The disciplinary dimensions of nineteenth-century gymnastics for US women

Abstract

This study examines the conditions and terms under which US discourses promoting gymnastics for women institutionalized those exercise regimens as vehicles of disciplinarity between 1830–1870. Specifically, it finds that those texts encouraged practices of medical examination and measurement along with a variety of additional, interconnected and significant disciplinary operations: economies of space, of distribution, and of order; logics of temporality, of individual development, and of social salvation; procedures of monitoring and of rendering normalizing judgments; mechanisms of review and of punishment through exercise; as well as the dynamics of panopticism and of self-monitoring. That array of disciplinary techniques, in turn, was meant to materially effect not only a healthy, orderly, and morally transcendent social body but also enlightened, disciplined, and idealized feminine subjectivities. As a consequence, this paper also asserts that the resistant potentialities of gymnastics for US women between 1830–1870 cannot be evaluated thoroughly without some consideration of modern power's nature, attributes, and applications.

Notes

[1] Hargreaves, ‘Victorian Familism’, 140; Mangan, ‘The Social Construction’, 6–7.

[2] Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 17–47. See also Wishy, The Child and the Republic, 70, 72–3; Melder, ‘Mask of Oppression’, 269–70; Tonkovich, Domesticity with a Difference, 149–50, 154, 160–61. Along similar lines, ‘An Account of Gymnastic Exercises at Mount Holyoke’ states that ‘We believe that the effect of gymnastics, on the whole, has been to promote the health and vigor of the family.’ See [Alice Gordon?], ‘An Account of Gymnastic Exercises At Mount Holyoke’, ca. 1870s, Hygiene and Physical Education Department Records, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College (hereafter cited as ‘An Account of Gymnastic Exercises at Mount Holyoke’ and as Mount Holyoke Hygiene and PE Records).

[3] See Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood.’ We also must remember that, from the third to the seventh decades of the nineteenth century, most of the discourses lauding gymnastics and calisthenics for US women were propagated as follows: in books, articles and chapters written exclusively with the perceived needs of women and girls in mind; in regimens initially devised for and imparted to girls attending female seminaries (then sometimes, as in Catharine Beecher's case, recommended subsequently to both girls and boys attending common schools); as well as in some texts, such as Dio Lewis's, that addressed both men and women, but portrayed the worth of the regimes depicted therein by stressing their admissibility for members of the female sex. In addition, nineteenth-century gymnastics fitted for US women often comprehended a greater total percentage of free exercises per se than systems conceived only for men and boys, occasionally incorporated balletic guidelines for the placement and usage of hands and feet, many times set gendered standards with regard to the appropriate sizes and weights of light apparatuses, and typically either eliminated or severely restricted and regulated any form of jumping. Furthermore, notwithstanding circumstances in which men and boys also may have been potential participants, gendered distinctions regarding the ways gymnastics discourses sought to shape female bodies also stemmed from the fact that those works contextualized their regimes both in relation to female invalidism and in relation to specific idealized embodiments and enactments of feminine subjectivity (which several noteworthy texts of the day associated with the Venus de' Medici's figure). Therefore, to an extent, although ‘[m]any of the ideologies of the age, and fundamental assumptions regarding the human body, were applied to both sexes’, as Roberta J. Park has written with respect to the century's end, ‘the contexts in which these were articulated were considerably different’. See Park, ‘Physiology and Anatomy are Destiny!?’, 35–6.

[4] Gymnastics for women were institutionalized in US academic contexts during the first hundred years that followed both the American Revolution and the establishment of the US as a republic (representative democracy). This was a time in which individuals, as early modern subjects of the Enlightenment, were increasingly implicated in the discourses of science and rational thought – discourses that challenged and modified (but did not eliminate entirely) conceptions of divine right and theological doctrine while accompanying and facilitating the persuasiveness of natural law and the mechanization of labour and life, as well as the onset of consumer culture and, in the end, of industrial capitalism. Therefore, although US gymnastics discourses disseminated between 1830 and 1870 predated what historians consider to be sufficiently choate realizations of modern society in the late-nineteenth-century US, and although they certainly cannot be deemed examples of modern sport per se, they were situated within Jacksonian (yet often Whiggist) and then more Victorian milieux that (ironically) fostered the slow, but inexorable, crystallization of modernity in the US. Acknowledging these facts, this enquiry refers more or less specifically to Enlightenment principles as ‘modern thought’, to the mechanisms of disciplinarity as related ‘modern technologies of power’ and to the more fully formed attributes of modern society in late-nineteenth-century US as ‘modernity’. Thus, modern thought and modern power influenced gymnastics for US women between 1830 and 1870, but those exercise systems resided outside the compass of modernity and modern sport.

[5] Hargreaves, ‘Victorian Familism’, 138–9.

[6] Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique’, 40–1. See also Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 65.

[7] Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique’, 38.

[8] Atkinson, ‘Fitness, Feminism and Schooling’, 129; Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique’, 38, 41. See also Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture, 161–81; Mangan, ‘The Social Construction’, 5–6.

[9] Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique’, 38.

[10] Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, 68. See also, for example, Bartky, ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’, 63–4; Theberge, ‘Reflections on the Body’, 125; Cole, ‘Resisting the Canon’, 86; McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 15.

[11] See, for instance, Atkinson, ‘Fitness, Feminism, and Schooling’; Bartky, ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’; Theberge, ‘Reflections on the Body’; Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Cole, ‘Resisting the Canon’, 86–93.

[12] Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman, 10–12. See also Vertinsky, ‘The Social Construction of the Gendered Body’, 148, 162–3.

[13] Vertinsky, ‘Sexual Equality’, 38, 41, 43–5; Borish, ‘The Robust Woman’, 141–4; Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society’, 62–5; Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, 6, 89, 112, 157, 159–60. Again, the present study proposes to establish the bases for future investigations to connect in even greater detail the subject matter related herein with the works of these and other historians, and to enable them to do so with an eye toward issues of race, class and sexuality. Along those lines, see Chisholm, Ladies of the House, and Chisholm, ‘Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics’.

