PARIS.- It was 1922, two years before the last time the Olympics were held in Paris. On a warm August day, about 20,000 people came to Pershing Stadium to watch 77 athletes in track and field, including a team from the United States. There was a parade of nations. There were world records. There were 27 journalists and news coverage around the world.
And at the start, a 38-year-old woman named Alice Milliat welcomed the world to Paris. She was the founder of the International Women’s Sports Federation, known in her native France as the Fédération Sportive Féminine International.
Every competitor that day was a woman.
“I hereby declare the first female Olympic Games open,” she said.
Milliat was making a statement that echoes today. The male-dominated world of the mainline Olympics, busy preparing for the Paris Games of 1924, ignored the 1922 event, other than to complain about Milliat’s unauthorized use of “Olympics.” They dismissed the rising idea that women should compete at all.
The 1924 Paris Games had a smattering of female athletes — 135 women out of 3,089 competitors — but the Olympics hardly welcomed their participation beyond just a few events, such as swimming and tennis. There were no women’s competitions in most sports, including track and field, soccer, rowing, cycling and even gymnastics.
Pierre de Coubertin, the founder and leader of the modern Olympics, made his attitude known repeatedly over the years. Having women in the Olympics, he said in 1912, “is impractical, uninteresting, ungainly and, I do not hesitate to add, improper.”
By 1928, his thoughts had not evolved.
“As to the admission of women to the Games, I remain strongly against it,” he said that year. He died in 1937 and has been heralded as a visionary of sport.
But in the end — well, 2024 — Milliat won the fight over gender. This summer’s Olympics are expected to be the first with as many female athletes as male ones.
Milliat, 100 years after the last Paris Olympics, is finally getting recognition as a pioneer, the Billie Jean King of sorts for her age. Biographies are being published in France. A new documentary has been shown in theaters and on television. France’s National Sports Museum in Nice has a temporary exhibition highlighting Milliat. A plaza outside a new Olympic arena was named for her. (In a predictably modern twist, plans for the arena itself to be named for Milliat were upended when the naming rights were sold to Adidas.)
“That women can participate in sports is largely thanks to her; that there are women in the Olympics is thanks to her,” said Sophie Danger, the author of a new book, “Alice Milliat: The Olympic Woman,” available, for now, only in French. “Every time I put on my sneakers I think of this woman.”
But it is reasonable to suspect that, among the more than 5,000 women expected to compete at the upcoming Olympics, only a few have ever heard of Alice Milliat.
“Symbolically, she remains on the fringe of the Olympic movement,” Danger said. “Which means the battle continues.”
Parity, Danger noted, is not equality. The battle is not just at the Olympics, of course.
“Some people want to control the body of women,” said Anne-Cécile Genre, a filmmaker behind the documentary, “Alice Milliat: Les Incorrectes.” (She translates the title to “The Unsuitables” in English.)
“Alice Milliat fought for control of their own bodies, so women could be free, and have control for the way they moved and the way they dressed. That’s a universal thing. That’s something women on the planet are still fighting for.”
‘The Applause of Women as a Reward’
Milliat, born and raised in France, moved to London at 18 and married. She worked as a nanny and stenographer and took up rowing and other sports — activities she saw few women do back in France.
Her husband died unexpectedly, leaving Milliat a childless widow, and she moved to Paris during the world war. It was the dawn of a new feminist movement. Across Europe, slowly, women were getting the right to vote. Men left to fight. Women went to work — and assembled, increasingly, on playing fields and in gymnasiums.
In 1915, Milliat became president of a local women’s sports club. She co-founded a national federation in 1917.
“Women’s sport has its place in social life the same way as men’s sport,” she said at the time.
The Olympics were slow to react to the women’s movement. Coubertin often cited several reasons to keep women out: Having twice as many participants and events would be an organizational headache; it was inappropriate to see women competing in public; the Olympics were a showcase of the best athletes, and women were not among them.
“I believe that we have tried, and must continue to try, to put the following expression into practice: the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism, based on internationalism, by means of fairness, in an artistic setting, with the applause of women as a reward,” Coubertin said in 1912.
Milliat wanted the same events for women as there were for men, including soccer and rugby. She began her push with track and field, known as athletics, since it was a glamour event, evocative of ancient Olympics. Coubertin’s all-male Olympic committee rejected the suggestion for the 1920 Games in Belgium. Milliat pushed on.
