ABSTRACT
When the Olympic Games began again after World War I, the status of women in British public life had altered immeasurably, due to their crucial part in the war effort. Antwerp in Belgium hosted the 1920 Games in somewhat restrained circumstances, but the Paris Olympics of 1924 was a more celebratory festival of culture, as well as inaugurating new sporting technologies. As part of the expanding middle classes of inter-war Britain, swimmer Gladys Carson, was able to spend a month in Paris as a young woman and benefitted from life experiences to which only Olympians could have access. Part of a ‘swimming family’ Gladys continued to swim and teach children lifelong. As a home economics teacher, her tastes, and awareness of ‘continental’ lifestyles was passed down to family and her students. This chapter analyses what a Paris-based Olympic Games had to offer participants, and points out that the hopes of the British women’s team in the 1920s rested mainly upon the swimming and diving events, given that track and field athletics for women was not yet an Olympic mainstay, and tennis would disappear from the programme for over 50 years.