[14] Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’, 1276.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 1288–94. See also Chisholm, ‘Incarnations’, 751–3.

[17] Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’, 1277–9, 1282–3, 1287–8.

[18] Ibid., 1284–6.

[19] Park, ‘Muscles, Symmetry and Action’, 370.

[20] Park, ‘Healthy, Moral, and Strong’, 131; Park, ‘Physiology and Anatomy are Destiny!?’, 46–8.

[21] Park, ‘Healthy, Moral, and Strong’, 135–6. See also Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 172. Importantly, as Young has argued, ideals with regard to athleticism were reinterpreted quite dramatically over time (‘Mens Sana in Corpore Sano?’).

[22] See Green, ‘Introduction’, 8.

[23] Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness; Verbrugge, Able Bodied Womanhood; Green, ‘Introduction’, 3–17.

[24] Walters, American Reformers, 146, 48–9, 153; Vertinsky, ‘Sexual Equality’, 42–3; Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 15, 34–6; Verbrugge, Able Bodied Womanhood, 50; Green, ‘Introduction’, 7; Engs, Clean Living Movements, 58, 171; Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 34.

[25] Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 167, 175. See also Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 5–7; and Engs, Clean Living Movements, 58.

[26] Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 5, 6, 33.

[27] Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 171.

[28] Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 18, 35; Green, ‘Introduction’, 7; Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 175.

[29] Accordingly, Beecher advanced the following argument: ‘All the strong motives of religion and of the eternal world are brought to bear … to enforce certain duties that are no more important to the best interests of man than those ‘laws of health’ which are so widely disregarded. And yet they are as truly the ‘laws of God’ as any that were inscribed by his finger on tables of stone’ (Physiology and Calisthenics, v).

[30] Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, 79, 84.

[31] Ibid., 11, 14, 78, 163, 172.

[32] Ibid., v, 172.

[33] Ibid., v, 78. See also Catalogue of the Officers and Members of Ipswich Female Seminary, 1839, 32, Ipswich Female Seminary Records, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College (hereafter cited as Ipswich Catalogues, Mount Holyoke and as Ipswich Female Seminary Records, Mount Holyoke); Powell, ‘Physical Culture’, 134.

[34] See also M., A Course of Calisthenics, 26; Student Diaries, 6 Dec. 1833, Ipswich Female Seminary Records, Mount Holyoke; Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 26, 32–5; Philbrick, ‘The Want of Physical Training’, 4.

[35] Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 169, 172, 190. See also Green, ‘Scientific Thought’, 122, 124; and Verbrugge, Able Bodied Womanhood, 18–62.

[36] Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 190.

[37] Ibid., 6, 9, 12, 169, 211.

[38] See, for example, M., A Course of Calisthenics, 26; Student Diaries, 6 Dec. 1833, Ipswich Female Seminary Records, Mount Holyoke; Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 66–70 (see also 9–12, 134–7); Lewis, ‘The New Gymnastics’, 137. In addition, consult Foucault's discussion of care (Discipline and Punish, 215; Foucault, ‘The Politics of Health’, 172–92).

[39] Gove, Lectures to Women on Anatomy and Physiology, 203.

[40] Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 54, 61.

[41] Ibid., 38. Catharine Beecher likewise described her Physiology and Calisthenics as upholding the ‘laws by which these curiously-arranged and nicely-adjusted instruments of happiness [human bodies] are to be made to fulfill their benevolent design’ (Physiology and Calisthenics, 78, 173).

[42] Vertinsky, ‘Sexual Equality’, 44–5; Borish, ‘The Robust Woman’, 142–4; Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society’, 65; Todd, Physical Culture, 112. See also Chisholm, ‘Incarnations’, 746–54; Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’, 1288–96. In 1871, Dio Lewis provided an extended list of the occupations that women might enter, but also retained those of (wife), mother, and housekeeper as crucial to healthy US womanhood. See Lewis, Our Girls, 131–72.

[43] See, for instance, Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 105; Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, 53, 154–5, 160–2; Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, 25–7. See also Chisholm, ‘Incarnations’, 741–2; Chisholm, ‘Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics.’

[44] Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, 154.

[45] See Patricia Vertinsky's reference to both Foucault's and Ruth Bleier's thinking in ‘The Social Construction of the Gendered Body’, 162–3.

[46] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136.

[47] Ibid., 139.

[48] Ibid., 141, 143. See also aspects of a twentieth-century case study in Vertinsky and McKay, Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium.

[49] M., A Course of Calisthenics, 82. With regard to gymnastics practiced indoors, see, for example: John Bell, Health and Beauty, 201–2; ‘An Account of the Gymnastics Exercises at Mount Holyoke’, Mount Holyoke Hygiene and PE Records; Fitzgerald, The Exhibition Speaker, 249.

[50] Tyler, ‘The New Gymnastics as an Instrument’, 257, 259.

[51] Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, iv–vi; Watson, Watson's Manual, 16–17; Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1146–7, 1149; Lewis, The New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children, 10^th edn, 16–18.

[52] Mildred S. Howard, ‘Physical Education at Mount Holyoke College 1837–1974’, May 1975, 1, Department of Physical Education Records, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College (hereafter cited as Mount Holyoke PE Records). Prior to the construction of its gymnasium, Vassar also held its gymnastics classes in corridors (Woody, A History of Women's Education, vol. 2, 118). Importantly, Foucault has maintained that, during the eighteenth century, educational institutions began distributing individuals according to rows and ranks in classrooms – and in their occupation of courtyards and corridors as well (Discipline and Punish, 146). For him, schoolrooms were early examples of zones that ‘are at once architectural, functional, and hierarchical’ (ibid., 148). Thus directives for organizing and practicing gymnastics exercises within such spaces merit our attention.

