-71-2