Terrain de lutte - French Cultural Studies

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French Cultural Studies
Terrain de lutte
Women’s Football and Feminism in ‘Les anneés folles’
WENDY MICHALLAT
University of Sheffield
This article traces the development of women’s football in France in the
context of the evolving political and social status of women over the
course of the 1920s and 1930s. It specifically examines football alongside women’s broader struggle for social, political and sexual emancipation. In the early 1920s, football was championed by the French
feminist movement. Subservient not to men but to a team ethic, robust
female players rebutted the myth of women’s fragility – seen then as a
major obstacle to women’s suffrage. Football also appeared to offer a
means to rally a new generation of working-class women to what had
been a middle-class cause. Sponsored by the feminist movement and
administered by the Fédération féminin sportive de France (FFSF) with
state funding, French women’s football flourished domestically and
abroad. However, by the late 1920s it had been abandoned by the feminist movement and the FFSF in the midst of a sexual panic caricaturing
participants as unnatural, ‘masculinised’ and lesbian – a charge levelled
at feminists in general with increasing vehemence as the suffrage issue
made progress. This discussion links football’s fall from favour over the
course of the 1920s to the increasingly hostile political climate that
faced the feminist movement and imperilled the survival of groups such
as the FFSF who associated with it.
Keywords: body, feminism, football, gender, lesbianism, maternity,
sport, suffrage, war
On 27 April 1920, France’s women’s football team disembarked at Dover
for its first international tour. For the young seamstresses, students and
secretaries, the turbulent Channel crossing, which they had spent flopped
French Cultural Studies, 18(3): 259–276 Copyright © SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
http://frc.sagepub.com [200703] 10.1177/0957155807081436
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like rags over the boat railings, was a mild perturbation compared to what
awaited them as they staggered onto English soil. They had slipped away
from the Gare du Nord the previous day in virtual anonymity, only the
French sports newspaper, L’Écho des Sports seeing the occasion worthy of a
cursory mention in a modest paragraph on its back page. But the enthusiasm
of the team’s welcome in England stood in stark contrast to the indifference
it had left behind. Pinned in arrivals for an hour by a crush of reporters, photographers and cheering, tricolour-flapping members of the general public,
the French women were tumbled out of the train at every station stop en
route to Preston for interviews, photographs and spontaneous displays of
popular affection. There was to be no respite at Preston either. As the players stepped from the train, a brass band crashed out the ‘Marseillaise’ and
the women were escorted through a garland-strung High Street to a civic
reception. Throughout the night, hundreds of feverishly excited Prestonians
laid siege to the hotel in which they were staying. Alice Milliat, President of
the Fédération féminin sportive de France (FFSF), was later to recall her
astonishment in an article for French sports journal Le Miroir des sports:
Jusqu’à notre arrivée à Preston, les faits ne nous surprirent pas outre
mesure, étant donné le légendaire amour du sport avec lequel tout
Anglais vient au monde. Mais saluées à la gare même, par une foule
énorme, par la Marseillaise, couvertes de fleurs, obligées de nous mettre
en file indienne pour atteindre les voitures, il faut avouer que l’accueil
de Preston fut pour nous très inattendu. Les rues étaient tendues de drapeaux, de bandes portant des inscriptions en français; le maire se tenait
sur les marches de l’Hôtel de Ville pour nous souhaiter au passage la
bienvenue. (Milliat, 1921: 6).
However, the British enthusiasm for women’s football had less to do
with the nation’s genetic predisposition to sporting mania presumed by
Milliat than with the game’s public face as a novel fundraising initiative
for war charities. Dick Kerr’s Ladies, the French team’s first opponents,
had been established at a Preston munitions factory during the First World
War. Its philanthropic cause was excellent PR for the factory as well as an
effective defence against those who regarded dishevelled, mud-splattered
women in shorts as an alarmingly mobile mutation of the Suffragette.1
Funded by the private sector and closely associated with the workingclass community, as well as with the sympathetic image of women ‘doing
their bit’ for the nation during wartime, women’s football enjoyed a degree
of protection in Britain.2
In France, women’s football was more vulnerable. It was promoted by
a women’s sporting movement with close links to the country’s feminist
movement. Feminist goals of social and political emancipation were closely
allied to the introduction of competitive and robust team sports to France.
Football and ‘la barette’, a variation of rugby football, were seen by
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progressives within the feminist movement as an apprenticeship to political action: the means by which women could acquire a sense of autonomy
outside of the home, an appreciation of solidarity in teamwork and empowerment through physical fitness. At the same time, women’s sport was
funded by the state and, whilst harbouring these aspirations for the cause
of women, the women’s sporting authorities took pains to protect against
anti-feminist attacks by being seen to endorse the traditional notion of sport
as preparation for healthy maternity, while at the same time promoting its
more progressive role. This article will explain the development of women’s
football in France against the social and political conflict that characterised
women’s fight for suffrage in the immediate post-war period and the 1920s.
It will interpret the violent opposition the sport increasingly encountered
over the course of the 1920s as a ‘playing out’ in the sporting arena of a
fierce backlash against feminism in the inter-war years. Indeed, as Karen
Offen writes, French feminism suffered as fierce and as sustained a backlash during this period as any it had previously experienced: a consequence
of the progress made by women in social and political life over the course
of the two previous decades (Offen, 2000: 272). Very little has been written
about women’s football in France and what has gives only cursory mention
to the sport’s links with first-wave feminism. This article rearticulates the
alliance between women’s football and feminist politics, and in so doing
elaborates sport as a significant arena of women’s struggle in the early part
of the twentieth century.