[53] Lieber, Review of A Treatise on Calisthenics and of The Elements of Gymnastics, 490; Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 40; Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, xii; Watson, Watson's Manual, 20–1; Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1149–50.

[54] Ellen G. Parsons, Graduating Essay, 1863, Alumnae Biographical File, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College (hereafter cited as Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke).

[55] First Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Vassar Female College, 1865–6, 18, 28, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College.

[56] Lewis, New Gymnastics, 1862, 14–16; Lewis, New Gymnastics, 1868, 10th edn, 16–18.

[57] Catharine Beecher suggested that four-inch black walnut squares should be inlaid five feet apart in gymnasium floors in order that each student would ‘have her appointed station, so as to have no confusion in arranging for exercise’: Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 39).

[58] Ibid., 39–40.

[59] Ibid., 39–40, 43; Watson, Watson's Manual, 20–1; Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1150.

[60] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 188.

[61] Beecher's Calisthenic Exercises, 39–41, 43. See also Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’, 1291–3.

[62] Lewis, New Gymnastics, 1862, 16.

[63] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143. With regard to primary sources, see for instance, ‘Courtesying around the circle.’ and ‘Fronting Columns’, Notebook Describing Calisthenics, 1846–8, Sarah Packard Holden Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College (hereafter cited as Holden Papers, Mount Holyoke). Also, the Ipswich Female Seminary may have either provided students with or asked them to traverse paths that were similar to those depicted in the diagrams found in Mount Holyoke's archives. Before she became Mount Holyoke's founder and first principal, Mary Lyon was an instructor at Ipswich. Both schools employed three series of calisthenics exercises, the first of which, as comparisons between the notes of Holyoke students and instructors and the notes of one Ipswich gymnastics instructor show, were practically identical. Along these lines, note the likeness among the following: Ipswich Catalogues, 1839, 28, Mount Holyoke; Zilpha P. Grant Banister, ‘Calisthenics’, [ca. 1830?], Zilpha P. Grant Banister Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College (hereafter cited as ‘Calisthenics’ and as Zilpha P. Grant Banister Papers, Mount Holyoke); Notes of Mary Titcomb, [ca. 1850?], Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke; Mary Titcomb, Calisthenic Exercises, 1867, Mount Holyoke PE Records. In much the same vein, whereas no diagrams were offered, Lewis's 1868 edition of the New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children also provided fairly detailed narrative constructions of the paths that were to be taken by students performing the exercises he developed (10th edn, 225–9).

[64] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 146.

[65] Ibid., 146–7.

[66] Ibid., Discipline and Punish, 149. See also 144, 148.

[67] Ibid., 148–9, 219.

[68] Ibid., 148–60.

[69] Ibid., 151, 157.

[70] Among those who maintained that students should master one exercise at a time, the following are numbered: M., A Course of Calisthenics, 32, 85; and Forrester, Minnie's Playroom, 24–5, 35, 43–4. Likewise, Lewis instructed students to progress slowly when learning his regimen, although he suggested that students learn five or ten exercises at a time (The New Gymnastics, 10th edn, 19–20; Lewis, Treasury, 543). At the Ipswich Female Seminary, students were prohibited from becoming familiar with its third series of exercises before they had learned the first and second (Ipswich Catalogues, 1839, 28, Mount Holyoke). Beecher allowed students to learn all 50 of her exercises at the outset, but directed that they only perform each only once on the first day ‘so as to learn the method’. At each session, another repetition along with incremental increases in quickness and force were to be added to each exercise (Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 9–10).

[71] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 151, 158–9. In addition to the example included in the main text, see also ‘Fig. 34’; M., A Course of Calisthenics, 47; ‘Hands Forward’, ‘Calisthenics’, [ca. 1830?], Zilpha P. Grant Banister Papers, Mount Holyoke; ‘Nine Changes’, Notebook Describing Calisthenics, 1846–8, Holden Papers, Mount Holyoke; Forrester, Minnie's Playroom, 38, 39; ‘Seventh Exercise’, Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, 183; ‘Club Practice’, Fitzgerald, The Exhibition Speaker, 256; ‘Sect. 15.’, Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1158–9.

[72] Lewis, The New Gymnastics, 10th edn, 30–1.

[73] Dio Lewis, for example, proclaimed that, with respect to the movements comprised by his regimen, ‘[t]he order is physiological’ (The New Gymnastics, 10th edn, 20–1). M. and Beecher both promoted regimens that progressed according an anatomical logic – as did Watson (M., A Course of Calisthenics, 27; Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, ‘Contents’; Watson, Watson's Manual, ‘Preface’, 25). Mount Holyoke's three series of exercises moved from a series of simple individual manoeuvres to more complex individual manoeuvres, to still more complicated partnered and group manoeuvres. Again, although we only have conclusive evidence that Ipswich's first series was nearly identical to Mount Holyoke's, we have some reason to conjecture that all three of its series progressed along similar lines.

[74] See, for instance, M., A Course of Calisthenics, 67–8; Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, 53, 154; Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, 25; Lewis, Our Girls, 360. See as well Chisholm, ‘Incarnations’, 741–2; Chisholm, ‘Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics’.

[75] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 160. Such regimes thus summoned not only regulation but also intervention, often in the form of rectification, at any instant in time.

[76] Ibid., 166. See also Atkinson, ‘Fitness, Feminism and Schooling’, 97–8.

[77] Notebook Describing Calisthenics, 1846–8, Holden Papers, Mount Holyoke. See also Beecher's ‘words of command’ (Calisthenic Exercises, 10); Forrester, Minnie's Playroom, 20–3; Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, 180; Fitzgerald, The Exhibition Speaker, 252–3, 265–6; Watson, Watson's Manual, 10; Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1152. Also, it is possible, but by no means definitively the case that the first series of calisthenics at both Mount Holyoke and the Ipswich Female Seminary relied on brief imperative phrases such as ‘hands to the side’, slow walking step', ‘meet elbows’. See ‘Calisthenics’, [ca. 1830?], Zilpha P. Grant Banister Papers, Mount Holyoke.

