Notable Early Women Olympians

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy ve Wilson. It's Olympics time once again. Yes,

(00:21):
we've discussed the Olympics many times on the podcast before,
but today we are going to focus on women who
participated in the early iterations of the modern Olympic Games,
or at least tried to. One of the people that
we're talking about today is technically not an Olympian. She
was not allowed to compete. She was also not a

(00:43):
woman but a teenage child, and we're juxtaposing their stories
against the famously problematic takes of Pierre de Coubertin when
it came to women in sports. So we're going to
talk about three sportswomen of the early nineteen hundreds and

(01:05):
the work that they did to be part of the
Olympic Games. I'm laughing because we've talked about Pierre to
Kuberta a number of times and I just sort of
forgot that layer, like I jettisoned it from my mind,
and now I've been reminded. He It's interesting because there

(01:25):
have as we are about to discuss ben some efforts
to kind of rehab his misogyny a little men, No,
no thanks. But then when I look back at his
actual writings, there's no way around it, which we will
talk about, yeah as we go on. Yeah. So the
nineteen hundred Olympic Games, those were the first ones in

(01:47):
which women were allowed to participate. And you might imagine,
based on what we just said, that's almost miraculous, given
that the recognized father of the modern Olympic movement, Year
de Kubertant, was just not a fan of women in sports.
He's known for saying inspiring things like quote, sport is

(02:08):
the birthright of all equally and to the same degree,
and nothing can replace it, but also saying quote as
to the admission of women to the Games, I remained
strongly against it. It was against my will that they
were admitted to a growing number of competitions. There's actually

(02:29):
a really interesting framing of all of this on the
International Olympic Committee website, where this problem and this problematic
ideology is framed as Kupeptain protecting women. The IOC shares
the Kupeptain quote from his writing in nineteen twenty eight,
which states if some women want to play football or

(02:50):
box let them provided that the event takes place without spectators,
because the spectators who flock to such competitions are not
there to watch a sport. So they're making the case
that he didn't want any lecherous lookielues being unchivalrous around
ladies in sport, which also kind of brings up the

(03:11):
issue of like, is that the only reason you can
think of that someone might want to watch women do
athletic things? Uh. The IOC does note that he left
the decision to the Olympic Committee and he didn't block
women from the games even though he was openly against it. Yeah.
The IOC is clear though that his opposition to women's

(03:32):
sports was ongoing even as he was touting the importance
of equality and education. So he was kind of a
mixed bag. As we will see, he had some very
choice words when women tried to take matters into their
own hands with this. So women were allowed to participate
in the nineteen hundred Olympic Games in Paris, but only

(03:53):
in five of the twenty categories, and those were croquet, equestrianism, golf, sailing,
and tennis. Comedically, the poster that became the most popular
for the Games and was adopted as the primary advertisement
for the nineteen hundred Olympic Games was one that depicted
a woman in fencing gear carrying a foil, a pay

(04:14):
and saber, despite the fact that women were still barred
from fencing in the Games. That poster was created by
Jean de Peliologu, who was a very popular poster artist
in Europe and the US at the time. It is
unclear why he depicted a woman fencer in it. I
never found any documentation of why he went that route.

(04:36):
That inclusion of sailing as a sport women could participate
in for the nineteen hundred Games did open the door
for our first notable woman from Olympic history. Ellenne de
Portales was born Helene Barbee in New York City on
April twenty eighth, eighteen sixty eight. But she was from
the beginning a child who really lived in two worlds.

(04:58):
The first, New York York was where her mother's family
was located, Mary Laurillard. Ellen's mother was an heiress to
the Laurillard Tobacco company fortune and then her father, Aunri
Isaac Barbee, was Swiss. He had made a lot of
money through US investments, including in railroads. This family had
homes in New York and in Switzerland, and they would

(05:22):
spend the autumn and winter in the US and then
go to Europe for the summer. When Elen, who was
the second of their seven children, was young, she stayed
on that schedule, but then while she was still a child,
Switzerland became her primary residence, presumably also the primary residence
of her siblings, because her parents became concerned that New

(05:44):
York was not good for the children with all the
crowds and pollution. So life in Geneva, Switzerland, for the
family was one of wealth and privilege. Among the many
luxuries they enjoyed were boats, which loved and he passed
that love on to his children. Boting was a huge

