Katie Taylor
Nottingham Trent University

La Vie Jamais Racontée: Alice Milliat, a French Heroine and Sporting Suffragette
222 pages, hardcover, ill
Worthing, SX: Pitch Publishing 2024
ISBN 978-1-80150-727-1
If you followed this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris, it was hard to miss that this was the first to achieve “numerical” gender parity, with the same number of male and female athletes competing. However, few people will know much about Alice Milliat’s role in attempting to secure equal participation for men and women at the games. Nancy Gillen’s book aims to right this wrong and bring her story to the fore.
Gillen is well-placed to write about Milliat. She is a women’s content coordinator for GiveMeSport (an online sports news platform) and has covered various events, including the 2022 Women’s Euros, the Commonwealth Games, and Wimbledon. Her expertise led to her selection to be on the judging panel for the 2022 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. This background explains the very readable nature of the book. It is accessible to academics and a general audience and simply tells the story of Milliat’s life and her work to try and get gender equity in the Olympic Games.
The book takes a largely chronological approach to telling Milliat’s story. The first chapter provides a taster of what Milliat went on to achieve before turning to the early years of her life. This includes her two years in London, following her husband’s death when she was just 24, where she discovered a love of rowing. The chapter also contextualizes the situation for women’s sports in France and Pierre de Coubertin’s opposition to women’s inclusion in the Olympic Games. Chapters two and three focus on Milliat’s role in organizing women’s football in France and the matches played between a composite French team and the Dick, Kerr Ladies in both England in France. The chapters explain the rise and fall of women’s football in France up to the outbreak of World War Two.
The lack of broader interest in highlighting Milliat’s legacy is no more apparent than on the book’s final page, where the plan to name the Porte de La Chappelle Arena after Milliat was changed after Adidas won the naming rights.
From chapter four onwards, the focus is very much on Milliat’s role in women’s athletics as the International Women’s Sports Federation leader and her creation of the Women’s World Games, a direct challenge to the Olympic Games following the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) lack of progress in admitting women athletes. The chapters continue to tell Milliat’s story chronologically about her persistence in fighting for gender equality in the Olympics and the compromises she had to make in the face of misogyny and the Games’ male controllers. The book concludes with an assessment of Milliat’s legacy. As with other chapters, it includes discussions of the women who have benefitted from her advocacy, including Fanny Blankers-Koen, and the slow progress the IOC made to get to numerical gender equality. It also explores the fact that women still do not compete in all the same events as men and that the same gender equality is not evident in the Paralympics. The lack of broader interest in highlighting Milliat’s legacy is no more apparent than on the book’s final page, where the plan to name the Porte de La Chappelle Arena after Milliat was changed after Adidas won the naming rights. Gillen notes that as a way of compromise, a space near the venue was to be named after Milliat instead.
Some chapters take necessary sidetracks to deal with important broader issues that women athletes struggled with (including the English Football Association’s ban on women’s football on their pitches) and stories of influential sportswomen, including golfer Margaret Abbot and athlete Mary Lines). Such deviations demonstrate not only the sporting situation for women at the time but also how little is known about Milliat; without these stories, the book would be significantly shorter – if viable at all. This is not a critique of Gillen’s work but rather a recognition that stories of pioneering women often remain well hidden, and, in some cases, sources lost. Gillen is clear in the Introduction that as she learned more about the women who benefitted from Milliat’s fight, it was essential to tell these stories to continue filling the gaps in women’s sporting history. These deviations from the main story are dealt with well and do not detract from the book’s primary purpose. In some cases, the divergences are very brief. For example, when discussing Babe Didriksen, her story feels sanitized. Topics about how she was reported on in the media fail to capture the sexism and misogyny she faced. Most academics of women’s sports history will be very familiar with these additional stories, but the general audience may be surprised by these women who contravened societal expectations.

Gillen credits controversial IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch for the IOC’s eventual increase in women competing at the Games. However, there are more nuanced discussions to be had on this topic. For example, the often-repeated “numerical” gender parity celebration ignores that the IOC’s inclusion of women in decision-making and leadership roles is lacking, nor is their participation genuinely equal because of differences in event lengths, equipment, clothing, etc. (Donnelly, 2022). As Pape (2020) argues, the conditions of allowing more women to participate in the Games also maintained their male-dominated leadership. Gillen touches on these issues briefly, but the lack of depth on some topics means that the text is somewhat sanitized. However, this may be the product of ensuring that the book appeals to the broader public and is not an academic text.
The book is very much aimed at a general readership. This is made clear in the lack of referencing which means that many instances of quotations do not clearly reference where the information comes from. This makes it difficult for people to follow up on the material if they want. This may, however, be a stylistic recommendation from the publisher. Given the recent Olympics and the growing interest in women’s sports, this is a timely book. It is an easy read that a general audience interested in women’s sport will undoubtedly enjoy.
Copyright © Katie Taylor 2024