Rethinking sports history to include sportswomen in 1900s France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the history of French sport, the practice of physical activities by women is essentially considered non-existent before the 1920s, with the exception of a few aristocratic women. Although this idea persists, it has been challenged by recent research on early sportswomen. These studies raise the question of the scope of sports history, and indeed the very definition of sports itself. These are usually defined in the social sciences as physical activities that are organized, codified and institutionalized, structured by clubs and federations. While at the beginning of the 20th century these clubs and federations were most often closed to women, this does not mean that women were not practicing sports. Physical activities were gaining increasing popularity among women even before this time, and not only among the upper class. There is evidence of women swimming, cycling, racewalking, and even wrestling or boxing in the United States, Canada and Britain, as well as in France. These practices necessarily developed outside institutions, with women taking them up as individual pastimes. As demand grew, some sought to profit from this, and sports promoters organized the first competitions. Journalists then reported on these events in the press, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with disapproval. Yet the first women walkers, runners, cyclists and other athletes are only now beginning to appear in historical studies. This paper seeks to contribute to the rehabilitation of these sportswomen, who include working-class boxers and wrestlers, all of whom have long been subject to a double exclusion-institutional and historical. It presents the history of the first competitions of sportswomen-professional or amateur-in France at the turn of the century, a first foundation stone in writing a new and more inclusive history of sport.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".