(06:05):
part of their family life on Lake Geneva. Are had
his own steam powered yacht there which he brought from
North America, and the family was close with other Geneva
families of wealth who shared their love of yachting. So
it makes sense that she married a man from one
of those families. That was Count Ermann Alexandre de Portalise,

(06:25):
who was her senior by twenty one years. They got
married in eighteen ninety one, when Ellen was twenty three.
Her husband's first wife had died three years before he
and Ellen got married, and then when they got married,
Ellen became the stepmother to four Portales children. Ellen's time
on the water continued as a wife, as she and

(06:48):
erman not only yachted and sailed together for enjoyment, they
also competed in regattas regularly, and they won quite a
few of them. So when the nineteen hundred Games opened
up its sailing entries, they had already been in a
constant state of training and winning. They were considered some
of the very best boaters in Europe at this point.

(07:08):
Elene and Ermann registered to compete with their sailboat Loverina,
representing Switzerland, with a crew consisting of themselves and Armand's
nephew Bernard Alexandre George Edmond de Portelais. During the qualifying
round on May twentieth, nineteen hundred, the Lorena, which was
in the twenty foot class both literally and figuratively, sailed

(07:29):
through the eleven kilometer course known as the concourd'naire. That
event took place at Moulon On Evelin just northwest of Paris,
Eleine and armand had manage through some conditions that did
not provide much wind at all for their sales, but
that was something they were already really good at, so

(07:49):
it did not pose a challenge for the two of them.
That was not the case for everybody, though, According to
Olympic historians, of the more than forty nine boats that
entered the qualifier, only seven of them finished within the
required time limit, and the finishing group got cut down
to only five because two of them were disqualified for cheating.

(08:12):
They had used some kind of propulsion that was more
than their sales to make up for this lack of
wind that day. Those numbers can be very confusing. We
will talk more about that. It's about to get real
weird with the numbers. So the first race for the
Portellas Switzerland team took place on the Seen on May

(08:34):
twenty second, and the Loreine sailed under the assigned number
twenty two in the one to two ton category. This
was a nineteen kilometer course that is a little more
than ten nautical miles you want standard miles, that's almost
twelve and it was a difficult course as nine or
perhaps sixty five competitors had qualified and there was a

(08:56):
lot of maneuvering to get from the start to the
finish to amud eate all of those yachts. Listen, that's
a big gap in number, so and it doesn't match
up with the numbers Tracy just said, And it is
one of the many problems with historical accounts in the
nineteen hundred Games. Sixty five participants is almost certainly wrong.

(09:16):
There were not anywhere near that many qualifiers or even
people who tried to qualify. There are only nine boats
listed in the official record, which contradicts that previous number
of seven qualifiers. But the journal Yachting World that was
on scene reported sixty five. That magazine also described the

(09:38):
confusion of the race due to the many participants. Quote,
the river was absolutely blocked with vessels of all shapes,
rigs and sizes, and it became exceedingly difficult to keep
clear of each other. The big vessels, which had started later,
brought up a breeze with them and ran right up
to the smaller craft, so that at the turning mark

(09:59):
every boat was up together. Because of the general confusion
about this event, it's possible that there were some non
qualified boats in the water, maybe people just running this
course for themselves, or maybe a journalist pumped up the
numbers for some reason, or maybe that journalist didn't do
it on purpose, they just didn't understand what was happening,

(10:20):
and they were counting boats that were not actually trying
to compete. It's all really unclear why the periodical yachting
world was just so far off the numbers compared to
everyone else. I'm willing to cut them some slack, though, because,
as we have talked about on the show before, there
was confusion about the Olympics being wrapped up with the

(10:43):
nineteen hundred Exposition, and some people that competed in the
Olympics didn't even know it was the Olympics. They just
thought they were doing like some sporting event for the Expo.
So it's possible that there were more boats in the
water because they thought they were doing an Expo regatta.
And we don't know. We can't unravel this particular not
but what we do know is that Alen served as

(11:05):
the Loreene's skipper and she and her team won that race.
They were awarded the gold medal, and there is also
some confusion about whether or not they got an additional prize.
We're going to talk about that in a moment that
is also tied to those less than thorough or less
than clear accounts that we have of the event. There
was a second race on May twenty seventh on the

(11:28):
same course with the same boats, and in that one,
the Loreene took the silver while the German boat Aschenbrode
won the gold. Why were there two races that were
essentially identical, made up of the same competitors that didn't
end up with an aggregate score to determine an overall champion.
We don't know. Unclear for a long time, and you'll