Pro-natalist enthusiasm for healthy and copious procreation, shared by a
majority of the feminists in the immediate post-war period, facilitated the
progression of women’s sport, and in particular that of vigorous contact
sports.3 It was believed that strong healthy women would produce strong
healthy babies and pale and sickly factory-confined women would produce
inferior stock. Not everyone within the sporting establishment was convinced that rough team games were necessary to ensure bouncing babies,
however. There was a significant body of opinion in male-dominated sporting clubs that advocated, for the sake of decency, a continued concentration
on Swedish gymnastics.4 This view hardened when feminists began to talk
about rough contact sport debunking the myth of the weakling female,
which was believed to be a significant factor in women’s subjugation.5
Feminists also thought that the loose sports clothing necessary for such
activities might prompt liberation in dress reform by encouraging women to
elect to wear less restrictive garments in everyday life; the idea that sport
could prompt such shifts in sartorial taste amongst women had already been
borne out by cycling’s role in prompting the revival of bloomers in the late
1890s.6 Bitter disagreement over the nature and purpose of sport for women
led to women wresting control of it from men in 1918, when they voted for
an all-women executive to assume control of the FFSF. The ousted men,
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who were to prove to be a thorn in the side of progressive women’s sport
over the course of the 1920s, continued to campaign for a return to favour of
gymnastics, while the women of the FFSF set about implementing their radical project for competitive women’s sport.
Alice Milliat was the driving force behind its policies. Although repeatedly going on record to state that sport was ultimately maternal in vocation, in reality she saw competitive sport as an end in itself. Her ambition
was Olympic participation for women, and with this as the FFSF’s longterm strategy it was essential to demonstrate that women, like men, had
the stamina, strength, fitness and competitive spirit to perform at the
highest level. The FFSF thus promoted athletics, field sports like javelin
and discus throwing, and vigorous contact sports like ‘la barette’ and football at the expense of the sedate and decorative activities championed by
male-run female associations. The initiative enraged traditionalists for
whom the image of competitive sport conjured up a disconcerting spectre
of women’s self-assertion and physical empowerment: a horror-filled premonition of the consequences of women’s emancipation. Feminists, however, were delighted.
Feminist support for football
The Conseil national des femmes françaises (CNFF), the umbrella organisation for feminist associations in France, enthusiastically embraced sport for
women after the war. La Française, the unofficial mouthpiece of the CNFF,
regularly ran positive articles about women’s participation in sport. Initially, these attributed women’s enthusiasm to their patriotic determination
to emulate the strength and fighting spirit of their menfolk in the trenches.
But by 1921 articles were explicitly linking feminist objectives and sport.
In an issue dated 11 June 1921, male physician Dr Pillet wrote that women
could achieve a sense of self-worth through sport. Not only was sport
empowering for women but the experience women were gaining through
their governance of sport was vital preparation for future participation in
governance of the state. A successfully administered FFSF would prove
that women could be trusted in public office, thereby smoothing their passage to positions of real authority in political and social affairs:
Tout d’abord, pour créer et faire vivre des sociétés sportives sur tout le
territoire, pour administrer ensuite l’ensemble d’une fédération, les
femmes devront faire preuve, à tous les degrés, de véritables qualités de
gouvernement. Une fédération sportive est une petite République. En
développant la Fédération des Sociétés Féminines Sportives de France,
en la rendant l’égale des grandes fédérations masculines, les femmes
s’habitueront à diriger leurs intérêts elles-mêmes. Et elles prouveront
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qu’elles sont aptes au gouvernement de la nation en se gouvernant
d’abord elles-mêmes. (Pillet, 1921: 3)
Not only did feminists see the FFSF as useful proof of female competence
in public affairs but they were particularly drawn to the sports it endorsed, and in particular football. The competitive and vigorous field sports
which contested the disempowering myth of women’s fragility were much
lauded in La Française. For Dr Pillet, mud-caked, rain-drenched, brighteyed young ‘footballeuses’ were a healthy contrast to the lethargic women
caked in make-up who could be seen exiting the boulevard cinemas after the
Sunday matinée:
Je revenais l’autre dimanche, d’un match de football féminin qui
s’était joué sous la pluie. En redescendant le boulevard, je rencontrai
des couples jeunes sortant du cinéma. L’allure passive des femmes me
frappa. C’est qu’en face de leurs visages fardés se dressait brusquement
l’image des joueuses quittant le ground après le match, le maillot couvert de boue et les yeux étincelants. Où était la puissance? Où la moralité? Où la jeunesse et la santé? Où la beauté? (1921: 3).
