‘Embodied Selves’: The rise and development of concern for physical education, active games and recreation for american women, 1776–1865

Abstract

A contributor to the Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775 encouraged greater acknowledgment of the rights of women even though their duties in life might differ from those of men. Before long the Massachusetts Magazine began a series titled ‘On the Equality of the Sexes’ in which Judith Sargent Murray asserted that it was the limited education, employment and recreation permitted women that enervated the body and debilitated the mind. Charles Brockden Brown did likewise in his 1798 book Alcuin. By 1865 numerous Americans had spoken out in favour of greater opportunities for girls and women and recommended more participation in active games and healthful recreations. Among the more moderate were Emma Willard (who established the Troy Female Seminary), Sarah Josepha Hale (editor of the American Ladies Magazine), and Catharine Beecher (who established the Hartford Seminary and wrote extensively on the topic). British-born Frances Wright and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, both dedicated supporters of ‘woman's rights’, were especially forceful in their arguments in favour of political and other opportunities for women. Fuller would have girls learn to excel in a race, swim, and use every exercise that could impact vigour to their bodies and independence to their minds. Stanton declared in 1850 (much as Mary Wollstonecraft had done in 1792): ‘We cannot say what the woman might be physically, if the girl were allowed all the freedom of the boy, in romping, swimming, climbing, and playing hoop and ball’. Educational, medical, and other journals also took up the topic. Physician William Andrus Alcott condemned ‘errors in the physical education of young women’ in Young Woman's Book of Health (1850) and questioned whether their inferior strength and endurance might not be due to their ‘mis-education’. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to graduate from a proper medical school and author of The Laws of Life, With Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls (1852), was convinced this was so, stating that women no less than men could not live as ‘disembodied spirit’.

Notes

This essay was originally published in the Journal of Sport History 5, 2, (1978): 5–41.

[1] One of the charges made against Mistress Hutchinson was that she failed to teach women ‘that which the Apostle commands, viz., to keep at home’: Antimonianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1636–8, Prince Society Publications 21, Boston, 1894, 167, cited in Flexner, Century of Struggle, 352. For a somewhat different interpretation of the manner in which the proper role of colonial women was viewed see Ulrich, ‘Vertuous Woman Found’, 40: ‘Unwilling or unable to transfer spiritual equality to the earthly sphere, ministers might understandably begin to shift earthly differences to the spiritual sphere, gradually developing sexual definitions of the psyche and soul’.

[2] As of April 1978 only 35 states had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972, (three subsequently sought to rescind their affirmative votes). With regard to efforts to enforce the law banning discrimination by educational institutions that receive Federal aid, (in particular, those efforts pertaining to athletics and physical education) see, HEW News, 18 June 1974; ‘Education Programs and Activities Receiving or Benefiting from Federal Assistance. Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex’, Federal Register 39, 120, Part 2 (20 June 1974); Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, Memorandum from Leotus Morrison, AIAW President, to President of AIAW member institutions (5 Nov. 1974); ‘What Constitutes Equality for Women in Sports?’ Project on the Status of Women, Association of American Colleges, 1974; ‘Revolution in Women's Sports’, Women Sports 1 (4) (Sept. 1974): 34–56; ‘Women's Sports. There are Some Growing Pains’, Los Angeles Times, 23 April 1975.

[3] The revival of interest in the history of women's movements and women's achievements has resulted in numerous new publications as well as in the reissue of many works. For example: Smith, Daughters of the Promised Land; Bird, Enterprising Women; Cott, Root of Bitterness; Goulianos, By A Woman Writ; Gould and Wartofsky, Women and Philosophy. Schneir, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, xi, has pointed out that ‘The vast majority of women are unaware or the great feminist writings of the past. … In short, women have been deprived of their history’.

[4] See for example Branca, Silent Sisterhood; Davis, The First Sex; Hammer, Women: Body and Culture; Boston Women's Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves; Smith-Rosenburg and Rosenburg, ‘The Female Animal’.

[5] As Spears and Swanson have recently noted (History of Sport and Physical Education, xi), although in the twentieth century sport has become the ‘dominant component’ of physical education, ‘in the early days of the United States, sport as such existed in a nebulous form’. The term ‘physical education’ has been given a variety of definitions in the past two centuries, and even today there is far from total agreement concerning its exact meaning. Some limit its use to the pedagogical sphere, while others favour a broader scope. At the least, the term has seemed to include those types of endeavours that have a concern for hygiene, exercise, diet, rest, proper clothing, developmental play, active pastimes and recreations and simple games.