(11:52):
still see it in a lot of places. Tennis player
Charlotte Reinigald Cooper was credited as being the first woman
to win Olympic gold medal. She did win in women's
singles tennis, but Cooper didn't receive her medal until later
on in the Games, on July eleventh. That was fifty
days later compared to when the Loreenes team went to

(12:14):
the gold. This oversight has also been because Cooper was
a solo competitor, whereas Elene de Portoreis was part of
a team. We actually made this distinction in our episode
about Charlotte Cooper came out a couple of years ago,
and because Elenne did not ever compete again, she just
wasn't somebody whose name stayed in the news. In addition

(12:36):
to all those factors, though, there's also the fact that
the entire yachting category at the nineteen hundred Games has
been a matter of debate among Olympic historians. Yeah, as
we've said, these specific games have come up on the
show before, in an episode dedicated to them by prior
host Sarah and Deblina, and by us when we did

(12:57):
a live show about Pierre de kubertin the Dallas Museum
of Art a number of years back. These games were
a mess. As I said a moment ago, these ran
in conjunction with the Paris Exposition. Many athletes were confused
about whether or not they were participating in the Olympics,
and as we've talked about, even the reporting of the
events was really confusing. And in addition to medals, the

(13:20):
winners in some of the categories in the yachting events
were given cash prizes, and that's led to arguments about
whether those can be considered Olympic events at all. But
if I understand correctly, after kind of going down a
rabbit hole and trying to suss out like tables of
events and who got what again, which may or may
all be accurate. Those cash prizes were not given for

(13:45):
the one to two ton class that Ellen and her
family participated in, So in spite of all the messy
and confused nature of the nineteen hundred Paris Games, for
a brief time, Ellen de Portalis enjoyed kind of a
spark of not at least among other yachting enthusiasts in
Europe's aristocracy. Her husband, Herman, died four years later, and

(14:09):
then she lived another forty one years without him. She
died in Geneva in nineteen forty five. Coming up, we
will talk about a very young athlete who wanted to
compete alongside men in the Olympic Games, and we'll hear
more about Kubertin's thoughts on the matter. But first we
will take a quick sponsor break. In nineteen twelve, Pierre

(14:39):
de Kubertin wrote an article titled Les femes jus Olympique
or Women in the Olympic Games, and in this article
he made it very clear where he stood on women
participating in the Olympics. We're actually going to read a
good bit from this, because while he himself claims that
chivalry is part of his logic and that his position

(14:59):
is for the best benefit of the women in the Games,
the things he wrote are undeniably sexist. One brief quote
from it, that women's athletics would be quote impractical, uninteresting,
unesthetic and improper circulates all the time, but it's out
of context. I think it's even worse in context. And
the rest is, in my opinion, far more damning, and

(15:21):
it really cannot be wrapped in any kind of revisionist bow.
So he opened by referencing a recent hopeful woman competitor quote.
Not long ago, an application signed by a neo Amazon
who intended to compete and the modern pentathlon was received.
The Swedish committee, which was free to take its own position,

(15:42):
refused the agreement in the absence of any established legislation,
so it is clear that the debate remains open. The
woman he was referring to was Helen Priest. She was
a teenager from England. She did not wait for permission
for women to so compete. She just registered to be
in the Games, knowing that she would be competing alongside

(16:05):
male athletes, and despite her young age, she was an
accomplished equestrian competitor already. Dorothy Helen Priest, who went by Helen,
was born in London on November eleventh, eighteen ninety five,
and her parents were Ambrose Ernest Duncan and Edith Clay Priest,
and they ran a riding school. Helen was their first child,

(16:27):
and when she was six or seven, the Priests moved
from London to the suburb of Kingsbury, where the family
expanded their business into a much larger operation spread across
many acres. By the time the family made that move, Helen,
who had been riding since she was three, was already
competing in writing competitions and she was winning. But Helen

(16:48):
wasn't only interested in sports that involved horses. During her
time at Corn Collegiate School as a teen, she also
played lacrosse and other sports, but horses remained her primary
herea of competition, and she gained to following doing it.
She loved jumping in particular, and she was incredibly dynamic
as a competitor. Apparently anybody who was into horses in

(17:11):
England knew who she was, and even people who really
weren't into horses almost certainly saw her picture in the papers.
She appeared often in ride ups about horse shows and
horse riding. In the spring of nineteen ten, it seems
as though every paper in London and its suburbs, and
even some papers in the US ran a story about

(17:32):
Queen Alexandra giving Helen five pounds and telling her how
admirably she had performed after the young rider won a
jumping competition at a polo pony show. In some of
her competitions, she wrote against boys and often won. Sometimes
in those cases she was the only competitor riding side saddle.