The match report of the France and England international, published in
La Française on 30 October 1921, was similarly enthusiastic about football’s apparent ability to enable women to rediscover a natural vitality
and strength:
Tandis que les esprits attardés encore trop nombreux, s’apitoient sur la
naturelle faiblesse féminine et ne lui trouvent pour remède que la subordination sociale de la femme à l’homme, un grand mouvement se
développe pour rendre aux femmes toute la beauté, toute la force
primitive, dont la civilisation prive la plupart d’entre elles. Il est édifiant de suivre à ce sujet les rubriques sportives des journaux. Les
exploits féminins y tiennent presque autant de place que ceux du sexe
fort. C’était par exemple, dimanche dernier à Vincennes grand match
entre Anglaises et Françaises. (La Française, 1921b: 4)
The feminists of La Française saw women’s sport, and football in
particular, as a potential source of new recruits. The vertiginous growth
in the number of sporting associations after the Great War had made sport
accessible to the working classes. It appealed to women in whom wartime
work activity had inspired a greater ambition for personal fulfilment. It
was thought that feminist support for sport coupled with pitch-side canvassing would convince these ‘sportives’ to ally themselves with feminism. So convinced were feminists of the political potential of football
that not only were match reports and articles becoming regular column
features in La Française but the newspaper also lent it financial support
by sponsoring the first women’s football challenge cup. Alice Milliat
welcomed the benevolence of the feminist movement and in a letter of
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thanks to La Française, published in the journal on 11 February 1921, she
enthusiastically endorsed the association between feminism and
women’s football:
Mes collègues m’ont chargée de vous remercier très chaleureusement
de l’intérêt que le journal ‘La Française’ continue à porter à l’éducation
physique féminine et de la décision relative de la mise en compétition
de la ‘Coupe La Française’. Nous sommes très sensibles à ce don de
votre part et à l’appui que vous nous donnez dans le développement
de notre œuvre de féminisme, car ne faut-il pas que la femme dispose
de santé physique pour se défendre et conquérir enfin ses droits les
plus essentiels? (La Française, 1921a: 2)
By the first years of the 1920s, women’s sport had begun to attract regular
coverage in the sporting press and it was clear that commentators had
picked up on its feminist connotations. At the outset, when the FFSF’s progressive brand of women’s sport was only a couple of years old, there had
been the occasional show of support. In an article published in Le Miroir des
sports on 22 December 1921, sports journalist Gabriel Hanot, who was later
to become one of the most influential figures in European football, described
women’s sport as yet another glorious achievement in women’s ongoing
fight for equality.7
Voyez le succès des jeunes filles aux différentes agrégations de l’enseignement secondaire … voyez le projet du droit de vote des femmes
sans cesse écarté et sans cesse revenu à la surface, voyez les fonctions et
métiers ordinairement exercés par des hommes et remplis actuellement
par les femmes. Il y a en sport, comme dans ces multiples expressions
de la vie sociale, un vaste et profond bouillonnement … D’ores et déjà
il est possible d’affirmer que la femme a acquis droit de cité dans la vie
sportive comme dans les autres manifestations de l’existence. (Hanot,
1921: 389).
Anti-football antagonism
Hanot’s support was exceptional. In general, the press took a dim view of
any female sporting activity appearing to promote female emancipation.
Languorous non-contact activities like gymnastics and croquet were generally accepted. These could be performed out of the view of the general public and in all-enveloping garments. New sports like football, rugby and
cross-country running practised by women dressed in a bulky male-style kit
of jerseys and shorts in front of a paying public were fiercely criticised.
Antagonists attacked the FFSF on its ambiguous manifesto for sport by questioning how it could reconcile its support for competitive activity and its
supposed commitment to women’s maternal and domestic responsibilities.
Enlisting the support of a posse of doctors and psychiatrists, they embarked
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on a concerted campaign to discredit both women’s sport and the FFSF. That
critics sought to sabotage the development of women’s sport by making it
the subject of a health scare was in keeping with the anti-feminist strategies
of the time. As Karen Offen points out, the 1920s was a period which saw a
demonisation through science of the feminist cause. Virilisation and mental
illness, seen as the principal perils of the female’s quest for autonomy, were
lent ‘scientific’ credence by the in-vogue theories of Freud and Jung
(Offen, 2000: 274). The anti-football lobby regularly called upon physicians
to speculate about the dangers of rough sports.8 With an eye on potential
damage to the reproductive functions of the adolescent woman, a certain
Dr Debeyre sketched a monstrous vision of the woman of the future. Young
women would develop into malformed, stunted adults whose bone growth
would not proceed naturally to elegant elongation but would instead
broaden and thicken resulting in stocky, dwarfish creatures. Women, in
order to remain women, had to avoid ungainly activities:
Le déséquilibre des ligaments articulaires et des muscles entraîne les
déviations et les déformations des os et des jointures. L’exagération des
fonctions circulatoires et musculaires irait à l’encontre des résultats
recherchés ou poursuivis vers la puberté, elle provoquerait une ostcogenèse intense et aboutirait à l’édification précoce des os trapus,
solides, dont elle arrêterait trop tôt la croissance en longueur … pour
rester femme, la jeune fille doit éviter tout exercice violent. Excluons
sans pitié du programme féminin le rugby, la boxe, la lutte, les haltères,
les courses de fond, le cross, toutes épreuves ou jeux sportifs qui ne
conviennent pas aux demoiselles. Il ne saurait être question pour nous
de transformer nos jeunes filles en athlètes, ni de leur faire battre des
records. (Debeyre, 1927: 14)
Competition was undesirable because it was selfish.9 It contravened the
conditions set down for women’s participation in sport and it was unpatriotic because it drained energy which could be harnessed for reproductive duties. Competition was particularly perilous when it took the form of
a team activity. Women striving in unison towards a collective goal was a
demoralising spectacle for those fearful of feminism. The article, ‘Les
femmes doivent-elles jouer au football?’ (L’Auto, 1920a) advised that team
sports did not allow for the frailties of individuals. Too exhausted to carry
on, but frightened to let the team down, women were liable to topple over
with cardiac problems. Either that or they would finish up with distorted
lower limbs and unsightly wrinkles brought about by the exertion for
which their delicate physique could not cater.