[6] Quoted in Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 16–17. The majority of Americans were convinced, of course, that it was divine providence that predetermined such inequality. For a discussion of popular attitudes towards women in England in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, (with some observations on women in America) see Crow, The Victorian Woman.

[7] Riegel, American Feminists (preface), contends that there were two independent lines of development. ‘One was the ideological approach, which derived directly from the ideas of the Enlightenment, and which was of prime importance to the first feminists. The other was the economic changes that made possible in fact the objectives for which the feminists fought.’ Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman has been referred to as one of history's most important statements regarding ‘human rights unobstructed by any sexual bias’. See Charles W. Hagelman's introduction to the Norton Library edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The ‘Memoirs of the Late Mrs Godwin Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ were printed in several issues of The Ladies' Monitor in late 1801; this same journal had announced in August 1801 an anticipated publication of ‘A Second Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, by an American Lady. For a discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft's views on physical education see: Park, ‘Concern for the Physical Education of the Female Sex’. For a useful discussion of how ‘enlightenment faith in liberty and equality’ concerning the power and potentiality of women suffered at the hands of nineteenth-century (biological) science, see Alaya, ‘Victorian Science and the “Genius” of Women’.

[8] Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, 75. Earnest, The American Eve In Fact and Fiction, 10–28.

[9] Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, 130. The editor suggests that the 1778 letter may not have been sent. As late as 1809 and 1814 Mrs Adams was still asserting that there was need to provide American women with a more extensive education, albeit one in keeping with their expected roles as wives and mothers: Ibid., 265; 278–9. Mercy Otis Warren, whose History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) is considered by some to be a major political work, suggested in her private correspondence that women should only appear to be uniformed and inferior but never be so. Noted in Friedman and Shaffer, ‘Mercy Otis Warren’.

[10]The Pennsylvania Magazine: Or American Monthly Museum (Aug. 1775), 363–5. It has been suggested that the author of this statement was Thomas Pame, editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine. However, Smith, ‘The Authorship of “An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex”’, contends that the article was a filler item taken from the European press and probably written in French by a Mr Thomas.

[11]Massachusetts Magazine, March 1789, 28–9. Benson, Women In Eighteenth Century America, 214–15, maintains that ‘much of the most interesting material dealing with women came not from the ladies’ magazines but from the pages of [magazines] … designed for general circulation’.

[12]Massachusetts Magazine, April 1790, 223. From February 1792 to December 1792 the Massachusetts Magazine carried Mrs Murray's further pronouncements on the status of women in America in a series titled ‘The Gleaner’, Benson, Women In Eighteenth Century America, 172–7.

[13] Quoted in Goodman, Benjamin Rush, 313–14. Dr Rush was an early American proponent of physical exercise. In 1772 he delivered a ‘Sermon on Exercise’ in which he declared: ‘Man was formed to be active. The vigor of his mind, and the health of his body can be fully preserved by no other means, than by labor of some sort.’ Rush listed a number of exercises that would be beneficial, indicating that these needed to be varied according to the age, sex and temperament of the individual: he also observed that women had less need of active exercise than had men. In Runes, The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, 358–72.

[14]The Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces and 1nteresting Intelligence (Feb.–April 1798); Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America, 180–4. Blinderman, American Writers on Education, 99.

[15] Brown, Alcuin, 23–6, 56–60, 92–3, 102; Clark, Charles Brockden Brown.

[16] Martineau, Society in America, 245–59. In ‘How to Make Home Unhealthy’, 601–19, she ridiculed the fashion that forbade to girls and women any type of vigorous physical activity. The extent to which women were considered to be physically and mentally inferior to men – and the restrictions placed on their ownership of property, the wages they earned and even the right to the custody of their own children – has been discussed by numerous authors. See for example, Merriam, Growing Up Female In America; Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood’; O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave, 7; Conrad, Perish The Thought, 95–104. The abolitionist Sarah Grimke pointed out that there was good reason to believe that women in earlier periods of history had enjoyed substantially greater advantages than did women in 1837. See her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. Dulles, A History of Recreation, 95–8, maintains that ‘In Colonial days they [women] had been able to enter far more fully into both the work and the recreation of men. … they enjoyed as spectators if not as actual participants whatever amusements were available’. The title of a recently published book by Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, aptly sums up the plight of women in the nineteenth century.

