Women's rugby union is a full contact team sport based on running with the ball in hand.

These days, women's rugby is gaining a higher profile thanks to international tournaments' exposure and financial investment.

A series of sporting cigarette cards published 1895 in Liverpool includes an image of a woman playing what looks like rugby in kit similar to that described in reports of the 1881 team.

[6] There are also early reports of women's rugby union being played in France (1903) and England (1913)[7] but in both cases the game was largely behind closed doors.

[10] The Cardiff team (who all worked for Hancocks a local brewery) all wore protective headgear,[11] which predates their male counterparts by some decades.

Throughout the 1920s a popular form of women's football game very similar to rugby called "barette" was played across France.

In 1930 a women's league playing the full game was formed in Australia, in the New South Wales areas of Tamworth and Armidale, which ran until halted by World War Two.

By 1975 university students at Wageningen in the Netherlands were playing, and in the same year clubs appeared in Spain (Arquitectura in Madrid and Osas in Barcelona).

In the UK 1983 saw the Women's Rugby Football Union (WRFU) formed to govern the game across the British Isles.

Rugbyfest 1990 pointed the way to the next big leap forward—the first women's Rugby World cup, which took place in Wales the following year.

However, this did not stop the New Zealanders from taking part, and there were also teams from Wales, the United States, England, France, Canada, Sweden, USSR, Japan, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.

In 1994 a second World Cup was awarded to the Netherlands, but constant prevarication by the IRFB about whether they would (or would not) give the tournament official status caused huge problems for the hosts.

In fact, the IRFB went so far as to threaten sanctions against any unions, players and officials who did take part: with this threat, New Zealand, Sweden and Germany withdrew.

Faced with this, and the risk of major financial losses, the Dutch withdrew both as hosts and participants with barely weeks to go.

The second World Cup was in the end, a purely northern hemisphere affair with 11 competing teams (consisting of the four home nations, France, the United States, Japan, Sweden, Russia, Canada and Kazakhstan) joined by an invited Scottish Students XV.

[20] In 2000 the Irish WRFU affiliated fully with the IRFU, but there were still set-backs: in 2002 the Australian RFU dropped support for the women's team's entry to the World Cup.

The decision was seen as a factor in IOC rejection of rugby as an Olympic sport for 2004, and amid criticism by the Australian players, this was reversed two years later.

The United States won the Hong Kong Sevens in 2008 by defeating Canada in the final (New Zealand did not send a team).