Women’s Olympic Games took place in Paris on August 20, 1922, organized by the Frenchwoman Alice Milliat (1884–1957), against the will of the International Olympic Committee and in a context relatively hostile to the practice of sports for women, despite the freedoms obtained in this field since WWI. Bringing together 77 girls from Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Switzerland and the United States around thirteen athletics events, this event could seem anecdotal compared to other events. Its importance is measured by other criteria: its capacity to have made emerge a female international, to have encouraged the institutionalization of the sport for the women in the various countries, to have emancipated itself from the hygienic and aesthetic gymnastics in which girls were confined, but also the violence of the reactions which it generated in the male circles, in particular, of the press and the sport on a national and international scale. While waiting for the imminent vote of the Senate for the female suffrage, the French leaders and sportswomen of August 1922 proclaim loud and clear their right to run.
Florence Carpentier (Wed,) studied this question.