Le surmenage physique auquel peuvent être entraînées les joueuses
moins bien constituées provoquent des chutes, tôt ou tard, sans
compter les affections de cœur ... d’autre part, le running, le kicking, le
twisting, et le turning, qui sont d’autant de mouvements du jeu, sont
préjudiciables à la symétrie des membres inférieurs et développent les
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chevilles jusqu’à un degré qui les rend peu esthétiques. Enfin les efforts
obstinés pour atteindre la balle ou tenir le goal obligent des femmes à
des contractions de figure qui, répétées souvent, laissent des traces sous
forme de rides et de lignes désagréables. (L’Auto, 1920a: 1)
Articles in the sporting press were as worried about football causing
impressionable women to lose interest in marriage and motherhood as they
were about its dire consequences for health. Women were expected to consider sport as a pleasurable preparatory interlude prior to the fulfilment
of maternal and domestic responsibilities. Concern abounded that young
ladies were according football more attention than they were the opposite
sex. In 1921, on the eve of the second international fixture between France
and England at the Pershing stadium in Paris, L’Auto ran an article entitled
‘Nos footballeuses peuvent-elles avoir des enfants?’ (L’Auto, 1921a).Two
women from the French football team, Jeanne Brulé and Mlle Braquemond,
confirmed that women could indeed procreate, and to prove it they produced photographic evidence of former women football players who, once
happily married, had produced healthy offspring. L’Auto reassured its readers that football was safe: women did not appear to see it as an end in itself
and it did not appear to have snarled up their reproductive anatomy either:
Les exercices physiques, y compris le football, ne sont alors plus du
tout un but, ce qui serait blâmable, mais le moyen de conserver et
d’améliorer même la santé, pour être mieux à la même de remplir les
devoirs que la nature impose à la femme. (L’Auto, 1921a: 1)
All the same, several months later the topic reappeared in the same publication. In an article ‘A quoi rêvent-elles les jeunes filles … sportives?’,
Mlle Marie, ‘footballeuse’, reminded women of the incompatibility of
marriage, motherhood and sport. L’Auto was charmed:
Très raisonnable, Mlle Marie … sait très bien qu’une fois mariée, elle
ne pourra plus pratiquer … Voyez comme le sport, qui passe pour tout
envahir, n’a pris, dans leur gentilles cervelles, que la place qu’il doit
prendre … Ah! Les adorables petites fiancées! Ah! Les adorables, bientôt, épouses et mamans. (L’Auto, 1921b: 1)
The abandonment of football
As negative coverage of football increased in the press, the FFSF went on
the defensive. Conspicuously lacking the zest of its early years, it dignified
criticism of football by undertaking to make ‘improvements’ to how it was
played and by discouraging the competitiveness that it had initially championed. Writing in L’Auto, of all places, in 1923, Alice Milliat sought to
counter criticism of the game’s violence by announcing rule changes
designed to reduce boisterous physical contact and overexertion. The pitch
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would be shortened, the ball made lighter and body-checking outlawed.
If properly adapted to women’s physical capacities and not played with an
excess of competitiveness, football was, in Milliat’s view, an acceptable
sporting pastime for women:
mais il en reste des antagonistes, sans doute de bonne foi, mais au
jugement erroné. C’est pourquoi footballeuses et dirigeants doivent,
pour ne pas enrayer la propagande, se garder d’exagérer l’esprit du
club – source d’incidents dont nous laissons volontiers le monopole
au football masculin. (Milliat, 1923: 1)
However, only three years later, a startling about-turn in sporting ethos
by the FFSF made Milliat’s pandering interview with L’Auto look positively
radical. In 1926 the FFSF banned cycling for women: an extraordinary
suppression of an activity which had been popular with women since the
turn of the century, in spite of a generalised grumbling about its freewheeling bloomer-clad riders. With cycling expelled from women’s sport,
the writing was on the wall for the FFSF’s controversial field games. Sure
enough, in the same year it went public with a condemnation of football.
Milliat, who had done so much in the early 1920s to promote the game
both in France and internationally, returned to L’Auto, the game’s most
consistent and derisive critic, to denounce as a failure the ‘experiment’
with women’s football. She regretfully conceded that of the many hundreds
who had attempted the game only a small minority had acquired the
skills to play it properly. In fact, at the time of Milliat’s admission of football’s ‘failure’ the sport was more popular in France than it had ever been,
with an increasing number of women’s teams playing in the national
league and cup competitions. With dismaying recourse to the same brand
of essentialist reasoning that had characterised male criticism of football
since the war, Milliat claimed that women and football were fundamentally
incompatible. It had failed in other countries already, she declared, and
French women were additionally impeded by a genetically installed streak
of individualism which provoked a natural aversion to the game’s team
ethic (Milliat, 1926: 1).
Four years after the FFSF’s first public withdrawal of support L’Auto
could officially proclaim the death of women’s football. Its front-page
headline on 18 November 1931 triumphantly announced ‘La régression
du football féminin’. ‘Le football féminin se meurt’, it trumpeted, ‘ce n’est
certes pas un mal et c’est un fait’ (L’Auto, 1931: 1). This intervention by
L’Auto was something of a scoop for the sports paper given that it was
prompted by an article criticising football written for L’Ami du peuple by
the secretary-general of the FSFF, Andrée Joly. Writing under a pseudonym, ‘Annie Jorsène’, Joly took issue not with shortcomings in skill nor
with the boisterous nature of the game but with how the women who
played it dressed. Football was a public embarrassment. The problem
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seemed to be less the physical demands of the game than the masculine
appearance of the women who played it:
Les sportives ont donc compris que ce jeu d’équipes n’est pas féminin,
ou tout au moins que les exhibitions de football, en public, sont le plus
souvent désastreuses pour la propagande du sport féminin. La violence du jeu? Elle est discutable et ce n’est pas de ce côté qu’il faut
chercher la pierre à lancer au football. Mais la tenue des jeunes filles?
N’est-elle pas le plus souvent, très critiquée et très critiquable? …
Pourquoi donc ces demoiselles se donnent-elles – pour taper dans un
ballon – ces allures garçonnières qui les font ressembler parfois à de
jeunes garnements de la barrière? (L’Auto, 1931: 1)
In fact, the interest of the official French feminist movement appeared to
have waned as early as 1923. In April 1922, La Française had hailed the
first ‘Coupe, La Française’ a great success: ‘Comment en aurait-il été autrement. Les sportives ne sont-elles pas des femmes d’action?’ (La Française,
1922: 4). But by the following year it was wondering what it had to do to
get sportswomen to attend its meetings. The hope that football could introduce feminism to the working masses had been disappointed. Although
La Française regarded vigorous, independent sporting women as pin-ups
for its feminist message, the newspaper despaired of their reluctance to
answer the call to action. They would only turn up for sports events, it lamented, although it did manage to find some consolation in the notion that
the women were liberating themselves in their own particular way. ‘Elles
s’émancipent elles-mêmes, de l’ancien usage qui condamnait les femmes à
la vie sédentaire’ (La Française, 1923: 1).
