Women's Olympics

Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that every institution is the lengthened shadow of a great man. If one substitutes “woman” for “man,” Emerson's assertion holds true for Alice Million Milliat (1884–1957) and the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale [Page 1681](FSFI), the organization that staged four successive Olympiques Féminins in the years 1922 through 1934.

The platform from which Milliat launched her remarkable career as a sports administrator was Fémina Sport, a Parisian club founded in 1911 to encourage sports among upper-class women. (Her own favorite sport was rowing.) In 1917, Fémina Sport joined a number of other clubs to form the Fédération des Sociétés Féminines Sportives de France (FSFSF). Although all of the clubs in the FSFSF were led by men, Milliat was named the federation's treasurer. Early married, early widowed, and childless, Milliat had the time, the energy, and the material resources to dedicate herself wholeheartedly to women's sports. In 1918, she became the FSFSF secretary-general. A year later, she was elected president by a unanimous vote. A year after that, all the officers of the FSFSF were female.

After the FSFSF staged France's first track-andfield championships for women in 1917, Milliat worked hard to organize additional national championships in soccer, basketball, field hockey, and swimming. It is likely, although not certain, that it was also Milliat who arranged, in 1918, for two Fémina Sport teams to play a game of soccer as a curtain-raiser to a match between the French and Belgian national teams. In 1920, a women's team formed from nine French sports clubs crossed the Channel to Lancashire to play a series of four matches against Dick, Kerr's Ladies, a soccer team formed by employees of the engineering firm Dick, Kerr & Co. The expedition was arranged by Alice Milliat.

It was, however, women's track-and-field sports, not soccer, that became the focus of Milliat's efforts. Although a number of historians have asserted that Milliat was the organizer of the Olympiade Féminine that was staged in Monte Carlo in the summer of 1921, that honor belonged to Camille Blanc, mayor of Beaulieu and president of the socially exclusive International Sporting Club of Monaco. On 31 October 1921, only five months after the games at Monte Carlo proved the viability of international competitions for women, Milliat was among the seven delegates who met in Paris, at 14 Boulevard des Italiens, to create the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI). By all rights, Milliat should have been named president of the organization, but Émile Antoine insisted that women lacked the aura of authority necessary to assume leadership of an international organization. A year later, it was obvious that Milliat had the necessary aura as well as a full measure of administrative talent. She became and remained president of the FSFI.

The success of the first Jeux Internationaux Féminins testified to Milliat's ability to lead. These games, which some contemporary journalists referred to as the Jeux Olympiques Féminins, were held in Paris on 10 August 1922. Over 20,000 spectators crowded Le Stade-Pershing to watch athletes from five nations compete in the eleven-event program, which included a 1,000-meter race, a distance then considered to be an enormous challenge for a young woman.

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