The Matilda Effect
By (Author) Fiona Crawford
Melbourne University Press
Melbourne University Press
30th May 2023
31st October 2023
Australia
General
Non Fiction
Sports teams and clubs
Gender studies: women and girls
796.334660994
Paperback
304
Width 153mm, Height 234mm
147g
The Matilda Effect is the exciting, inspiring, sometimes infuriating and always colourful story of the Australian women's football (soccer) team, the Matildas, and their ultimately successful struggle, alongside other women from around the world, to compete in World Cup football. From the 1980s, when women had to pay to participate in the pilot Women's World Cup, to 2019, when the principle of equal pay for women players was finally accepted amid surging interest in their game, the voices of key figures emerge. A book at once about and not about sport, and with a throughline of human rights and gender equality history, The Matilda Effect takes the reader out of the stands and onto the pitch, into the team's hotels, buses, boardrooms and social media universe, where positive change has been wrestled into being.
Fiona Crawford is one of Australia's most respected women's football writers. She is author of The Matilda Effect and co-author of Never Say Die- The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women's Football. An adjunct lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology's Centre for Justice, Crawford has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, Vogue, The Guardian, The Conversation, The Big Issue, the Matildas and the W League, FourFourTwo, and the Homeless World Cup. She appears regularly on radio and television.