[78] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 166–7.

[79] Lewis's gymnastics, which were performed to music, appear to have included few, if any, commands and therefore may have been internalized still more thoroughly (New Gymnastics, 1862, 70). In the same vein, see also Watson, Watson's Manual, 14–15, 43–5; and Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1151–2. Prior to Mount Holyoke's adoption of Lewis's system, the fact that students sang as they performed calisthenics suggests, but does not conclusively prove, that this may have be the case with the school's second and third series as well.

[80] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 160. For instance, Ipswich did not allow first-term girls to learn the third series of exercises (Ipswich Catalogues, 1839, 28, Mount Holyoke). Likewise, at Mount Holyoke, the first series of exercises accompanied the first series of studies in the fall of each academic year, the second series were learned during the spring term that followed, the third series were taught throughout the year – although it is possible that the third series may have been taught during the same year as the first and second, given the progressive nature of the three series, this scenario does seem a bit unlikely. See Book of Duties, 1842, 46, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College (hereafter cited as Book of Duties, Mount Holyoke). At Vassar, classes were eventually organized by grades of health (Lillian Tappan, Annual Report of the Department of Physical Training, 1875–76, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College). Similarly, see ‘Health and Beauty’, 145.

[81] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 160–1. See also M., A Course of Calisthenics, 27–8; Mary Lyon, Female Education, 1839, 8–9, Mary Lyon Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College; Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, iii–vi; Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 42–3; ‘Health and Beauty’, 145; Fitzgerald, The Exhibition Speaker, 222–3; Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1146. In addition, see Chisholm, ‘Incarnations’; Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’; Chisholm, ‘Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics.’

[82] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 161.

[83] Ibid. With respect to repetition and difference, consider not only the example provided subsequently in the main text, but also the fact that Mount Holyoke's second and third series built upon motions and manoeuvres that were introduced in the previous two, while incorporating additional elements as well. See Notebook Describing Calisthenics, 1846–8, Holden Papers, Mount Holyoke; and Mary Titcomb, ‘Calisthenic Exercises’, 1867, Mount Holyoke PE Records. See also Forrester, Minnie's Playroom, 24–5, 32–4, 41–2, 49; Watson, Watson's Manual, 50–1; Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1160, 1169; Lewis, The New Gymnastics, 10th edn, 22–5. In a somewhat similar vein, Beecher's gymnastics for girls sometimes instructed girls to assume a particular position before beginning a set of repetitions and then instructed them to return to that same position in order to perform repetitions of a somewhat different exercise (Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 12–15).

[84] Fitzgerald, The Exhibition Speaker, 253; see also Forrester, Minnie's Playroom, 20–3.

[85] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 161.

[86] Ibid., 155.

[87] Ibid., 156.

[88] Fletcher, Women First, 18–19, 22; Park, ‘Hygienic and Educative’, 31; Park, ‘Biological Thought’, 8, 15; Park, ‘Healthy, Moral, and Strong’, 150; Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 48, 58, 69, 71–2; Todd, Physical Culture, 154. In The Prevention and Cure of Many Chronic Diseases by Movements, Roth describes the active system he advocates as follows: as having been extracted from ‘Ling's ‘Reglement’, a book introduced many years ago into the Swedish army for the sake of enabling the physician to prevent diseases by recommending the simplest movements . … Convinced of their great advantage if introduced into every school, we select the most important.’ See Roth, The Prevention and Cure, 122. Along similar lines, Roth's text The Gymnastic Free Exercises of P.H. Ling explains the ways his discourse intersects with multiple institutional investments: ‘The ultimate aim of rational Gymnastics is the harmonious development of the physical and psychical life of man; and this development may be attained by Ling's Free Exercises, which are an essential and complete branch of Pedagogical Gymnastics. Medical Gymnastics makes use of them principally in the after-cure or treatment of the convalescent. In Military Gymnastics they form the wrestling exercises; and Aesthetic Gymnastics consist of free exercises only’ (1). Ling therefore not only explicitly borrows the ‘word of command’ from ‘military exercises’ but also uses the same core course of movements for both students and soldiers (8–9, 15–39, 105–7). At the same time, Roth also recommends portions of Ling's system to ‘ladies, whether children or adults’ (viii). In fact, ‘[t]he anterior view of the thorax in the Venus of Medici’ faces the first page of Roth's introductory chapter to The Gymnastic Free Exercises of P.H. Ling. In these respects, then, we should not be surprised that US discourses promoting gymnastics for women often described the value of Ling's system with regard to health. See for example, Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 172–6; Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, 12–13.

[89] Park, ‘Healthy, Moral, and Strong’, 150; Todd, Physical Culture, 36. See also Catalogue and Circular of Dr Dio Lewis's Family School for Young Ladies, 1867, 15, used by permission of the Lexington Historical Society, Lexington, MA (hereafter cited as Lewis Family School Catalogue); Lewis, Our Girls, 388. Also, while Lewis apparently referred to Ling's more passive system as the ‘Swedish Movement Cure’ and while he utilized it ‘in the case of any who may need special treatment’, some controversy emerged regarding the relationship between Lewis's New Gymnastics per se and aspects of Ling's system (Lewis Family School Catalogues, 1867, 15, Archives, Lexington Historical Society, Lexington, MA; Todd, Physical Culture, 218–19).

[90] Park, ‘Healthy, Moral, and Strong’, 140; Park, ‘Biological Thought’, 15; Todd, Physical Culture, 37, 154. See also Beecher, Letters, 119–20; Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, 12–13. It does appear that Beecher was familiar with the brief chapter entitled ‘On the Importance of Gymnastics to the Healthy as well as to the Ailing’ (xi–xviii). Large portions of that chapter appear, in slightly revised form, in the introduction to her Calisthenic Exercises (iii–vi). Also, there are similarities between some of the exercises that appear in Roth's The Gymnastic Free Exercises of P.H. Ling and Beecher's Calisthenics Exercises, although they are not as striking as the parallels just mentioned.