(17:53):
In the autumn of the following year, she traveled to
New York City to compete in a co ed horse show,
and she won numerous events, writing against both boys and
men as well as adult women, and that led her
to be lauded as one of the best writers in
the world, and definitely the best female writer. Remember, she
was still a teenager of about sixteen at this point.

(18:15):
In July of nineteen twelve, articles appeared throughout Europe and
North America saying she was set to participate in the Games.
One that was written in England and then appeared in
the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, New York read quote,
Miss Priest, who will be the only female representative at
the Games, has won fame here as an expert horsewoman,

(18:37):
an athlete generally, and her abilities are not unknown in
the United States. The write up goes on to mention
her riding awards, her skills in swimming and fencing, and
her strength at cross country running. The article included a
quote from Helen about her hope to win the Pentathlon
and that she knew it was very ambitious, but had

(18:57):
been training with her father and friends and they believed
in her. She was ready to compete in the five
Pentathlon categories of fencing, pistol, shooting, swimming, cross country running,
and of course horseback riding that of course included jumps,
which she almost certainly could dominate. Because of her young age,

(19:18):
she had to get permission to take a leave of
absence from school, and it seems that Helen didn't realize
that her involvement in the Olympic Games in this way
could be controversial. In later writing about it, it seemed
that she didn't have a full sense of what the
event even was. She knew there were multiple competitions, across
different sports, but she did not appear to have any

(19:41):
knowledge that it was supposed to be men only. The
official description that the Olympic Committee had prepared did not
specify as such that was going to be the first
year that the pentathlon even happened, and because there wasn't
a pentathlon national committee in Great Britain at the time,
athletes were allowed to submit applications cold without going through

(20:01):
the same level of red tape and qualifiers as other
events would have required. Her father apparently did know that
this was supposed to be men only. It seems that
he actually contacted the British Olympic Association and asked about it.
But even after he got told that it was for men,
the priests pressed on and they actually hired a press

(20:22):
agent to talk about Helen's Olympic plans. When the British
Olympic Association received Helen's completed paperwork, they've reached out to
the Swedish Olympic Committee, who were hosting the nineteen twelve Games,
asking for their guidance about this lady applicant. They consulted
kober Tabit. He said it was the committee's decision. All

(20:43):
of Helen's training and planning were for naught because the
Olympic Committee barred her from competing after a vote. There's
some uncertainty about how much she understood the situation, because
later in her life she said that her age had
been the problem. It is also oh a little bit
unclear if Helen had intended to enter the nineteen sixteen

(21:04):
Games in Berlin. Her father had made some inquiries about
it to the British Olympic Committee, but the start of
World War One eclipsed any such thoughts. Helen and her father, Ambrose,
moved to the United States with a number of their
horses when the war began, and on March twentieth, nineteen fifteen,
Helen married George Chipchase, a horseman and stable manager who

(21:27):
had supported her career and had arranged pairing her with
various horses owned by himself and others for competitions. So
they had known each other for quite a while when
she was still a teenager, which is weird. This marriage
led to some drama. George's first wife sued Helen just
a few months after the wedding, claiming that she and

(21:47):
George had never gotten divorced, and so the marriage wasn't legal,
and that Helen was not entitled to use the Chipchase name.
There's a funny thing here where the write up suggests
that the wife thinks that Helen is going to use
this name to bolster her image, and I'm like, she
was already famous with her maiden name. I'm not sure
what was going on there. Despite all of that drama,

(22:11):
Helen stayed with George until they divorced in nineteen twenty eight.
She married riding instructor John Leslie Smith in nineteen thirty four.
They did not stay married more than a few years,
and throughout all of this Helen remained very busy in
the horse world. She was running a riding school. At
that point. She had moved to Aiken, South Carolina, and
she married for a third time in nineteen forty two

(22:33):
to a man named Nelson Lewis. That seems to have
been a very good match. They stayed together for forty three
years until Nelson's death in nineteen eighty six. Helen died
at the age of ninety four on July second, nineteen
ninety Helen's attempt to participate in the nineteen twelve Pentathlon
stirred up a lot of public opinion, and of course

(22:55):
Kubert had big feelings. He continued in the nineteen twelve essay,
quoted from earlier quote, I feel that the Olympic Games
must be reserved for men first, an application to the
well known proverb adoor must be either open or closed.
Can we allow women to access all Olympic events? No?