[17] Mather, Observations On The Real Rights of Women, 18–20, 56–8.

[18] Thompson, Education for Ladies, 42, has declared: ‘No matter what the concept of women's sphere, from the many who, in practice, confined it to the parlor, to the few who aspired to break all bonds asunder and let her have the same opportunities as man, with all the shades of difference between these two extremes, there was one point of agreement – women should be educated’. One of the more comprehensive treatments of ‘physical education’ for girls and women in America from the 1820s to the 1860s may be found in Woody, A History of Women's Education, 98–136.

[19]American Journal of Education 1 (1) (Jan. 1826), 19–23.

[20] Ibid., 61. Russell was acquainted with the New England educational innovator Amos Bronson Alcott, with Elizabeth Peabody and with other members of the so-called ‘Transcendentalist’ group interested in new forms of education and also in the ‘perfection of the body’. See Park, ‘The Attitudes of Leading New England Transcendentalists’.

[21]American Journal of Education 1 (6) (June 1826), 349–52.

[22]The Boston Medical Intelligencer had begun publication in 1823. In late 1826 the American Journal of Education reported that Dr J.G. Coffin, MD had recently become the editor of the aforementioned journal, noting that Dr Coffin had already contributed several articles to the American Journal of Education (some of these dealing with ‘physical education’) 1 (10) (Oct. 1826), 633.

[23][Barnard's]American Journal of Education, 25 (June 1864), 608.

[24] Fowle, ‘Gymnastic Exercise for Females’; Fowle, ‘The Animal Mechanism and Economy’; Woody, A History of Women's Education, 109–10.

[25]Parent's Friend: Or Extracts from the Principal Works of Education … was first published in London in 1802. An American edition appeared in 1803.

[26]American Journal of Education, 2 (1) (Jan. 1827), 37–43.

[27]American Journal of Education, 2 (5) (May 1827), 289–92; 2 (6) (June 1827), 339–40.

[28] Voarino, Treatise on Calisthenic Exercises.

[29] Hamilton, The Elements of Gymnastics for Boys.

[30]American Journal of Education, 2 (7) (July 1827), 428–32.

[31] William A. Alcott, who often commented on the physical education of the female sex in his voluminous writings on health, joined Woodbridge as associate editor. Woodbridge changed the name to the American Annals of Education.

[32]American Annals of Education, 3 (1) (Jan. 1833); 6 (2) (Feb. 1836).

[33]The Massachusetts Teacher, 2 (2) (Dec. 1849), 368–9; 3 (3) (March 1850), 65–8; 3 (8) (Aug. 1850), 244–7; 8 (9) (Sept. 1855), 265–7; 8 (11) (Nov. 1855), 343–4; 9 (12) (Dec. 1856), 550–6, 561–5.

[34]Common School Journal, 1 (Nov. 1838); 2 (Sept. 1840); 5 (Nov. 1843); 7 (June 1845).

[35][Barnard's]American Journal of Education, 6 (Sept. 1856), 399–408; 8 (March 1857), 139–46; 20 (March 1860), 185–215; 23 (Dec. 1860), 527–38; 25 (June 1861), 597–680; 27 (June 1862), 513–62; 29 (Dec. 1862), 665–700; 34 (March 1864), 61–8.

[36]The American Monthly Magazine 1 (8) (Nov. 1829), 541–6. The author concluded that the world would profit from ‘substituting works on Physical Education for those entitled “Universal Doctors”, and “Family Physicians”’. This same issue also referred to works of Sarah Josepha Hale and Lydia Sigourney.

[37]New York Free Enquirer, 3 (26) (23 April 1831), 205–7. See also New Harmony Gazette, 2 (14) (3 Jan. 1827), 109. In the early 1830s Frances Wright was associated with the Free Enquirer, a continuation of the New Harmony Gazette. For an assessment of the New Harmony settlement's views on physical education see: Park, ‘Harmony and Cooperation’.

[38]‘Of the Exercises Most Conducive to Health in Girls and Young Women’, American Farmer, 9 (32) (Oct. 1827), 254; ‘On the Quantity of Exercise Proper for Girls and Young Women’, ibid., 10 (34) (Nov. 1827), 270–1; ‘Education of Girls’, ibid., 11 (41) (Dec. 1829), 325–6. See also Berryman, ‘John Stuart Skinner’.

