ABSTRACT
A run by young shop-girls, organised in Paris in 1903, amused the newspapers. 2,500 ‘young messenger-girls or older female runners’ ran from the Tuileries Gardens to Nanterre. They could hardly make their way through the middle of the many spectators who were ‘curiously’ interested by this event. Jeanne Cheminel, a finery maker, won the competition, accomplishing the 12 kilometres in 1 hour and 10 minutes. This poorly-prepared run had a rather disastrous effect on the development of female sport. The organisers of the event did not understand that the athletes’ lack of preparation and the spectators’ taste for sensationalism and promiscuity would be harmful to women (Eyquem 1944: 25). At the beginning of the century it was forbidden for women to participate in sport. It was not only considered dangerous, because women were not seen to have the physical potential to face competition in sport, but it also constituted an element of immorality. Exhibitionism was deemed not appropriate for women, for whom it was essential to remain modest: ‘We oppose the introduction of physical education of girls because it is based on indecent and deliquescent attitudes…Let us take care not to make our daughters comedians’ (Dehoux 1947: 72).
