Women and Sport in Ireland: A History of Ladies Gaelic Football

This thesis aims to address a major research gap in Irish historiography – the place of women in sport in Ireland. In recent decades, the experience of women in Irish society, politics, and culture has been a growing area of research in history, sociology, and other disciplines. However, our understanding of how women have fared in sport (which has traditionally been a male dominated and controlled sphere) remains under-researched. Using Gaelic football as the central sporting example, this thesis charts how women’s place in sport has changed between the late nineteenth century and the twenty-first century. An array of sources including newspapers, archival materials, reports, and publications, as well as existing research on sport, sociology, and Irish social history are drawn upon to analyse this history. This thesis correlates the emergence of ladies’ Gaelic football and the subsequent founding of the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) with the changing position of women in Irish society which began in the late 1960s with the rise of the Second Wave Feminist Movement. Charting the development of the LGFA over its fifty-year history, it reveals how women’s sport in Ireland has been strongly influenced by social, political, and cultural developments. In so doing, this body of research situates the history of ladies’ Gaelic football within the global historiography of women’s sport as well as Irish historiography on sport and society. It is hoped that this thesis presents a basis for further research on women’s sport in history and other academic disciplines to broaden our understanding of women’s experience in sport and society.