(23:17):
Then why should some sports be opened to them while
the rest are not? Above all, what basis can one
use to place the barrier between the events that are
permitted and those that are not. There are not just
women tennis players and swimmers. There are women fencers, women riders,
and in America, women rowers. In the future where there

(23:38):
be perhaps women runners or even women football players, would
such sports played by women constitute a site to be
recommenced before the crowds that gather for an Olympiad. I
do not think that any such claim can be made.
Kumet Dan goes on to talk about what he feels
is the more practical problem of the idea of women

(24:01):
in Olympic sports, and it honestly starts to sound really comedic,
like he's just making excuses. He thinks the question of
whether women should compete separately or alongside men in the
same competitions is simply too hard to figure out. And
then he notes that women are just not good athletes, stating, quote,
let us not forget that the Olympic Games are not

(24:23):
parades of physical exercises, but aim to raise or at
least maintain records sidius altius, fortius, faster, higher, stronger. He
stated that, quote, whatever the athletic ambitions of women may be,
they will never be as good as sports as men, apparently,
and quote to bring the principle of the theoretical equality

(24:44):
of the sexes into play here would be to indulge
in a pointless demonstration, bereft of meaning or impact. His
next argument, which somehow is even more condescending than all
of his earlier ones, is that it would just be
two hard to have these events just for women, and
ladies should just be enthusiastic observers. Quote. There remains the

(25:08):
other possibility that of adding women's competition alongside men's competitions,
and the sports declared open to women, a little female
Olympiad alongside the great Male Olympiad. What is the appeal
of that organizers are already overworked deadlines are already too short,
the problems posed by housing and ranking are already formidable,

(25:32):
Costs are already excessive, and all that would have to
be doubled. Who would want to take all that on?
In our view, this feminine semi Olympiad is impractical, uninteresting, ungainly,
and I do not hesitate to add improper. It is
not in keeping with my concept of the Olympic Games,

(25:54):
in which I believe that we have tried and must
continue to try to put the following express ran into practice,
the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism based on
internationalism by means of fairness in an artistic setting, with
the applause of women as a reward. This combination of

(26:18):
the ancient ideal and the traditions of chivalry is the
only healthful and satisfactory one. It will impose itself on
public opinion through its own strength. As Kubertina was spinning
his wheels about women sullying the Olympic Games, Alise Milia
was seeking reforms. And we're going to talk about her

(26:41):
right after we hear from the sponsors that keep the
show going. Alis Josephine Marimillon was born on May fifth,
eighteen eighty four, in Lante, France, went to her working class.
They ran a shop for a while and then they

(27:03):
closed it and got jobs elsewhere. We don't have a
ton of information about her life as a child, but
what we know is that when she was twenty, she
moved to London looking for work. Alis did find work
as a tutor, and she also found a husband. In
nineteen oh four, she married a man who was also
from Nant, Joseph Miat. Sadly, the two of them were

(27:25):
only married for four years because he died suddenly in
nineteen oh eight. Alis stayed in London for a couple
more years, but ultimately decided to go back to France.
By that time, she had been on trips to the
US and around Europe and had become multi lingual, so
she started working as a translator. During the time between

(27:45):
losing her husband and returning to France, Alise had also
picked up a passionate love of sports. She played field
hockey and other track and field sports, and she loved swimming,
but her true love was rowing. She looked for and
found other women who loved to do all these things.
That was with a group called Femina Spor, which was

(28:07):
founded in nineteen eleven by Pierre Pezi to promote dance
and athletics. By the time Alise was back in France,
this group had started sponsoring soccer and rugby games for
women players, as well as cycling events. This was all
considered sort of outlandish at best and scandalous at worst,
but the participants loved it, and they did have supporters,

(28:30):
and there was at its core a growing feminist movement
that wanted equality. Biatt was a natural leader in this
space and became an organizer of groups designed to promote
women's sports. Just a few years later, in nineteen seventeen,
she was instrumental in launching the Federation of Women's Sports Societies.