But the indifference of working-class sporting women to feminism was
not the only reason for the movement’s waning enthusiasm for women’s
football. Throughout the 1920s the issue of votes for women became a regular fixture on the political agenda, with optimism for a favourable outcome
intensifying over the course of the decade.10 However, the more progress
women made, the more vitriolic and concerted the anti-feminism campaign
became. It was in this increasingly polarised political environment that
women’s sport became more than ever a target for attack (Reynolds, 1996:
211). The FFSF was especially vulnerable because its bullish forays
into contact sports made it an easy target for slurs equating feminism with
virilisation.
‘Masculinisation’ panics
This favoured strategy of anti-feminists had been used during the First
World War to label women as unpatriotic or traitorous.11 For Christine Bard,
the virilisation attacks of anti-feminists in the post-war period were more
about a practical urgency to restore traditional gender relations by removing
women from the workplace and returning them to the ‘foyer’.12 In the 1920s,
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the masculine fixation was revived, again slightly differently, in the figure
of the ‘garçonne’. Whilst initially the risqué gender indeterminacy of its look
had made it an ‘haute couture’ quirk for heterosexual women, it had, by the
early 1920s, become associated with loose sexual mores, gender transgression and lesbianism. In particular, Victor Margueritte’s 1922 novel La
Garçonne, an admonitory tale of androgynous Monique who plumbs the
moral abyss by way of a serial bed-hop with both men and women, alerted
the French public to the possibility of a connection between woman-to-male
transvestism and sexual deviation. As Christine Bard points out in an
analysis of the ‘garçonne’s’ symbolic articulation of emergent discourses
around gender and sexuality in ‘les années folles’, Margueritte’s ‘garçonne’
was a campaigning gift for anti-feminists.
Margueritte’s description of his novel as ‘une étape dans [la] marche
inévitable du féminisme, vers le but magnifique qu’il atteindra’ horrified many feminists who baulked at Margueritte’s association of gender
ambiguity and sexual licentiousness with feminism (Bard, 1998: 69).
Margueritte’s portrayal of the ‘garçonne’ particularly enraged feminists
because it implied that the new post-suffrage woman would retain nothing of her ‘natural’ femininity, but would instead trade her compassionate, gentle and modest nature for the selfish, pleasure-seeking disposition
of dissipated men (1998: 70). The idea that women would ‘become’ men
if they achieved their political objectives had been a favoured line of antifeminists since the earliest days of the feminist movement. The movement had countered this by insisting that suffrage for women would mean
a new societal valorisation of natural feminine attributes which would
serve to reinforce traditional moral standards (1998: 70). With fierce hostility being directed from all sides at the spectre of the ‘masculine’
woman, it was not surprising that women’s sport should have found itself
the target of renewed attack for its apparent disrespect for gender conventions. In the first years after the war, male anxiety that women should
preserve both their modesty and their femininity on the sports field could
be seen in numerous articles in the sporting press about appropriate
sportswear. On 13 April 1920 L’Auto made a front-page appeal to its readers to design an appropriate sports outfit for women. A week later, on 20
April 1920, another front-page feature entitled ‘Le costume féminin de
sport est trouvé’ announced the discovery of an all-in-one pantaloon-skirt
combination as the answer to the vexing problem of decent sporting
apparel for the fairer sex (L’Auto, 1920b: 1). By the mid-1920s, with more
and more women engaging in ‘rough’ sport dressed in unflattering malestyle shorts and rugby shirts, virulent condemnation of the ‘defeminising’
consequences of women’s sport appeared in the press in the form of butch
muscle-bound caricatures. In L’Écho des sports women ran cross-country
races, which had them splashing about in mud ‘jusqu’aux reins, je dirai
même, sans commettre un mauvais à-peu-près, jusqu’aux seins’ (Breyer,
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1927: 12). Not only did their cross-country capers cover their erogenous
zones with dirt, but football and cycling made them hysterical, messed up
their hair and caused them to grimace unpleasantly:
Elles luttent pédestrement de vitesse en des déboulés à l’issue desquels
le vainqueur s’affale sur le sol, traits crispés, yeux hagards, cœur battant
la breloque. Elles disputent – tu parles! – des matchs de football où les
crises de nerfs alternent avec les coups de pied. Elles courent à bicyclette
sous la pluie qui plaque leurs cheveux et l’effort pénible qui contracte
leur visage. (1927: 12)
Of all the sports endorsed by the FFSF, football had emerged as the most
popular, but in an increasingly hostile anti-feminist climate it was also its
most troublesome. Only a year before Milliat’s surrender of football’s cause
in L’Auto, the secretary-general of Fémina, Jeanne Brulé, was energetically
refuting talk of the sport’s demise, whilst at the same time alluding to the
damage caused to women’s sport by the movement’s internecine fighting
over its appropriateness:
les difficultés par lesquelles nous sommes passées: conflits, absence de
pouvoir central, chamailleries entre dirigeants, ont créé une période de
désordre dans notre propagande. Le sport féminin n’en a été nullement
affecté dans ses pratiquantes; mais il a perdu au point de vue respectabilité, vis-à-vis des pouvoirs publics, des organes sportifs, des diverses
fédérations. (L’Auto, 1925: 1)
But it was clear that the leadership of the FFSF was in a panic over
what to do about football. Longstanding critics of the FFSF claimed that
the year-on-year cuts in its state funding were due to its encouragement
of unfeminine sports, which in turn encouraged unfeminine behaviour. In
an article virulently critical of the FFSF published in Très Sport in May
1925, Jacques Mortane wrote that when women should have been working to improve their ‘grace’ and their ‘plastique’ with ‘exercices rythmiques’ they were propped up at bars, drinking, smoking and swearing:
Avant de considérer le sport, il faut faire attention à ne pas repousser
les parents hésitants par des attitudes regrettables. Nous avons vu, à
des arrivées de courses cyclistes féminines, des concurrentes poser
leur machine contre le trottoir, allumer une cigarette, entrer dans les
estaminets, boire une consommation sur le comptoir et employer des
expressions d’argot qui choquaient même les moins rébarbatifs.
