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Popular Culture Review
numbers starting in 1900, although in accordance with the late-nineteenthcentury ideology of “separate spheres”: separate events, separate standards. In
1922, the Federation Sportive Feminine Internationale sponsored the first
Women’s Olympic Games, but the experiment did not get far. While many
women disliked competition and the increasing commodification—even then—
of sport and athletes, many other women, while accepting the segregation of
events by sex, wanted at least to be at the same Games as the men. At the same
time, as was the case at the level of college sport in America, male sport
organizers gained increasing control of women’s competitions (Cahn 59),
drawing women’s events into the Olympics while coming to dominate the
governing bodies of the Games and international sport federations.
In the first half of the twentieth century, women’s involvement in the
Olympic Games was concentrated in “feminine” sports like swimming or figure
skating