Emmarae Dale (21) is the first woman ever to join the Canadian Junior Football League and is set to play for the Saskatoon Hilltops. The full story of Football Pioneer Emmarae Dale Meets her Moment in History can be found here. This story is an example of how gender barriers in football can be broken. Typically, women are not even offered the option to play full contact football in their own leagues and now we have a woman who is not only playing full contact football but is playing it in a men’s league as well.  

Women participating in primarily male dominated sports has been a topic of discussion for years and now it is not just women playing male dominated sports in their own leagues but transitioning into the men leagues as well. This brings up a lot of questions as to how female athletes in these sports will be viewed in respect to their femininity and if they will be respected as athletes and how the male athletes will feel about female athletes “encroaching on their territory.” In an article titled Women, Sport and Physicality, research has been conducted on women in traditionally male defined sports and discussed topics such as aggression, sexuality, femininity and the feminists label in sports (speaking to what female athletes are thought to be allowed and not allowed to do). This study also talks about how women in traditionally male dominant sports are working on reconstructing what is considered and accepted as female appropriate behaviours.  

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Featured Image: Emmarae Dale with her New Team the Saskatoon Hilltops (Source: Michelle Berg/Saskatoon Star Phoenix)