(28:51):
This and Feminist sport were not surprisingly founded by women,
but women were part of the leadership from the beginning.
Alise was the first treasurer and then became secretary a
year later, and in nineteen nineteen she became its president
a year later. The entirety of the club's leadership was
made up of women. She would later write in a

(29:13):
magazine article that she thought it was abnormal for men
to be at the helm of women's sports organizations. The
group's goal was to get their efforts beyond France and
to get women's sports recognized at the international level. While
Pierre de Coubertin was complaining that women should be relegated
to cheering from the stands and stop trying to get involved,

(29:35):
Elise and her colleagues were launching the first multi country
women's soccer matches between France and England, and then an
event in Monte Carlo in nineteen twenty one in which
women from France, England, Italy, Norway and Sweden participated. And
then Alise started planning something bigger, a women's Olympics. In

(29:56):
the autumn of nineteen twenty one, she founded the Federation
s de Feminine Internacionelle that is also abbreviated generally as FSFI.
There had been back and forth over the years as
advocates made their cases to Olympic organizers to have women
included in more sports, and they had been met with
no cooperation, so they decided to just plan their own

(30:18):
similar events, and the first of these games, called the
Jous Olympiques Feminine, was held in Paris in nineteen twenty two.
This was only a single day with eleven track and
field events, and a crowd of twenty thousand people watched.
The games opened with at least announcing over a loud
speaker quote, I declare open the first Women's Olympic Games

(30:41):
in the world. Unsurprisingly, this event was not met with
enthusiasm from the International Olympic Committee. There was a feeling
that the whole thing was feminist propaganda and that the
governing body of the Olympics SYS, the International Amateur Athletic
Federation that's i AAF, should just take it over. This

(31:03):
led to so much arguing and then negotiating back and forth,
and it was not only these two entities that were
vying for control of the situation. A couple of things
came out of the negotiations after two years of contentious meetings.
Milia's FSFI could continue to have its own games, but
it could not use the word Olympic or any variation

(31:24):
of it in the name. The FSFI agreed to the
general rules of international competition that the IAAF had developed,
but they were still enabled to modify those rules at
the event level as negotiations continued. In nineteen twenty six,
Milias organization held the second International Ladies' Games in Sweden,

(31:46):
it's also been called the Women's World Games, and the
IOC made an offer to try to appease Milia and
her team and get their competing events to stop. They
said they would add women's track and field events to
the nineteen twenty eight Games. Initially this seemed like a win,
but then the IAAF retracted the promise of a full

(32:09):
schedule of events and agreed to only five events on
an experimental basis. At least was furious and wanted to
shut the negotiations down completely, but the larger group at
FSFI saw this as still being a win and they
voted to accept the IOC's plan. One country, which was England,

(32:30):
was as irate as MIAT was about it, so much
so that they boycotted the games entirely. Yeah, that was
actually a big deal because they were favored to win
that year, so they were basically walking away from their opportunity. Meanwhile,
the Women's World Games continued with the nineteen thirty Games
being held in Prague, and that was also a success.

(32:52):
Fifteen thousand spectators came out to watch women from seventeen
countries compete. In nineteen thirty four, another Women's World Games
was held in London, and throughout all of this time
that these games were going on, the FSFI was pressuring
the IAAF to fully integrate the Olympics with women, but

(33:12):
things seemed to be going backwards. There were fewer women
allowed in the various games and fewer events that they
could participate in, and so the bickering between these two
entities continued. In nineteen thirty five, a very frustrated Milia
asked the IOC to just exclude women completely so that
they could just go do their own thing and not

(33:33):
have to negotiate with an organization that clearly did not
want any kind of cooperation. This letter that she wrote
asking them to say, fine, just write us out completely
was incendiary, which she knew it would be, and it
set off another round of tense negotiating. But this resulted
in the Olympic Committee and the IAAF agreeing to a
complete program of women's sports in the Games and the

(33:57):
recognition of world records that had been set at the
Women's Games, which was another sticking point. While another women's
Games had been planned for nineteen thirty eight in Vienna.
The IAAF insisted that if everybody agreed to these terms,
that those games could not happen, and this was the
agreement that was finally struck. Through grint, perseverance, and a

(34:18):
willingness to toe up to the largest athletic organizations in
the world. Alis Milia had led the charge to get
women's sports fully integrated into the Olympics. Miya had spent
the years fighting this fight, doing so not just in
meetings with athletics committees, she had also been very publicly
touting the importance of equality in sports. She wrote numerous