(Mortane and Mortane, 1925: 1)
In 1929 the FFSF completely rewrote its manifesto for women’s sport.
Short of money, its appeal to private benefactors necessitated a more cautious ethos. However, the manifesto read like a pitiful confession of past
wrongs coupled with a meek undertaking not to repeat the same mistakes.
Women’s sport had been damaged by those who had tried to mould it in the
image of competitive male sport, it conceded. The experiment had been a
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disaster. Championships and tournaments had sanctioned the pursuit of
individual glory when the right and proper role for women’s sport should
have been to provide healthy mothers:
Les sports féminins, qu’est-ce que ça peut bien être et où cela peut-il bien
conduire? Sur ce point, nous sommes très catégoriques: à deux choses:
1. La création de championnats, de tournois, d’exhibitions multiples, à
des recherches spectaculaires, au cabotinage et à tout le reste …
2. ou bien à l’organisation d’une méthode de développement corporel
complète, méthode physiologique et naturelle, ayant pour unique objet
l’amélioration de la santé de la jeune fille et la femme.
Entre les deux nous avons fait notre choix définitif … Nous voulons, en
un mot, préserver la jeune fille et la femme d’une quantité de maux qui
les guettent si elles ne réagissent pas à temps contre un mode d’existence anormal et contraire à toutes les lois de l’hygiène élémentaire …
oui nous sommes les mères de demain, que faisons-nous pour enrichir
et parfaire ce corps qui doit porter et former l’avenir d’un pays? (Le
Bulletin officiel FFSF, 1929: 1)
There was clearly to be no place for ‘masculine’ sports in the FFSF’s new
programme. It had signalled as much already, when in 1928 it withdrew the
sporting licence of one of its most successful sporting women and footballers, Violette Morris. ‘La Morris’, as she liked to be known, had become a
regular source of embarrassment for the FFSF. It had tolerated her on-field
brawling and public criticism of its running of football for years, but,
since the post-garçonne revival of the ‘masculinisation’ slur, Morris’s custom of turning up to events dressed in a male-style three-piece suit had
begun to worry the Federation.13 Rumours about ‘unnatural’ sexual proclivities, coupled with allegations about lewd and improper interest in young
women in her charge, prompted the FFSF to act.14 When Morris refused its
request that she swap trousers for a dress, or at the very least for a ‘pantalon
bouffant’, the FFSF banned her from sporting competition. Morris brought a
civil action against the Federation for the return of her licence and for damages. The case, dubbed ‘le procès de la culotte’ by the press, was heard in
Paris in March 1930.
The manner in which the FFSF conducted its defence showed how sensitive it had become about the issue of ‘masculinisation’. There was no
mention of sport’s feminist vocation but there was plenty said about its role
in producing better mothering stock, and the lawyers representing the
FFSF, Yvonne Netter and Simone Weiler, denounced the robust sports it
had once championed by implying that the slow development of women’s
sport in France was due to the natural reluctance of French women to
assume masculine traits:
Le sport féminin, Messieurs, est d’un usage récent en France, et s’il a
eu précisément du mal à s’implanter chez nous, cela tient à ce que la
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tradition française est ennemie de ce qui peut trop masculiniser la
femme. (Revue des grands procès contemporains, 1930: 177)
The FFSF legal team paid particular attention to a passage in a letter of
protest Morris had written to them in which she had boldly declared: ‘On
me reproche ma liberté d’allures, mais je suis femme et n’ai à répondre à
personne de ce que je fais’ (1930: 194).
Addressing a predominantly male court, lawyer Yvonne Netter offered
the FFSF’s reassuring condemnation of Morris’s audacity: ‘Messieurs …
nous pensons au contraire, que parce qu’elle est femme, elle ne peut pas
faire tout ce qu’elle veut’ (1930: 194). Although it was not unusual for
mainstream feminism to publicly disavow discourse and behaviour regarded as overly radical, it was clear that the FFSF was keen to obfuscate
its association with the feminist cause. Football, Morris’s ‘look’ and feminism were now incompatible with the FFSF’s vocation.
In the end Morris lost the case and the FFSF formally withdrew all support from football in 1933. Bereft of funding and facilities, women enthusiasts nevertheless continued, as they had done in Britain, to organise
their own matches and tournaments. For a brief period it seemed that
football might survive. The ‘Ligue Féminine de Football Association’ was
founded in 1933 and several new clubs were formed to compete in two
leagues in the Paris region. Its success was to be short-lived. In 1934 the
Fédération française d’athlétisme withdrew permission for women’s football to be played on its pitches. Alternative venues were few and expensive to hire. Those organising the embryonic league complained that the
state was running a campaign against women’s football which had
resulted in many players leaving its ranks (Prudhomme-Poncet, 2003: 170).