[91] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 223. See also Gleyse, ‘Instrumental Rationalization of Human Movement’, 241–4.

[92] ‘Calisthenics’, ‘Hands over head’, [ca. 1830?], Zilpha P. Grant Banister Papers, Mount Holyoke [emphases added by author].

[93] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 155–6. See the patent spring exercise described by M., which she refers to in her writing as ‘Fig. 25’ (A Course of Calisthenics, 41–2). Likewise, see Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, 185; Fitzgerald, The Exhibition Speaker, 260; Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, iv; Watson, Watson's Manual, 63; Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1161–2; Lewis, The New Gymnastics, 10th edn, viii.

[94] ‘Thoughts on the Education of Females’, 351.

[95] ‘Thoughts on the Education of Females’, 351; M., A Course of Calisthenics, ‘Introductory Remarks’, 1, 54–6, 81–2; Bell, Health and Beauty, 202; Child, The Little Girl's Own Book, 242; Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, 18–19; Fitzgerald, The Exhibition Speaker, 247; Watson, Watson's Manual, 145. See as well Lieber, Review of A Treatise on Calisthenic and of The Elements of Gymnastics, 489–90; and Review of A Treatise on Calisthenic and of The Elements of Gymnastics, 430, 433. Also, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (‘Health of Our Girls’, 731) may possibly have accepted leaping in some form as well.

[96] Tyler, ‘The New Gymnastics as an Instrument’, 264.

[97] Ibid., 264.

[98] Duffin, The Influence of Physical Education, 97–8. See also M., A Course of Calisthenics, 27.

[99] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 155–6, 223.

[100] Philbrick, ‘The Want of Physical Training’, 4. See Beecher, Calisthenics Exercises, vi; Report of the Sanitary Committee, 1860, Health Service Records, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College; Endorsement by New York Observer, 147; Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, xii; Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1147–8; Lewis, ‘The New Gymnastics’, 129–30, 137.

[101] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 161–2. See also Vertinsky, ‘Sexual Equality’, 39, 43.

[102] Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 173.

[103] Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, 178.

[104] Ibid., 178–9.

[105] Park, ‘Healthy, Moral, and Strong’, 138–9, 145. See also Roberta J. Park, ‘Physiologists, Physicians, and Physical Educators’, 30, 43; Park, ‘Physiology and Anatomy are Destiny!?’, 47.

[106] With regard to concerns regarding gymnastics for US women and race see, for instance, Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 167, 172; Beecher, ‘Health of Teachers and Pupils’, 399–400; Higginson, ‘Barbarism and Civilization’, 68–9; Philbrick, ‘The Want of Physical Training’, 4; Tyler, ‘The New Gymnastics as an Instrument’, 265–6.

[107] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170.

[108] Ibid., 174. See also Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’, 1283–6.

[109] Ipswich's early catalogues indicate that students may have been instructed in vocal, music and calisthenics lessons either by teachers or by assistant pupils who initially were trained to do so in seminary classes themselves (1839, 29, Mount Holyoke). This certainly seems to have been the case at Mount Holyoke, where students such as Mary Titcomb eventually became paid calisthenics instructors for the school. See Mary Titcomb to My Dear Miss Blakely, 14 Jan. 1909, Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke; and From Mrs. J.B. Clark (Clara Henderson), Mary Ticomb, Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke. See as well Mary Lyon to My Dear Miss Backus, 30 Jan. 1846, Mary Lyon Letters and Documents 2, 249–50, Mary Lyon Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College; See also Persis Harlow McCurdy, ‘The History of Physical Training at Mount Holyoke’, 1909, 9, Mount Holyoke PE Records. Also see Watson, Watson's Manual, 9, 10. Likewise, the manifest purpose of Lewis's Normal Institute was to train students to become instructors of his system.

[110] See, for instance, Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 9, 40–2, 50; Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 175; Fitzgerald, The Exhibition Speaker, 265–6; Watson, Watson's Manual, 9–10. Mount Holyoke's records indicate that, in its third series, the first student in each section was a leader (but, crucially, there is no indication that the student participated in surveillance per se). Beecher also suggested that the leaders of each division oversee her students' physiology recitations, which were to occur immediately before gymnastics exercises commenced (Physiology and Calisthenics, vi). Beecher structured these recitations by providing questions to be asked and answered at the bottom of each page in Physiology and Calisthenics. These questions corresponded to the text of the page on which they appeared (and, presumably, to the exercises Beecher described thereafter). Under the supervision of their division leaders, one partner in each pair of students was to ask and to answer a set of questions individually while their counterpart listened. In this way, Beecher strategically used physiological knowledge to set the stage for exercise: through physiology lessons and recitations, she strove to create and to inculcate not only an understanding of the necessity for calisthenic exercise but also the will and desire to perform those exercises (and to obtain a particular kind of physique/physiological state, not to mention the attending mode of happiness, that body promised). In other words, in Foucauldian shorthand, Beecher created a setting in which her written discourse functioned as a discourse of power/knowledge, in which knowledge induced the effects of power.

[111] M., A Course of Calisthenics, 86.

[112] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 174. See also Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 40–2, 50; Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 175. Although Mount Holyoke may well have not integrated networks of surveillance into their gymnastics regimens, some available remarks on the subject of observation are enlightening: ‘without the most careful supervision, disastrous results would often follow either from exercising too long or too rapidly’ (‘An Account of the Gymnastic Exercises at Mount Holyoke’, Mount Holyoke Hygiene and PE Records).

[113] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143, 171, 173, 175. See also Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’, 1292–3.

[114] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 177. See also Vigarello, ‘The Life of the Body’, 162.

[115] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 180–1. See also Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’; Chisholm, ‘Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics’.

[116] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 177–9.

[117] Ibid., 179.