(34:41):
articles for various magazines and newspapers about why it was
not at all scandalous for a woman to be an athlete.
She was very frank and sharing her frustrations over having
to fight so hard for the right to play sports.
Miyat represents the push in France and the worl world
in the early twentieth century for women to have opportunities

(35:03):
in sports, but also for women to have more social
and political equality. She recognized that the two were inextricably connected,
and in nineteen thirty four she told an interviewer for
Independent Women quote, women's sports of all kinds are handicapped
in my country by the lack of playing space. As

(35:23):
we have no vote, we cannot make our needs publicly
felt or bring pressure to bear in the right quarters.
I always tell my girls that the vote is one
of the things they will have to work for if
France is to keep its place with the other nations
in the realm of feminine sport. And after all of
this work and finally getting the Olympics integrated, Alice opted

(35:46):
to step out of the spotlight and mostly retired as
the mouthpiece for women in sports. She continued to live
in Paris until her death on May nineteenth, nineteen fifty seven.
Although she was characterized very negat by a lot of
people in her lifetime, Alise has come to be seen
as a trailblazer and a vital force for women's athletics.

(36:08):
In twenty sixteen, the Elise Milia Association was formed with
the mission that it quote advocates for gender equality in sport,
promotes better representation of female athletes, coaches and leaders, values diversity,
and fights against all forms of discrimination and violence, both
on and off the field of sports. At the twenty

(36:29):
twenty four Olympic Games in France, an actor was present
throughout the games dressed as Elise, and there was also
a plaza at the Olympic Village that was named for her.
If you watch the opening ceremony, which I know not
everybody loved. I thought it was spectacular. And you recall
the ten gold statues of women that appeared along the
sein during the festivities. One of those was Elise. Those

(36:51):
statues actually went into storage for a while, but then
in June of twenty twenty five they were installed along
the Rue de la Chapelle in the eighteenth hour deisment
as a permanent public exhibit. And those are some women
that made it possible for women to be involved in sports. Yeah, d'

(37:11):
alse have some listener mail I do. This listener mail
is from our listener, Miranda. It is in response to
our Embroidery podcast, specifically Embroidery Part one. Without knowing it, Miranda,
reference is something that comes up I think in part
two writing Dear Holly and Tracy. Imagine my amusement when
I started the latest podcast without really looking at its subject.

(37:34):
While I worked on my latest cross stitch, I started cackling.
I love the various dives into handicrafts, especially textile and
fiber arts. In the last year or so, with paper
patterns and now embroidery. It's nice to see them get
the same kind of attention as other art. Listen, we
know I love these arts for anyone who might be
getting into the hobby. DMC has free cross stitch and

(37:56):
embroidery patterns on their website that you can filter by difficulty.
I also use Antique Patternlibrary dot org for vintage and
antique patterns. That's pretty cool. I didn't know about that one,
and we talked about DMC, I think in the second
part of that two parter, so they gotta shout out
as pat tax. I'm including my eleven year old lady

(38:17):
Scottie or Scattie, I'm not sure how it's pronounced. She
is a calico, very deliberately not looking at the cheese
she wanted to steal. And my one year old Apollo
thirteen the void, who looks like an Edward Gory drawing
of a cat. These babies are so sweet, Listen. I
have a cat. I am normally a don't feed cats
any food off your plate person, but we have one

(38:40):
who is a sweet, gentle little lady, and I can't
resist sneak in her a little snack now and again,
and we all love voids. We know that also because
this email mentions Edward Gory. There are only a few
days left if you're listening to this episode the day
it comes out. But if you are in Manhattan, the
Society of Illustration has a lovely Edward Gorey exhibit going on.

(39:04):
I highly recommend it, like pieces from his entire career
in life, and it's amazing. These two kiddies are so
cute and should get all of the cheese and all
of the kisses. And man Paul thirteen is really an
extra gorgeous black cat. He looks like a little panther baby.
I love it. I love it. Thank you so much

(39:24):
for this listen. I want to talk about handicrafts all
the time. Let's talk about sewing forever. I'll do it.
But if you would like to write to us and
share your projects or your pictures of your pets or
anything else you want, or you don't want to send
a picture, that's cool too. You can do that at
History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also listen

(39:46):
to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you
listen to your favorite shows and subscribe there. Stuff you
missed in History Class is a production of iheartm Radio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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