Indeed, M. Dézarnaulds, sous-secrétaire d’État à l’Éducation physique, was
quoted in L’Auto in October 1936 as being of the opinion that women’s
football should be actively discouraged. It was not, in his view, an appropriate activity for women:
En ce qui concerne les sports mon avis est net: il y a des sports pour la
femme et des sports qui ne peuvent guère être utiles à son développement physique. Dans la première catégorie, je classerai le tennis, la
natation, le basket-ball mais n’attendez pas de moi que je fasse pour le
football et la barette le meme effort. (Cited in Prudhomme-Poncet,
2003: 170)
Concluding remarks
By 1937, women’s football had ceased to be a formally organised sporting
activity in France. It was already clear by the end of the 1920s that
women’s football represented a menacing presage of women’s advancement. It defied physical encumbrance and domestic confinement,
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enabling women to join together in a collective leisure pursuit outside the
home. It defied the essentialist propaganda of woman’s fragility and feebleness that was used to hinder career aspirations and frustrate academic
opportunities. Its abandonment by the FFSF and by the feminist movement at the height of its popularity amongst young women was due in
large measure to the fact that it had become an unwelcome focus for the
vilification of the ‘masculine’ woman and consequently a source of damaging publicity. In addition, by the mid-1920s its original purpose as
proof of the viability of the FFSF’s Olympic ambitions had backfired. In
the newly hostile anti-masculine climate, ‘footballeuses’ like Morris who
had competed in field events at the FFSF women’s ‘Olympics’ held in
Paris in 1922 were no longer seen as likely to assist the campaign. The
international arm of the FFSF was also under increasing pressure to relinquish control of women’s athletics to the International Athletics
Association, which had tried in vain several times between 1922 and
1926 to take it over (Van Kote, 2004). Scandal over Morris and relentless
‘masculinisation’ attacks on football only undermined the FFSF’s campaign to maintain control over athletics. It could not have helped the
cause either that the popularity of football was rocketing. As Jeanne Brulé
pointed out in her defence of football in L’Auto in 1925, hundreds of
young women were joining the FFSF just to play football:
Quelle erreur! nous dit la dévouée dirigeante athlète. Le football n’a
jamais connu pareille vogue! Il détrône presque l’athlétisme; il enterre
le hockey; il menace la barette. Le rêve de toutes nos jeunes filles – et
Dieu sait si nous en avons – c’est de devenir équipières du team premier d’abord, internationales ensuite. Les onzes se multiplient. (L’Auto,
1925: 1)
The game was now more popular than hockey and almost as popular as
athletics. It clearly made little sense for the FFSF to support a sport which
brought nothing but bad publicity and which was a drain on its already
over-stretched finances. Nor did it make sense to continue sponsoring an
activity which threatened the hegemony of athletics, which the FFSF saw
as the guarantor for women’s long-term future in sport.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dr Alison Fell for reading an initial draft of this article and for her advice relating to the political and cultural context of ‘Les années folles’.
Notes
1. Anti-feminists habitually accused feminism of seeking to ‘masculinise’ women. In her
1905 speech ‘L’Éternelle sacrifiée’, Nelly Roussel, a moderate feminist aligned to the Conseil national des femmes françaises (CNFF), alluded to the tactic, claiming, prematurely,
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
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that the public had not fallen for it. For the English translation of the speech, delivered as part of a lecture tour between 1905 and 1907, see Hause and Waelti-Walters
(1994).
In December 1921 women’s football in England suffered a major blow when the
English Football Association banned women from playing on its pitches, describing
the activity as ‘quite unsuitable for females’. Women were forced to play on public
parks with inadequate training and changing facilities. As a consequence, interest in
the sport began to dwindle. See the English Football Association’s website.
Both the CNFF and L’Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (UFSF), organisations
representing the majority feminist opinion after the war, were firmly supportive of pronatalist views. Christine Bard writes that this support was not merely a response to the
‘dénatalité’ crisis of the post-war period, but came from the conviction that reinforcing
the prestige of the mother and demonstrating the social usefulness of women would further the cause of suffrage (see Bard, 1995: 65).
Therapeutic gymnastic exercise invented by Swede Pehr Henrik Ling in the midnineteenth century was thought to improve women’s health. It caught on in both
England and France and became generally accepted as a quasi-medical treatment for
female ailments (Hargreaves,1994: 48).
In the late nineteenth century through to the 1930s, there was a widespread belief, propagated by a scientific and medical milieu influenced by Darwinist and positivist theories,
that women’s energy capacity was significantly inferior to that of men. Giving birth, menstruation and suckling infants diminished still further a feeble physical constitution
which made the pursuit of intellectual or sporting activities a potentially hazardous
affair (Hargreaves, 1994: 45).
Leigh Summers writes that women’s enfranchisement had been associated with the
fashion for bloomers as early as 1850. Dress reformists, however, had not embraced
the fashion which, it was feared, was too radical and risked undermining the feminist
cause (Summers, 2001: 145).
Hanot later became a major figure in French football. He managed France’s men’s
football team and edited France’s premier sports journal L’Équipe. He also launched
the European club championship, known today as the Champions League.
Pseudo-scientific interventions claiming that women could suffer the harmful repercussions of strenuous exercise were being seen as early as the nineteenth century in
England, and there is a striking similarity between the grotesque predictions of infirmity and deformity made then and those made by enemies of women’s sport in 1920s
France (see Hargreaves, 1994: 106).
In the post-war period unflattering caricatures of the ‘modern’ woman abounded. As
Mary Louise Roberts highlights, in the first chapter of her excellent study of gender
relations in the inter-war period (1994), the isolation in misery of the trench soldier
encouraged a bitter association of the easy life on the home front with women who,
they imagined, were betraying their sacrifices in a feckless pursuit of material comforts
and sexual pleasure. A similar association of selfishness, immorality and neglect of
wifely and motherly duties was stirred up by the ‘garçonne’ panic of the early 1920s
(see Roberts, 1994: 19–45).