[118] Miss Rice, as quoted in McCurdy, ‘The History of Physical Training at Mount Holyoke’, 1909, 7, Mount Holyoke PE Records.

[119] Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 10, 51–3. With regard to correction, see also M., A Course of Calisthenics, 86; ‘An Account of the Gymnastic Exercises at Mount Holyoke’, Mount Holyoke Hygiene and PE Records.

[120] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 179–80. See also Atkinson, ‘Fitness, Feminism and Schooling’, 111–12.

[121] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 183–4.

[122] Ibid., 182–83.

[123] Ibid., 184.

[124] Ibid., 193.

[125] Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 11, 13; Powell, ‘Physical Culture’, 134; Lewis, Our Girls, 360. The following primary sources depict either the Venus de' Medici or the Venus de Milo as ideal corporeal models: Gove, Lectures to Women on Anatomy and Physiology, 205; Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, 153, 159; Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, 25–7; Elizabeth Powell, instructor in physical training, requests a cast of the Venus de Milo for the Vassar gymnasium, Powell, 1867, Vassariana, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College (hereafter cited as Vassariana); Seymour, ‘Fern Grove Gymnasium’, 111. See also Lewis, Treasury, 241–3.

[126] Tanner, A History of the Study of Human Growth, 32–3, 122–6; Vertinsky, ‘Embodying Normalcy’, 101; Park, ‘Muscles, Symmetry and Action’, 378.

[127] M. Adolphe Quetelet, as quoted in Tanner, A History of the Study of Human Growth, 123, 126, 128. See also Vertinsky, ‘Embodying Normalcy’, 101.

[128] Tanner, A History of the Study of Human Growth, 123, 129.

[129] M. Adolphe Quetelet, as quoted in Tanner, A History of the Study of Human Growth, 128, 438.

[130] As J.M. Tanner has observed, the history of measuring human bodies can be traced, in part, to Polyclitus (A History of the Study of Human Growth, 8, 33). Like the artists who would succeed him over the centuries into the Renaissance, the Greek sculptor's concern was fundamentally that of proportion as opposed to absolute size. Eventually, Galileo (1564–1642) ‘applied to his observations the rediscovered mathematics of the Greeks’ and scientific measurement took root in Europe at the University of Padua – the place where ‘Vesalius (1514–64) had reintroduced the dissection of the human body to Europe in the 1540s and … had laid the cornerstone of modern anatomy, and indeed of modern science, by extolling observation over authority’ (ibid., 66, 56–63). Yet, even Sigismund Elshotz (1623–88), ‘[t]he inventor of the term “anthropometry”’ and ‘the first medical man to concern himself with measuring the human body’, was inspired by the artistic tradition in so far as his concern was that Galen's balance of bodily humors be reflected by correct bodily proportion (ibid., 45, 47–8, 52). Although Galen's theories were superseded gradually, medical and scientific impulses with regard to measurement endured (ibid., 68). The measurement of foetuses, female pelvises and human children followed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (ibid., 66–97). Notable personages affiliated with art academies, meanwhile, began to measure statues (such as the Venus de' Medici) in order to determine the ideal laws of the human form (ibid.). Yet, notwithstanding this history of measurement, Tanner tells us that ‘[i]t was in relation to neither art nor medicine, however, that the practice of measuring grew up; it was because of military requirements’ (ibid., 98). Accordingly, although Roberta Park discusses the prior measurement of college men in the US, she also notes the significance of post-Civil War anthropometric studies during a time when ‘measuring bodies would become of considerable interest to some physicians and scientists, and a preoccupation of a large number of American physical educators’; likewise, she also illuminates a concurrent investment in classical sculpture and symmetrical bodies (Park, ‘Muscles, Symmetry, and Action’, 379–81, 375, 381, 383, 386, 387–8). See as well Park, ‘Biological Thought’, 22; and Park ‘Physiology and Anatomy are Destiny!?’, 49, 55–9. These three historical factors pertaining to measurement – a concern with symmetry (in relation to beauty and health), a veneration of classical sculpture and a tinge of military influence – all intersected with (and in some cases already were attributes of) gymnastics that were adapted to US women between 1830 and 1870.

[131] Lewis, Treasury, 317. See also Lewis, Our Girls, 360–1.

[132] Elizabeth M. Powell, Report of the Dept. of Physical Training, 1866–67, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College.

[133] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 180, 182–3.

[134] Ibid., 180–1.

[135] Wellesley Prelude 3 (17 Oct. 1891), 51–2, Archives, Collections, Wellesley College; Anthropometry: Measurements, 1884–95, Department of Health and Physical Education, Archives, Wellesley College; No. 725, 29 Oct. 1892–May 1896, Anthropometric Chart, Mount Holyoke PE Records; First Class, 1899, Book of Class Records, Department of Physical Education, Archives and Special Collections, Smith College; Smith College Monthly, Oct. 1899, 337–8, Archives and Special Collections, Smith College; Mabel Newcomer, ‘Physical Development of Vassar College Students, 1884–1920’, Dec. 1921, Quarterly Publication of the American Statistical Association, 976–82, Vassariana.

[136] Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique’, 38–57; Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society’, 75–6.

[137] Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique’, 43, 45, 51; Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society’, 75–6.

[138] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184.

[139] Ibid., 185–6.

[140] M., A Course of Calisthenics, 81.

[141] Ibid.

[142] Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 11, 13; Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics, 192; Powell, ‘Physical Culture’, 134; and Lewis, Treasury, 316–17.

[143] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 185–6; Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique’, 46–51; Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society’, 75–6.

[144] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184.

[145] M., A Course of Calisthenics, 81. See also Beecher, Calisthenics Exercises, 10; Lewis, New Gymnastics, 10th edn, 8; Report on Physical Training, June 1870, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College; Lewis Treasury, 273, 535.

[146] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 180.

[147] Ibid., 188–9; Atkinson, ‘Fitness, Feminism and Schooling’, 110–11; and Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique’, 48–51.

