Congratulations to the Lionesses, England’s women’s soccer team, for making history Monday night! 

Their win over Germany in the European Championship final – after a 56-year title drought for the UK – would have amazed the man who wrote this letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1895:

“[A woman] is physically incapable of stretching her legs sufficiently to take the stride masculine… the smaller a woman’s foot is the prouder she is of it, and very naturally. I dearly love to see her feet come peeping in and out of her skirts, as the poet says ‘like little mice’ (delicious simile!).

“I don’t think lady-footballers will ever be able to ‘shoot’ goals. In order to score a ‘point’ they will find it necessary, I fear, to charge the enemy’s goal en masse and simply hustle the ball through… Sir, I have seen two women fight and never wish to witness a like scene again, and I think that the aspect of two lovely girls, flushed and mud-bespattered, causing their rounded shoulders to collide ever and anon with brutal force, would be a most deplorable one. The whole thing is so foreign to the poetry of life – if poetry can be said to exist when an educated and refined lady urges her sisters to don men’s attire and play men’s games.

“Women may boat, women may ride – they can do both gracefully – but women may not, with an advantage to themselves, ride a bicycle or kick a football. These pastimes are beyond them… Let women ‘keep’ books, write books, paint pictures, ride horses and row boats, but for the love of heaven stay them from making sights of themselves on the football field, or objects of ridicule on the bicycle saddle.”

(Source: Girls With Balls, by Tim Tate)