Educação pode mudar sua vida

In the 1960s, when an amateur football coach in the Brazilian city of Manaus put a girl in his team, an unexpected visitor showed up: an emissary from the Ministry of Education. He was there to remind the coach that it was forbidden by law for women to play football.

The government repealed that law in 1975, but a woman’s place in football remains restricted in Brazil. In the Peladão, the country’s largest amateur tournament, which has been held in Manaus since 1973, women have been allowed to take part – but only in a beauty pageant. The tournament encapsulates Brazilian attitudes to gender: for men, national identity is expressed through football; for women, through sensuality. 

Even when women achieve sporting success, they are expected to conform to stereotype. Hortência was Brazil’s best ever female basketball player; she also posed nude in Playboy. Brazil has produced other worldbeating sportswomen. Maria Esther Bueno won Wimbledon three times, in 1959, 1960 and 1964. Beach volleyball pair Jackie Silva and Sandra Pires became, in 1996, the first Brazilian women to win Olympic gold. Yet, because of the cultural barriers against women playing football, the sport that most defines the nation, women’s football has been conspicuously neglected.

Marta Vieira da Silva is Brazil’s most successful female footballer. In 2006, she was voted Fifa’s Women’s Player of the Year and, most recently, she played in the Uefa Cup final for Umea IK, from northern Sweden, against Arsenal Ladies. Umea lost, but Marta, a striker, was outstanding, reaffirming her place as the world’s best female footballer.