Alice Milliat, forgotten pioneer of international women’s sport

On August 20, 1922, at the Pershing stadium, near the Bois de Vincennes in Paris, athletes from five countries took to the track in front of thousands of people. That day, these women competed in the first edition of the Women’s Olympic Games. Alice Milliat, a woman from Nantes, was at the origin of this event.

Historian Florence Carpentier, lecturer at the University of Toulouse 3 and specialist in the history of the International Olympic Committee, discovered this long-forgotten figure during her studies at STAPS in Rouen at the end of the 1990s. “His name was mentioned,” she recalls, “but I realized how undervalued the character was […]. Its importance was always downplayed.”

According to her, the first sports historians had also decided, without relying on archives, that Alice Milliat was not a feminist. A judgment that the historian has undertaken to deconstruct, in particular thanks to the digitization of sources.

 

Alice Milliat was born on May 5, 1884 in Nantes, into a family of small traders. The eldest of siblings, she left at around twenty years old for London, to work as a tutor in a bourgeois family. It was there that she became familiar with the sport.

At the end of the 19th century, “The first women to play sport, as we understand it, were the wealthy classes, and in sports with social connotations.”[comme] tennis, horse riding, skiing,” recalls Florence Carpentier. Furthermore, this practice was done “according to social conventions, that is to say without showing their body, often accompanied by men, without competition, without physical excess.”

Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, in France, young girls in popular schools began to be taught “hygienic” gymnastics, intended to strengthen the muscles for childbirth and develop their grace. “Concretely, this gymnastics was very boring,” declares Florence Carpentier.

Once in London, Alice discovered the varieties of sports practiced by young girls such as football, as well as rowing, practiced by some women on the Thames.

In England, she married Joseph Milliat, from Nantes like her, who died shortly after their union. Widowed, childless, after losing her mother then her father, she finally returned to France where she worked as a shorthand typist, then as a translator. Her mastery of English proved to be a major asset for the international ambition she would have.

 

Back in Paris, Alice Milliat joined Fémina Sport, the capital’s first women’s club founded in 1911, which mainly offered aesthetic gymnastics.

She became president in 1915, and began adding sports to those already practiced in the club. “First, athletics […] because, among men, we thought that running, jumping, throwing, these were really the first actions that had to be done before being able to do anything else,” explains the historian. Then, gradually, basketball, football, rugby and hockey were added to the list. However, the modalities of these sports were different from those of men. Florence Carpentier takes rugby as an example, which was offered in “a watered-down version, without tackles”.