However, the Association put in place several restrictions on women's games, including limiting the game to two 35-minutes halves without extra time instead of two 45-minutes halves, making players take corner kicks from the edge of the penalty area instead of the corner area, and limiting the size of the ball to that used by U12 boys players.
[4] However, campaigners against the sport contacted President Getúlio Vargas, claiming that it posed a threat to the health of potential mothers and would cause a deterioration of social norms.
The DBU subsequently disestablished the unofficial competitions and teams the players were forced to sign up to an entirely new system created from scratch.
In response, the Fédération des sociétés féminines sportives de France (FSFSF), which had been formed in 1917, began to organise women's football competitions.
[16] In West Germany, the idea of organising women's football competitions surged after the country won the 1954 FIFA World Cup.
To justify the ban, the DFB claimed that the roughness of the sport would damage women's fertility and health as well as representing an event inappropriate for public viewing, saying that "in the fight for the ball, female grace disappears, body and soul are inevitably damaged, and the public parading of the body is offensive and indecent.
"[18] The ban was met with resistance, particularly following the advent of the West German student movement in the late-1960s, but attempts to organise matches were often broken up by police.
[21] In East Germany, the Deutscher Fußball-Verband der DDR did not impose a ban on women's football, however, early attempts to set up teams were met with obstruction from officials.
[21] In mid-1961, the Johor Bahru FA denied that it would allow women's football competitions to be organised, saying that "we don't want to make it a spectacle.
The ban would last until the Gorbachev era, with the Soviet Union women's national football team playing its first match in early 1990.
The government attempted to repress the sport, with the Sección Femenina ordering its members in 1971 to "abstain from promoting any activities related to women’s football," with doctors distributing disinformation about the impact of the game on fertility, and with the government refusing to allow the Federation of Independent European Female Football to host the successor to the 1971 Women's World Cup in 1972, leading to the cancellation of the tournament.
[27] Following the Spanish transition to democracy in the late-1970s, the ban came to an end, and the Spain women's national football team was officially formed in 1980.
[35][36] The ban was assessed in Barcelona newspaper La Jornada Deportiva in 1923, asking if the FA were trying to be anti-feminist or just wanted "British modesty" to prevail, or if they really found the sport to be too tiring and hard on women.
[37] According to Christchurch newspaper The Star in 1922, the head of the Canterbury Football Association stated that "the men in England had tried to stop the ladies from playing soccer for the simple reason that it affected their gate takings.
"[38] In 1952, the Durham County Football Association blocked the application of schoolteacher Jean Tizard to sit the examination for referees on grounds of her gender.
However, the ban was initially less comprehensive and less consistently applied than in England, with John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquess of Bute authorising Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C.
[51] Writer David Goldblatt has stated that the bans had the effect of reducing women's football "to a tiny and stigmatised subculture subsisting in the marginal spaces of municipal recreation grounds.
[53][54] Some have also attributed the dominance of the United States (where association football has struggled at various times throughout its history) at the FIFA Women's World Cup and the Olympics to the long lasting effects of the bans by traditional football powerhouses compared to well funded and early adoption of women's programs in the United States.
Kuper and Szymanski further added that women's football wasn't just "some potential untapped market, but a business sector that was regularly selling tens of thousands of match tickets.
"[58] Research by Stacey Pope of Durham University has found that many of the same attitudes that men used to justify bans of women's football in the 1920s are still widespread today.