Originally Posted by
francophile
I'll give a short at a decipher:
"Womens bike" = "really short" or "doesn't have a horizontal top tube"
"Racer" = "The word "race" or "racer", possibly "champion" or "sport" or "competition" appears somewhere on the bike.
In my experience, usually "womens racer" in Peugeot terms means it's a UO18/UE18 mixte with Mafac Racer calipers on it.
When I was selling Peugeot during the boom, it meant a Peugeot mixte with dropped, "racing" handlebars. Peugeot catalogued a lot of these. They go back to at least the boom era with the UO18C (the C suffix indicated "competition"). In my area, these were more popular with the young females than the UO18/UE18. The latter was more popular with the 30+ females.
Edit: Another possibility, at least in the Canadian market, was a women's proportional model offered in the late 1980s. It had the smaller 24" front wheel and was marketed specifically at female triathletes and thus was considered a racing model.