In her study France between the Wars: Gender and Politics, Sîan Reynolds (1996) refers
to Paul Smith’s (1996) findings in his analysis of women’s campaign for the vote.
As Margaret Darrow (2000) points out, women who spurned femininity were branded
defeatists, German sympathisers or even spies for a gender ambiguity which marked
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them out as ‘other’, and, in wartime, as ‘un-French’. Madelaine Pelletier’s shortcropped hair and cycling shorts caused her to be arrested. Hélène Brion was arrested
for spying. Le Matin described Brion as ‘at the very least abnormal’, highlighting her
predilection for masculine attire by publishing photographs of her wearing bicycle
‘bloomers’ (see Darrow, 2000: 297).
12. The connection between feminism and virility was not a paranoid imagining of men.
It was encouraged by feminists themselves. Praise for physically demanding factory
work, together with brawny images of female munitions workers, appeared regularly
in the feminist press after the war (Bard, 1999: 150–2).
13. It did not sanction her either for a letter sent to L’Auto in which she implied that the
FFSF was neglecting to ensure adequate physical and tactical training for young ‘footballeuses’ (see L’Auto, 1922: 4). See Michallat (2005).
14. Carolyn J. Dean (2000) examines the inter-war perception of lesbianism as an unseen
but proliferating menace symbolising a post-war crisis of masculinity in the face of
women’s increased social mobility and sexual freedom. She notes that prominent
French feminists were outspoken in their condemnation of lesbianism (see Dean,
2000: 189).
References
Unattributed periodical articles
L’Auto
[Anon.] (1920a) ‘Les femmes doivent-elles jouer au football?’, L’Auto, 28 January, p. 1.
[Anon.] (1920b) L’Auto, 13 April, p. 1.
[Anon.] (1921a) ‘Nos footballeuses peuvent-elles avoir des enfants?’, L’Auto, 29 October, p. 1.
[Anon.] (1921b) ‘A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles … sportives?’, L’Auto, 14 December, p. 1.
[Anon.] (1922) ‘Une sportive nous parle du football féminin’, L’Auto, 14 December, p. 4.
[Anon.] (1925) ‘Le Football féminin est-il en régression?’, L’Auto, 18 November, p. 1.
[Anon.] (1931) ‘La Régression du football féminin’, L’Auto, 18 November, p. 1.
La Française
[Anon.]
[Anon.]
[Anon.]
[Anon.]
(1921a) ‘La Coupe “La Française”’, La Française, 11 February, p. 2.
(1921b) ‘Les Sports féminins’, La Française, 5 November, p. 4.
(1922) ‘Stade Élisabeth’, La Française, 8 April, p. 4.
(1923) ‘Pourquoi les sportives doivent voter’, La Française, 10 March, p. 1.
Miscellaneous
[Anon.] (1929) ‘Nos efforts, notre but’, Le Bulletin officiel de la fédération féminine
sportive de la France, December, p. 1.
[Anon.] (1930) ‘Le Procès de la culotte’, Revue des grands procès contemporains, 36:
159–202.
[Anon.] ‘Women’s Football: A Brief History’, English Football Association official website:
http://www.thefa.com/Womens/ (accessed November 2006).
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Other
Bard, C. (1995) Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914–1940. Paris: Librairie
Arthème Fayard.
Bard, C. (1998) Les Garçonnes: Modes et fantasmes des années folles. Paris: Flammarion.
Bard, C. (1999) Un siècle d’antiféminisme. Paris: Arthème Fayard.
Breyer, V. (1927) L’Écho des sports, 5 December, p. 12.
Darrow, M. (2000) French Women and the First World War: Stories of the Home Front.
Oxford: Berg.
Dean, C. (2000) The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality and Other Fantasies
in Interwar France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Debeyre, Dr (1927) ‘L’Intéressante Conférence faite à Lille’, Fémina-Gym, 7 July, p. 14.
Hanot, G. (1921) ‘La Femme sportive ne devrait-elle délaisser le football au bénéfice
d’autres jeux de plein air?’, Le Miroir des Sports, 22 December, p. 389.
Hargreaves, J. (1994) Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of
Women’s Sport. New York: Routledge.
Hause, S. and Waelti-Walters, J. (1994) Feminisms of the Belle Epoque: A Historical and
Literary Anthology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Michallat, Wendy (2005) ‘Droit au but: Violette Morris and Women’s Football in “Les
années folles” ’, French Studies Bulletin, 97: 13–17.
Milliat, A. (1921) ‘Les Premiers Matchs féminins internationaux de football furent joués
l’an passé en Angleterre’, Le Miroir des Sports, 28 October, p. 6.
Milliat, A. (1923) ‘La Progression du sport féminin’, L’Auto, 6 December, p. 1.
Milliat, A. (1926) ‘Le Football féminin peut-il encore faire des progrès?’, L’Auto,
17 August, p. 1.
Mortane, J. and Mortane, S. (1925) ‘Doit-on encourager le sport féminin?’, Très Sport,
May 1, p. 1.
Offen, K. (2000) European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Pillet, Dr (1921) ‘La Personnalité féminine et les sports’, La Française, 11 June, p. 3.
Prudhomme-Poncet, L. (2003) Histoire du football féminin au XXe siècle. Paris:
L’Harmattan.
Reynolds, S. (1996) France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics. London: Routledge.
Roberts, M. L. (1994) Civilisation without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar
France, 1917–1927. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, P. (1996) Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in
France, 1918–1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Summers, L. (2001) Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Closet. Oxford: Berg.
Van Kote, G. (2004) ‘Alice Milliat, pionnière oubliée’, Le Monde, 28 August (online edition).
Wendy Michallat is a Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield.
Address for correspondence: French Department, University of Sheffield,
Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK [email: [email protected]]