In 1921, Sigfrid Edström, who was the first president of track and field’s global governing body and an influential member of the International Olympic Committee, held an international women’s meet in Monte Carlo. Milliat was not impressed. She felt it had been as a photo opportunity, not a serious competition. Putting women’s sports under the leadership of men, she believed, was a way for men to maintain control.
Milliat soon founded the International Women’s Sports Federation, which pulled a growing number of national federations under one umbrella, brought technical standards to sports events and consolidated record keeping. She was named president, and there were regular meetings and copious notes taken.
Milliat understood the power of publicity. Newspapers, especially in France, covered her and women’s sports regularly. She organized women’s soccer matches, including one in Manchester, England, in 1920 that attracted 25,000 spectators.
Then she set her sights on the Olympics. And she would use that word for her event, scheduled every four years between the cycles of Coubertin’s mostly male Olympic Games.
“To her, ‘Olympics’ was just a vocabulary word,” Danger said. “She was intelligent and funny. She said if they don’t grant our request to join the Olympic Games, we will continue to organize our own.”
At the International Women’s Sports Federation meeting in 1926, Milliat addressed the “women’s issue” and the push into the Olympics.
“Participation in the Olympic Games can only be understood if it is total, women’s sport having proven itself and should not serve as an experiment for the Olympic Committee,” the group’s report read. “Such limited participation cannot serve the propaganda of women’s sports.”
Milliat agreed to stop using “Olympics” if the Olympics let women compete in athletics. A deal was struck, and in 1928, the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam had women’s track and field for the first time. Milliat wanted 10 events, but women were granted five. Milliat was selected as a judge, the only female face in a sea of men.
It was not without controversy. In the 800-meter race, the longest distance women were allowed to run, the first three finishers broke the world record. Several women dropped to the ground after the finish line. Sports writers wrote that the scene was disturbing and the exertion was all too much for a woman to handle. The Olympics did not hold an 800-meter race for women again until 1960.
“It was not a scandal for the men to do the same thing,” Danger said of the common sight of a runner collapsing at race’s end. “But it was a scandal for women.”
The attention sparked a backlash. Milliat was lampooned in newspapers and editorial cartoons.
She persisted. There were all-female games in 1926 (in Gothenburg, Sweden), 1930 (Prague) and 1934 (London, with more than 300 participants). They were officially called the Women’s World Games, though some in the media (including The New York Times, at least once, in 1930) referred to them as the Women’s Olympic Games.
But the wave of feminism slowed in the 1930s, amid a global depression and the buildup to World War II, which canceled the Olympics in 1940 and 1944. International sports federations were more inclusive of women, but were run by men, exerting the kind of soft control that Milliat had feared. In 1934, the IOC considered eliminating women from the program entirely; women retained their meager place by a 10-9 vote. Growth in women’s sports tended toward what were seen as more feminine pursuits, like gymnastics and ice skating.
Any semblance of parity has been slow. In 1960, at the Rome Olympics, barely 1 in 10 athletes was a woman. At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, it was fewer than 1 in 4. In Beijing in 2008, it was just over 40%.
The IOC has turned equity into a mission in recent years, but not all events are equal at the Olympics. In Paris, while the 50-kilometer race walk (for decades, considered suitable only for men) has been replaced by a mixed relay, women still compete in the seven-event heptathlon, not the 10-event decathlon.
“I never realized what women had to fight for,” said Genre, the filmmaker. “I was born in the 1980s, and that wasn’t a fight for me. I didn’t know that women’s boxing wasn’t in the Olympics until 2012. And the marathon, in 1984? That was after I was born. That’s crazy for me. I thought there were women’s sports from the start.”
Milliat resigned from her position and the International Women’s Sports Federation faded away. She died in 1957, rather anonymously. Even her neighbors, a researcher later found, did not know about her role in sports.
But historians continue to excavate her contributions. The Alice Milliat Foundation, dedicated to women’s sports, began in France in 2016. Gyms and streets have been named after her in recent years. And this year, for the first time, the Olympics may have as many female athletes as male ones.
“I hear it everywhere, and people are congratulating themselves,” Genre said. “I’m sorry to be negative about it — it’s good news, and probably Alice Milliat would be proud — but if you look at the people surrounding the athletes, the coaches, the judges, the federations, they are still mostly all male.”
Women across sports, around the world, are still fighting for access, pay, even the way they can dress.
“We, especially women, have to know her and celebrate her,” Danger said of Milliat. “She is a role model. And there is still a fight.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
