"With the waning of its popularity in fashionable circles, lawn tennis was saved by two developments. It became popular in the new suburbs and it spread like wildfire internationally. Women were increasingly interested in the game and beginning to play it seriously. This met with opposition from those who (unlike Maud Watson's father) felt that while it might be permissible for women and girls to play in the privacy of the country house park or the suburban vicarage garden, it was indecent for them to play in public. The Irish nevertheless introduced a women's event in Dublin in 1879 and in 1884 Wimbledon followed suit. There, at the age of nineteen, Maud Watson defeated her sister to win the inaugural championship. Tennis did not remain for long exclusive to Britain. The circumstances favouring its success were also present in France, and indeed across Europe and in the United States and Australia. France was in the grip of Anglomania at the end of the nineteenth century and the new game was soon all over the country, but especially on the Riviera. The wealth of French landed estates was dwindling by the beginning of the twentieth century; industrialists, businessmen and members of the professions benefited from a new spirit of enterprise and the belle epoque saw republicanism finally firmly established, together with an economic upturn and a cultural flowering. Tennis was associated with exclusive clubs and precisely expressed the aspirations of the bourgeoise. Leon de Janze reported that only 300 of the 800 members of the Societe Sportive de 'Ille de Puteau, one of the chicest Paris clubs at the turn of the century, actually played tennis. Many attended purely for the social life, for tea, dinner and dancing. Tennis player Coco Gentein described women playing in huge hats. Their skirts swept the ground, only occasionally allowing a glimpse of a foot shod in a white leather shoe with a heel."