ABSTRACT
At the height of rugby’s war over amateurism in the 1890s, an investigating committee of the Rugby Football Union was offered evidence that a star player in Yorkshire had accepted money from a club in a flagrant violation of rugby’s amateur regulations. It was the smoking gun that would demonstrate the justice of the RFU’s belief that money had a corrupting influence on sport. But the witness was not allowed to testify. The reason was simple: she was a woman. As the chairman of the investigating committee, the Reverend Frank Marshall, stated, ‘we have no dealings with women here’.2
