À nous les stades ! Une histoire du sport au féminin
With Paris hosting the 2024 Olympics & Paralympic games, there have been a lot of exhibitions around the city related to the event. I’ve loved the vibe of the city during the games, and it will be interesting to see how long the traces last. This exhibition is open until mid October.
This exhibition has been on my to visit list for quite a while but I didn’t have the time to visit. Usually when I’m at the library, it’s to work - either to write or to research. I had passed it many times, but never stopped to read all of the text. Here I’ll give an overview on some of the things that stood out for me, and what I took away from it.
This exhibition is free to enter for everyone (woo, I love having free exhibitions around the city).
The exhibition
This exhibition is hosted in the hallways of the BNF library. It’s broken down into different themes, based on the timeline - an overview of women in sports, the sports that were tolerated first, different sports and how they were perceived all the way up to recent olympics - the 2024 games were the first games to have a 50/50 split between men and women.
The first panel gives an overview. There’s a timeline with some key events such as the creation of the FSFSF (Fédération des sociétés féminines sportives) in 1917, the first women’s rugby match in 1966 and the first time women were allowed to compete in the olympics games for boxing in 2012. Alice Millant was the president of the FSFSF and was a pioneer of Women’s sports.
The second panel is all about le sports aristocratique. In 1896, women were banned altogether. In the 1900 Paris olympic games, there were 997 athletes in total, with 22 of them being women. They were allowed to participate in certain sports - sailing, croquet and horse riding were mixed while tennis and golf were separate. All of these sports, were related to a certain group of women. Even now sailing and horse riding are associated with wealth. This section has one of my favourite photos of the exhibition - two women playing ping pong in a fancy looking dining room while wearing fancy dress, the caption reads le ping-pong est le jeu à la mode. It’s interesting for me to reflect on how certain sports were tolerated for women before it was really accepted by the general public.
The next section is all about les intrépides. It has a series of images related to women climbing mountains. I love these images because they contain women climbing in beautiful dresses - dresses that would not be practical for an outdoor activity like that.
There’s a section all about cycling. Cycling is something that I’m a big fan of, from every day life such as going to the supermarket, to travelling. Bikes open up so much possibility - there’s a great movie called women don’t cycle which shows some of the impact around the world. At the time when women were starting to cycle, there were a lot of debates related to clothing because long skirts are not practical and trousers were acceptable. It’s really interesting to think about how sports, and clothing do overlap. My only complaint about this section is that the white text on a light blue background is hard to read.
I also really liked the section on sports in public! At a certain point, in order to make changes you have to do thing public - which I think is still true today. Here you can read a bit about a 13km swim across Paris and some running events that were organised. One of the craziest things I read was in this section - doctors were remarking that swimming would straighten your back and firm the stomach without having negative impacts on the body, these things were considered ideal for having children.
In total I spent around 1h30 looking at the exhibition. I wanted to take my time reading all of the text, and to look at all of the images. I wanted to have time to reflect on how different my life would have been if I was born even 40 years earlier. All of the text was in French with no English translations.
End thoughts
There is still work to be done, but I am grateful to be living in a time and place where women are mostly seen as equals. I often think about how men sports is the default - we say football and women’s football. Why is it that we need to prefix sports with women’s?
Paris 2024 was the first Olympic games to have an equal split between men and women which is great progress. But will we always have women’s and men’s split in the way they currently are? We have seen that this can lead to transphobic discord - which does impact all women even outside of sports. I don’t have a solution for this but I think it’s an important discussion.