The Olympics and Women Athletes
From zero participation to parity: And it only took 100 years
Women were not allowed to compete in the ancient Olympic Games. The games were exclusively for free-born Greek men, and married women were not even permitted to attend. According to historical accounts, any married woman caught watching the games could be thrown off a cliff.
Fast forward. With the inception of the modern games in 1896, things for women improved only slightly. Women were forbidden to compete in the first modern games—but at least in Athens women would no longer be thrown off cliffs. Attitudes toward women in sport remained quite backwards and regressive.
In fact, the man credited most for organizing the modern games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin felt that their inclusion would be "impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect". And in 1896 in not one of the 14 nations at those first games had women yet achieved suffrage—the right to vote.
Breakthrough: Paris 1900
Women were allowed to compete for the first time at the 1900 Games in Paris. Of a total of 997 athletes, 22 women competed in five sports: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism and golf.
Things for women were to steadily progress from there. By the 1924 games in Paris there were 2,954 male athletes and 135 female athletes.
Two Steps Forward—One Step Back
Under pressure from various directions by this time, the IOC would add womens’ track-and-field events to the Amsterdam Games in 1928.
The 800-meter race—the longest distance women were given to run—would become a flashpoint that would resonate for decades. After the Olympic event, the female competitors appeared, (unsurprisingly) sweaty and out of breath. Even though the men didn’t look any better after their race, spectators were aghast. The distance was perceived as too much for the women. In the words of one sensational newspaper headline, the racers were “Eleven Wretched Women.” The backlash ensured that the distance would be banned from the Olympics until 1960.
Post World War II: Enter the Soviet Union
But it was after the war, when the Soviet Union entered international sporting competitions, that the pervasive stereotypes of the Victorian era were finally forced out in the open. At the 1952 Helsinki Games, all Soviet athletes—men and women—arrived ready and trained to win.
As the postwar Soviet Chairman of the Committee on Physical Culture and Sport, Nikolai Romanov, put it in his memoirs:
“… we were forced to guarantee victory, otherwise the ‘free’ bourgeois press would fling mud at the whole nation as well as our athletes … to gain permission to go to international tournaments I had to send a special note to Stalin guaranteeing the victory.”
The commanding presence of these Soviet women, whose wins counted just as much as the male athletes, left the United States little choice but to build up its own field of women contenders if it wanted to emerge victorious in the medal tally. The catalyst for the increased participation and success of women athletes in the Olympics would be cold war politics.
By the 1960 Rome Games, the breakout performance of Wilma Rudolph, as well as those of her Tennessee State University colleagues, sent a clear message home, just as the women’s liberation movement was taking seed.
Women Athletes Finally Achieve Parity
With the addition of women’s boxing to the Olympic program, the 2012 Games in London were the first in which women competed in all the sports on the program. Since 1991, any new sport seeking to join the Olympic program must have women’s competitions. By the 2016 Games in Rio, 45 per cent of the participants were women.
You’ve Come A Long Way
So in the end it took over 100 years for women to move from complete exclusion to parity in their participation as athletes in the modern Olympic Games. Of course this progress in womens’ involvement as athletic participants would mirror the progress for womens’ rights to vote, equal pay, and reproductive rights in many (but not all) countries around the world.
Tremendous article… very informative and enlightening.
Enjoying this journey of better understanding the history of the Olympics. Thank you.