[148] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 189. See, for example, Watson, Watson's Manual, 21; and Royce, Physical Culture and Development, 1150.

[149] Watson, Watson's Manual, 20. See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 188.

[150] Book of Duties, Mount Holyoke, 46–7.

[151] With regard to graduation ceremonies consult, for instance: Mary C. (Smith) Leonard to Mrs. Elvira P. Smith/care of [illegible name] Smith, 3 (?) A. 1840, Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke; ‘Graduating Exercises of Dr Dio Lewis's Training School’, Dio Lewis Scrapbook, Springfield College; and Ticket to ‘Tenth Graduating Ceremonies of Dr. Dio Lewis's Training School’, Archives, Lexington Historical Society, Lexington, MA. With regard to anniversaries, see: Third Anniversary of Dr Dio Lewis's School for Young Ladies, Program for Anniversary from Young Ladies School, 4 and 5 June 1867, 6, Archives, Lexington Historical Society, Lexington, MA (Introduction, 2, 6); Anna E. Walker to My Dear Father, 25 Dec. 1849, Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke; Notes by Bertha Blakely, ‘Physical Education’, Mount Holyoke PE Records; McCurdy, ‘The History of Physical Training at Mount Holyoke’, 1909, 7, Mount Holyoke PE Records. With regard to gymnastics as entertainment in general, see ‘Manners and Customs of Past Age as Seen Through Student's Eyes’, 12 Nov. 1933, Springfield Union News and Sunday Republican, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College; and Seymour's fictionalized account (‘Fern Grove Gymnasium’, 110–12). See also ‘American Institute of Instruction, Interesting Proceedings’, New York Times, 27 Aug. 1860, 2; and Todd, Physical Culture, 228–9.

[152] See Notebook Describing Calisthenics, 1846–48, Holden Papers, Mount Holyoke; Book of Duties, Mount Holyoke, 46–7; Beecher, Calisthenic Exercises, 42, 47–8; Lewis, The New Gymnastics, 10th edn, 225–31; Seymour, ‘Fern Grove Gymnasium’, 111.

[153] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136, 188.

[154] Ibid., 187–8. With regard to clothing, see Anna E. Walker to My Dear Father, 25 Dec. 1849, Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke; Notes by Bertha Blakely, ‘Physical Education’, Mount Holyoke PE Records; Seymour, ‘Fern Grove Gymnasium’, 111; and Atkinson, ‘Fitness, Feminism, and Schooling’, 120. With regard to ‘geometry’, see, for example, ‘fronting columns’, ‘single columns’, and ‘double columns’, Notebook Describing Calisthenics, 1846–48, Holden Papers, Mount Holyoke; Mary MacLean, Calisthenics, February 1851, Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke; and Lewis, The New Gymnastics, 10th edn, 223–31.

[155] Seymour, ‘Fern Grove Gymnasium’, 111.

[156] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 187.

[157] Ibid., 189–90.

[158] Ibid., 191–2.

[159] Ibid., 183.

[160] Ibid., 190–1.

[161] Ibid., 199.

[162] Ibid., 199. See also Chisholm, ‘Incarnations’, Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’; Chisholm, ‘Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics.’ See as well Chisholm, Ladies of the House.

[163] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 193.

[164] Ibid., 208–9, 212.

[165] Ibid.,138, 212, 215–16, 220. In one interesting, though not necessarily generalizable case, the Georgia Female College (later Wesleyan College), a southern school for well-to-do girls, utilized military drilling during the Civil War and within a decade thereafter adopted calisthenics. See Rees, ‘A History of Wesleyan Female College’, 80–2.

[166] Todd, Physical Culture, 36–7, 42, 46, 52. Todd also has traced the use of the ‘Indian Club’ in women's gymnastics to military antecedents (‘From Milo to Milo’, 8–9).

[167] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 212. We should take heed, therefore, of the possibility that even a personage such as John Neal – noted literary figure, staunch if not radical Republican, friend of Mary Gove, admirer of Sylvester Graham, champion of women's rights, agitator for African-American equality, early US promoter of gymnastics for men (in print and in practice) and advocate of gymnastics for women (in print, in theory and possibly in practice) – might not have been exempted from such an eventuality. See Sears, John Neal, 98–110. Indeed, an ardent US proponent of utilitarianism and the author of a series on prison reform that owed a clear debt to his familiarity with Bentham's Panopticon, Neal first encountered gymnastics while acting as Bentham's secretary in London (Sears, John Neal, 112). After both attending the Regent's Park gymnasium sponsored by Bentham and participating in the German regime taught there by Carl Volker (student of the Turners' founder Friedrich Ludwig Jahn), Neal returned to the US, published a few articles favouring gymnastics for women, and opened his own short-lived gymnasium for men in Portland, Maine. See Constitution of the Portland Gymnasium, 1828, 10, Archives, Maine Historical Society, Portland, Maine; ‘Gymnastics’, Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette 1 (2 April 1828), 108–9. See also Leonard, A Guide to the History of Physical Educati, 244, 252; and Todd, Physical Culture, 44–5. Registered among its honorary members was one Jeremy Bentham. The terms and tenor of Neal's relationship with Bentham were disputed at the time. Moreover, as Peter J. King has argued, although Neal relentlessly touted his relationship with Bentham, he rarely engaged with the substance of the latter's utilitarianism (and may actually have hindered the reception of Bentham's writings in the US). We might, however, note the coincidence that, as King has indicated, Neal did explicate one text in a fashion that ‘was certainly above average’– Bentham's Panopticon (King, ‘John Neal as a Benthamite’). Neal also did so in his periodical, the Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, which, as indicated heretofore, also promoted gymnastics.

[168] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201–3.

[169] Foucault, ‘Eye of Power’, 155.

[170] Chisholm, ‘Gymnastics and the Reconstitution of Republican Motherhood’, 1283–4, 1287–8, 1291–2.

[171] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 208.

