Rosabicyclette
La professionnalisation des courses féminines en France
(1980-2000)
Maurice Luis Henri Neumont. 1868-1930.
© Photo RMN Grand Palais, J. G. Berizzi
Women and cycling, 1870s–1890s
The first recorded women's cycle race took place in Bordeaux in 1869, and during the 1870s and 1880s women were to be seen participating in racing of various kinds, perhaps more as a spectacle than as a sporting activity considered in its own right. Less energetically, female middle- and upper-class elites gradually adopted cycling as a leisure activity during these early decades of the rise of cycling. The appearance of female ‘racers’ (essentially on the track) attracted considerable followings for their glamour as much as for their athletic abilities; but female cycling's major contribution to French society in this period was possibly the facilitating of a range of new sociabilities. The bicycle during the late nineteenth century became in essence ‘the technological partner of the femme nouvelle’.
On 1 November 1868 Bordeaux hosted the first officially organized race between women on bicycles. Over a distance of 500 metres, ‘Mademoiselle Julie’ took first place and a gold watch, beating her competitors Louise, Louisa and Amélie. On frequent subsequent occasions, Les Dames “bordelaises” would race in carefully staged events combining sport and the emancipation of women, sexual titillation and the objectification of femininity. Female cycle racing was an activity that – even more than leisure cycling – inflamed the passions of moralists and medical experts. The protagonists were more often working-class girls making a living through the ‘spectacle’ of women's racing in the regular velodrome meetings that sprang up all around France in the 1880s and 1890s.
« La Première Course des Dames à vélocipède en France »
© Genre & Histoire
‘Le Grand Jacques’
In a famous guide to vélocipédie published in 1869 by the sporting journalist Richard Lesclide under the pseudonym of ‘Le Grand Jacques’ can be found a passage typical of the titillation of female cycle racing:
« Si l'on organise des courses de femmes, c'est probablement à cause de l'attrait particulier qu'elles présentent. Que les dames s'habillent en voyous, le but est manqué. Ces courses doivent présenter un caractère de grâce et d'élégance qui dépend surtout du costume féminin, de la souplesse des écuyères, et de leur façon de gouverner leurs montures… »
Le Grand Jaques
Dauncy, H. (2012). French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History. Liverpool Press Scholarship Online. Pg 37
And in a characteristic flourish of sexist voyeurism, the writer goes on to suggest that whereas pretty women with nice legs should show them off, others should refrain from doing so.
Dauncy, H. (2012). French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History. Liverpool Press Scholarship Online. Pg. 38
« l'usage du vélocipède est bon pour la femme. Il va sans dire qu'il sera modéré, en effet, je n'admets pas que la femme fasse des courses de vitesse. Qu'elles se livrent au tourisme en marchant à l'allure de 12 à 15 kilomètres à l'heure; très bien! Mais de la course à 20, 25 kilomètres à l'heure, non! »
The more serious Tissié, even in his more enlightened phase (1893), was disapproving of female racing. Although he essentially maintained that gentle cycling was acceptable, the crucial aspect of any female cycling activity was precisely ‘moderation’:
Moderation.
La Belle Otero and the Courtesans
The distinction has to be made, of course, between riding/racing by the wives/daughters/sisters of the middle-class males who expressed these restrictive views on how their female companions or relations should behave, and the riding and racing of the celebrated courtesans la Belle Otero and Emilienne d'Alençon in the Bois de Boulogne or Mlle Julie and les Dames bordelaises, ‘Miss America’, and the numbers of other women who made a living from cycling either in road races or on velodromes as part of the developing sports-entertainment industry. ‘Miss America’ (in reality a Mrs Turner) took part in the famous Paris–Rouen race of 7 November 1869, taking 29th place in a mixed field of 33 finishers. Pseudonyms were often adopted by female riders either to protect a family identity considered sufficiently bourgeois to be worth concealing (a trend already set by male riders involved in races where money was involved) or in reflection of the novelty/entertainment status of their activities. As the business of racing-entertainment matured and as female emancipation in society and sport progressed, some women began to race under their real identities. However, until the 1980’s women’s cycle racing was not taken too seriously.
During the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s debates raged in France, as in other countries, over the social, cultural, medical, sexual and political advisability of women's adoption of cycling as either recreation, transport or sport. Many studies have been made of women and cycling in these early years, and one recent analysis suggests that by about 1914, the realization by manufacturers that the market for female cycling was an untapped goldmine, combined with the drive for women's liberation, had finally won the right to cycle for French women. The realm of competitive cycling, however, remained difficult for women to access on equal terms with men, as those women-only races that existed were more often regarded as curiosities than proper examples of true sport. With the creation of the female version of the Tour de France in 1984, however, it could have
been assumed that attitudes and prejudices had moved on, but Longo's difficulties with the authorities perhaps suggest that the male-dominated sporting establishment of the
federations and the sporting media find it difficult to accept a female ‘Cannibal’.
The first women’s tour de France 1955
The women's Tours
The Tour de France féminin (invented by the Société du Tour de France) was first run in the summer of 1984 and attracted a starting field of 36 women. In a sport that had been dominated for decades by a traditionally macho attitude towards female participation, even as recreation, a women's Tour was a significant event. Since the early 1990s a variety of ‘women's Tours’ have been organized by competing organizations, with occasional years where no significant women's national stage-race was run, as cycle competition of this nature has struggled to establish itself in the face of gender bias, commercial difficulties and the institutional constraints of the international governance of cycle racing.
Le Tour de France au féminin
Outside the world of the Société du Tour de France, the sporting community worldwide had been recognizing that women had the right to compete regardless of previous biases against the ‘weaker’ sex's participation in endurance sports. In 1984, Los Angeles Olympics had included both a women's marathon and a women's bicycle road race for the first time. Culturally, French society in general and the world of cycling and of the Tour in particular were still not wholly at ease with the idea that women could compete in a sport traditionally deemed to be enormously demanding and, indeed, whose entire image had been manufactured around the notion of ‘extreme’ male physicality and suffering. Conventional interpretations still saw the Tour féminin as a difficult reconciliation of ideals of femininity and sporting effort and suffering. Although women's cycling had been recognized by the UCI and the FFC as a competitive sport since the 1950s, its development had been slow in the 1960s and early 1970s, and even by 1982 only 1,500 women were signed up as members of the FFC (out of a total membership of over 56,000). The women's Tour de France in its various and confusing forms has been a primary site of the renegotiation of French attitudes towards elite sport and gender roles. The discussions and debates about women and endurance sport (some of which continue today) have summarized much of France's enduringly macho attitudes towards femininity. As for the women’s version of the Tour, still today, continues to lack support and recognition as a legitimate sport.
