The Lady Footballers and the British Press, 1895

Nettie Honeyball and Florence Dixie founded the British Ladies Football Club (BLFC) in 1894 with the aim to provide football-playing opportunities for girls and young women, but also as a means of making money. Theirs, in effect, was an attempt to create a professional football league for women. Public interest in 'the lady footballers' was enormous, at least in its early stages, and generated considerable attention from the press. Overall, press coverage of the BLFC was negative (football is a man's sport; football is a working-class sport; women are physically incapable of playing the game; women shouldn't appear publicly in bifurcated garments, etc.), with only a few notable exceptions. Did the stance adopted depend on the political leaning of the newspaper? Or were the reporters simply reflecting the social and economic realities of their time, struggling to 'explain' a marginal group - women athletes, or more specifically, middle-class women football players - engaging in a working-class male game? This article examines the press coverage of the BLFC. The double standard evident in the newspaper coverage was, on the surface, as one might expect: if a woman played well, she was a freak, possibly a man in disguise; if she didn't play well, it proved that women shouldn't play football. But on closer examination, the double standard was actually rather nuanced: if she played well and looked the part of a woman, she could be subject to praise; yet if she played well and didn't conform to the standard of feminine beauty, she faced ridicule, and her gender called into question.

Economic Policies to Address the Environmental Consequences of Global Reuse

This paper summarizes a two-country model that solves for optimal tax rates to achieve efficiency in an economy with international trade in used consumer electronics. If only the developed nation can tax the disposal of e-waste, then the global Pareto Optimum can be obtained by either imposing an import tariff on used consumer electronics or subsidizing the return of e-waste for disposal in the developed country. The global Pareto Optimum can also be obtained by reducing the disposal tax in the developed country to a level below the external marginal cost of disposal should no other policy option be available.