PARIS — It was 1922, two years before the last Olympics were held in Paris. On a hot August day, about 20,000 people packed Pershing Stadium to watch 77 track and field athletes, including a team from the United States. There was a parade of nations. There were world records. There were 27 journalists and reports from around the world.
And in the beginning, it was a 38-year-old woman, Alice Milliat, who welcomed the world to Paris. She was the founder of the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale, known in her native France as the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale.
That day, all the competitors were women.
“I hereby declare open the first Olympic Games for women,” she said.
Milliat made a statement that resonates today. The male-dominated world of the major Olympics, busy preparing for the 1924 Paris Games, ignored the 1922 event except to complain about Milliat’s unauthorized use of the term “Olympics.” They rejected the nascent idea that women should compete.
The 1924 Paris Games included a few female athletes (135 women out of 3,089 competitors), but the Olympics rarely welcomed their participation beyond a few events, such as swimming and tennis. There were no women’s competitions in most sports, including track and field, football, rowing, cycling, and even gymnastics.
Pierre de Coubertin, the founder and leader of the modern Olympic Games, made his position known repeatedly over the years. The presence of women in the Olympic Games, he declared in 1912, “is unrealistic, uninteresting, ungainly and, I do not hesitate to add, inappropriate.”
By 1928, his thoughts had not changed.
“As for the admission of women to the Games, I remain firmly opposed to that idea,” he said that year. He died in 1937 and was hailed as a sports visionary.
But in the end, in 2024, Milliat won the gender battle. This summer’s Olympics are set to be the first to feature an equal number of women and men.
A hundred years after the last Olympics in Paris, Milliat is finally being recognized as a pioneer, a sort of Billie Jean King for her age. Biographies are being published in France. A new documentary has been shown in theaters and on television. The National Sports Museum in Nice is hosting a temporary exhibit featuring Milliat. A plaza outside a new Olympic arena has been named in her honor. (In a predictable twist, plans to name the arena itself in her honor were upended when the naming rights were sold to Adidas.)
“If women can play sports, it’s largely because of her; if women are at the Olympics, it’s because of her,” said Sophie Danger, 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 assume that, among the more than 5,000 women expected at the next Olympic Games, only a few have heard of Alice Milliat.
“Symbolically, she remains on the fringes of the Olympic movement,” Danger said. “Which means the battle continues.”
Parity, Danger stressed, is not the same as equality. The battle is not just being fought at the Olympics, of course.
“Some people want to control women’s bodies,” explains Anne-Cécile Genre, director of the documentary Alice Milliat: Les Incorrectes.
“Alice Milliat fought to have control over her own body, so that women could be free and have control over the way they move and dress. It’s a universal thing. It’s something that women around the world are still fighting for.”
“Women’s applause 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 that few women in France did.
Her husband dies suddenly, leaving Milliat a widow without children, and she moves to Paris during the World War. It is the dawn of a new feminist movement. All over Europe, women gradually gain the right to vote. Men go off to fight. Women go to work and increasingly gather on sports 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 just as much as men’s sport,” she said at the time.
The Olympics were slow to respond to the feminist movement. Pierre de Coubertin often cited several reasons for excluding women: having twice as many participants and events would be an organizational headache; it was inappropriate to see women competing in public; and the Olympics were a showcase for the best athletes, and women were not among them.
“I believe that we have tried and must try again to put into practice the following expression: the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athletics, based on internationalism, by means of equity, in an artistic framework, with the applause of women as a reward,” said Coubertin in 1912.
Milliat wanted the same events to be held for women as for men, including football and rugby. She started with athletics, a glamorous discipline that recalled the ancient Olympics. Coubertin’s all-male Olympic committee rejected this suggestion for the 1920 Games in Belgium. Milliat insisted.
In 1921, Sigfrid Edström, the first president of the world governing body of athletics and an influential member of the International Olympic Committee, organized an international women’s meet in Monte Carlo. Milliat was not impressed. She thought it was a photo opportunity, not a serious competition. She believed that putting women’s sport under the direction of men was a way for men to maintain control.
