That article focuses on the period 1911 to 1915, on the Olympic Games in Stockholm (1912) and the Olympic Games in Berlin of 1916 that were not convened. It is analysed a crucial stage for physical education, hygiene, health and sport in Spain, from the perspective of the involvement of women in physical education and the first women’s sport practices.

The analysis is based on the publications Stadium and El Explorador Español, because both of them share the aim to disseminate the sport, to reflect on the consequences of physical education, and to try to create a narrative about sport in the period before mass sport. That is the foundational moment of the infrastructures and the genesis of a culture that will quickly become a model for modernity.

It is noticed a high presence of women in the first manifestations of physical education and sports. The specialized publications are consistent with the role of women in modernity, as a mother, educator, leisure consumer, and practicant of new modern sports.

Two basic questions are contemplated: on the one hand, the role assigned to women in physical education and sports, and on the other hand, the debate that sport publications open on the relationship of women with sports, in a first and incipient phase for sports in general and about womens’s sports.

Women’s sports had a certain visibility in Spain, despite the pessimistic generalized analysis of the weight of physical education in the school system. Modern sports industries claim the presence of women.