[172] Mangan, ‘The Social Construction’, 6.

[173] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 222–3. See also Foucault, ‘Eye of Power’, 152–3, 155.

[174] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 223.

[175] Mangan, ‘The Social Construction’, 6.

[176] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 219; Foucault, ‘Body/Power’, 56–7.

[177] Kerber, Women of the Republic, 284; and Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 299.

[178] Scholarly research has tended to consider women's rights primarily in relation to the more general realms of health reform, of physical education generally and of sporting activities (which emerged during the last decades of the nineteenth century). Yet sports studies also has observed important differences between sport and nineteenth-century gymnastics for women (and men) – to the extent that, in spite of some overlap between the two, claims concerning the former do not necessarily hold with respect to the latter (much less hold in the same way, without qualification etc.). Furthermore, during the nineteenth century, physical education was an expansive moniker that may have signified any one or a combination of the following: gymnastics, walking, dancing, riding or instruction in physiology and anatomy. Consequently, the term may or may not have comprised gymnastics for women. See, for example, Park, ‘Embodied Selves’, 6, 34 (fn.5); Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society’, 65; Park, ‘Healthy, Moral, and Strong’, 136–7. Thus, absent direct references in primary texts that gymnastics were matters of interest, we cannot be certain that this was the case. These facts do not mean that we should not pursue earnestly the lines of inquiry pertaining to women's rights established in relation to women's sport and, especially, physical education. Rather, they prompt us to map quite closely the terrain with which we are expressly concerned herein: that common to women's rights and to women's gymnastics per se. Proceeding along these lines, we can discern several important circumstances that might inform future research. Although extant materials do not indicate that he discussed these two commitments in proximity to one another prior to 1870, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a supporter both of women's rights and of gymnastics for women (often Dio Lewis's). Similarly, Dio Lewis also supported women's rights; but his gymnastics discourses did not raise the question until 1871, when, as discussed in the main text, Our Girls did so directly. One rather rare example of a women's rights discourse that specifically considers gymnastics per se is Elizabeth Cady Stanton's‘Address to the American Equal Rights Association on the Occasion of their First Anniversary’ (1867). There, she made the following observations: ‘Dio Lewis is rapidly changing our ideas of feminine beauty. In the large waists and strong arms of the girls under his training, some dilettante gentleman may mourn a loss of feminine delicacy. So in the wise, virtuous, self-supporting, common-sense women we propose as the mothers of the future republic, the reverend gentleman may see a lack of what he considers the feminine element. In the development of sufficient moral force to entrench herself on principle, need a woman necessarily lose any grace, dignity or perfection of character?’

[179] See, for instance, Park, ‘Embodied Selves’, 5; Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman, 15; Todd, Physical Culture, 7.

[180] See, for example Verbrugge, Able Bodied Womanhood, 192; and Guttmann, Women's Sports, 133–4.

[181] Verbrugge, Able Bodied Womanhood, 42–3.

[182] Park, ‘Embodied Selves’, 6. Moreover, Roberta Park asserts that ‘[I]t is generally agreed, however, that the initiation of physical education at Vassar College in the 1860s … launched the movement to make physical education a part of the formal curriculum for women’ (‘Physiology and Anatomy are Destiny!?’ 44).

[183] In this respect, the disciplinary characteristics of those gymnastics regimens deemed appropriate for US women reaffirm the import of the thesis advanced by and the dynamics chronicled within Roberta Park's essay ‘Embodied Selves’. Specifically, with regard to gymnastics regimes per se, the existence of disciplinary attributes signals the need to examine the dual implications (both the potentialities and the pitfalls) of ‘[t]he [resulting] role of the perception of one's – in this case woman's – corporal being in the establishment of selfhood’ (5).

[184] This is not to say that men were exempted from the machinations of modern power. As Foucault's extensive body of work has shown, they were subjected to it as well. This study, however, has focused upon the terms and conditions under which gymnastics for women were institutionalized in the nineteenth-century United States. In doing so, it has demonstrated that the context in which this particular investment of modern power occurred was one wherein certain conceptual and social advances for women also had been actualized. As a consequence, this essay does not assert that discourses promoting nineteenth-century US gymnastics empowered men and disempowered women: indeed, gymnastics for women often were meant to help enhance mothers' and teachers' institutional, social and (often quasi-)civic authority; and men's gymnastics often were vehicles of disciplinarity. This study does argue, however, that those texts advancing gymnastics for women between 1830 and 1870, along with the physical practices they many times entailed, encouraged women to invest themselves in the operations of modern power and, concomitantly, to constitute themselves as social subjects along specific lines in ways that often (though not always) reinforced and elaborated certain pre-existing contextual conditions with regard to gender roles.

[185] The enjoyment referred to in the main text is inclusive of, and largely grounded in, the physical dimensions of the pleasures that may have been derived from participation in gymnastics. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 180; Foucault, ‘Body/Power’, 56–7; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 44.

[186] Lewis, Our Girls, 131–72, 178–80.

[187] Lewis, Our Girls, 102, 110–18, 361, 363–80. See also Todd, Physical Culture, 274. With regard to Lewis's reinforcement of existing gendered ideals, see Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness, 279, and Vertinsky, ‘Body Shapes’, 269. Furthermore, the factors described in the main text, particularly those pertaining to disciplinarity, may have been numbered among those that thwarted the success of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's attempts at resistance via exercise (which included a later, somewhat more rigorous gymnastics system than many of those that appeared within the time span described in this study). For an analysis of Gilman's endeavours along these lines, see Vertinsky, ‘Feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Pursuit’, 5–26; also see Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman, 204–33.

[188] See, for instance, Todd, Physical Culture, 1–2, 52–5, 57–8, 107, 185–6, 242–4, 244–7, 294. Also consult Todd, ‘The Classical Ideal’, 10–13; and Todd, ‘Against All Odds’, 4–14.

[189] See also Todd, Physical Culture, 185–6.