Milliat soon founded the International Women’s Sports Federation, which brought together a growing number of national federations under one umbrella, introduced technical standards for sporting events, and consolidated record-keeping. She was appointed president, and regular meetings were held and copious notes were taken.
Milliat understood the power of publicity. Newspapers, especially in France, regularly reported on her and women’s sports. She organized women’s football matches, including one in Manchester, England, in 1920 that attracted 25,000 spectators.
She then set her sights on the Olympic Games. And she would use this word to designate her event, scheduled every four years between the cycles of the Coubertin Olympic Games, essentially reserved for men.
“To her, the Olympics were just a word in her vocabulary,” Danger said. “She was smart and funny. She said if we didn’t get the Olympics, we’d keep having our own.”
Milliat agreed to stop using the word “Olympic Games” if the Olympics would allow women to compete in track and field. A deal was struck, and in 1928, the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam hosted a women’s track and field event for the first time. Milliat wanted ten events, but the women got five. Milliat was chosen as a judge, the only woman in a sea of men.
The race was not without controversy. In the 800-meter race, the longest distance allowed for women, the first three finishers broke the world record. Several women fell to the ground after the finish line. Sportswriters wrote that the scene was disturbing and that the effort was too great for one woman. The Olympics did not hold an 800-meter race for women again until 1960.
“It wasn’t a scandal that men were doing the same thing,” Danger said of the common sight of a runner collapsing at the end of a race. “But it was a scandal for women.”
This attention provoked a violent reaction. Milliat was derided in newspapers and editorial cartoons.
She persisted. Women-only Games were held in 1926 (in Gothenburg, Sweden), 1930 (in Prague), and 1934 (in London, with over 300 participants). They were officially called the Women’s World Games, although some media outlets (including the New York Times, at least once, in 1930) called them the Women’s Olympics.
But the feminist wave slowed in the 1930s, due to the global depression and the approach of World War II, which canceled the 1940 and 1944 Olympics. International sports federations were more open to women, but led by men, who exercised the kind of soft control that Milliat feared. In 1934, the IOC considered eliminating women from the program altogether; women retained their meager place by a vote of 10 to 9. The growth of women’s sports tended to skew toward activities considered more feminine, such as gymnastics and ice skating.
Parity has not yet been achieved. At the 1960 Rome Olympics, barely one in ten athletes was a woman. At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the figure was less than one in four. At Beijing 2008, the figure was just over 40%.
The IOC has made equity a mission in recent years, but not all events are equal at the Olympics. In Paris, while the 50-kilometer walk (for decades considered a men’s event) was replaced by a mixed relay, women still compete in the seven-event heptathlon, not the 10-event decathlon.
“I never realized what a fight women had to fight,” said Genre, the filmmaker. “I was born in the 1980s, and it wasn’t a fight for me. I didn’t know women’s boxing wasn’t in the Olympics until 2012. And the marathon in 1984? That was after I was born. It’s crazy to me. I thought from the beginning that there were women’s sports.”
Milliat resigned her position and the International Women’s Sports Federation folded. She died in 1957, largely anonymously. Even her neighbors, as a researcher later discovered, were unaware of her role in the sport.
But historians continue to highlight her contributions. The Alice Milliat Foundation, dedicated to women’s sports, was created in France in 2016. Gyms and streets have been named after her in recent years. And this year, for the first time, the Olympics could feature as many female athletes as male.
“I hear it everywhere, and people are celebrating,” Genre said. “I’m sorry to be negative about it – it’s good news, and Alice Milliat would probably be proud of it – but if you look at the people around the athletes, the coaches, the judges, the federations, they’re still overwhelmingly men.”
Around the world, women in sports are still fighting for access to the sport, for their pay and even for the way they can dress.
“We, especially women, need to know her and celebrate her,” Danger said of Milliat. “She is a role model. And there is still a fight to be fought.”