[39] Shryock, Medicine and Society, ch. 4. Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls, 26–8, claims that one of the inconsistencies that feminists objected to most was the proclamation that women were weak and fragile, yet they were constantly assigned physically demanding chores at home and on the farm. See also Rowbotham, Hidden From History, 39–46.

[40] Baker, Views Of Society, 215–22. See also: Rossi, The Feminist Papers, 105–7. Frances Wright, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary Shelley, believed in freedom in just about everything for everyone. Her public advocacy of such freedoms brought the accusation that she favoured atheism and free love. The term ‘Fanny Wrightism’ came to be associated with those women who had the audacity to speak out in public.

[41] Rossi, The Feminist Papers, 113–15. In a lecture titled ‘Of the more important divisions and essential parts of knowledge’, she stipulated (Wright, Course of Popular Lectures, 6) that ‘We must allow this to be important. If any thing concerns us, it should be our bodies and minds. What do we understand of their structure? What of their faculties and powers? If we understand not these, how may we preserve the health of either?’

[42] Lutz, Emma Willard.

[43] Willard, A Plan for Improving Female Education. The original, printed by J.W. Copeland in 1819, bore the subtitle An Address to the Public, Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education.

[44] MacLean, ‘Zilpha Polly Grant’; Woody, A History of Women's Education, 113; Goodsell, Pioneers of Women's Education, 5.

[45] Lansing, Mary Lyon Through Her Letters, 102–3, 232–3. Emily Dickinson wrote from Mount Holyoke Seminary on 6 Nov. 1847: ‘At 12, I practice calisthenics and at 12 1/4 read until dinner’ (Angle, The American Reader, 272).

[46] The ‘oscillator’ was described as a kind of weighted balance-board invented by James Q. Casey, Esq.

[47]‘La Grace’ was played by two young ladies, each holding a stick of about one foot in length in each hand, who toss back and forth to each other ‘a small light hoop of wood, about nine inches in diameter … bound with ribbon, which is tastefully tied in a bow on each side’. (An almost identical game was demonstrated by an exhibitor at the 1977 national convention of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education and Recreation).

[48]‘M’, A Course of Calisthenics for Young Ladies, 60–3, 70–1, 81.

[49] Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 59.

[50] Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy.

[51] Beecher, Letters to the People On Health and Happiness. Ms Beecher was attracted to the ‘water cure’ and discussed this at some length in Letters to the People. The Water Cure Journal, published in the 1840s, occasionally discussed the influence of fashion upon health.

[52] Beecher, Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families. To this edition is added Calisthenic Exercises for Schools, Families and Health Establishments.

[53] Ibid., iii–58.

[54] Ibid., 152–79; Calisthenic Exercises, 51–3. Such concern was well-founded. Writing in the late 1850s, Thomas Colley Grattan, former British consul for the state of Massachusetts, observed that American women were pretty and had slight figures but that ‘compressions, by means of assassinating whalebone, was the cause of many a premature death, and of most defective figures to the squeezed-in survivors’; he also felt that abstinence from wholesome exercise arose from a ‘very mistaken modesty’ (Grattan, Civilized America, 55–6).

[55] Beecher, Suggestions Respecting Improvements, 7–9, 56.

[56] Ibid., 75.

[57] Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 94–7, 101–2, 113–14, 235, 246. Mrs Sigourney did not wish, however, to upset the established order of nature; while the sexes might differ (all as a part of ‘Divine Order’) this did not imply that one was inferior, 179.

[58]American Ladies' Magazine, 1 (1) (Jan. 1828), 1, 21–7. Finley, The Lady of Godey's, 17, goes so far as to state: ‘She was the first to stress the necessity of physical training for her sex: she was the first to suggest public playgrounds.’ Although she may not have been the first, Sarah Josepha Hale was surely one of the earliest American ladies to make a concerted appeal for healthful physical activity for women.

[59]American Ladies' Magazine 2 (1) (Jan. 1829), 89–90; 2 (10) (Oct. 1829), 485–6; 13 (1) (Jan. 1830), 46–7.

[60] Boyer, in Notable American Women, 111–2. When the question of medical education for women arose Mrs Hale gave her rather cautious support, on the condition that the women receive their education in separate medical schools.

[61][Godey's]Lady's Book, 23 (July 1841), 41–2.

[62] Fuller, ‘The Great Lawsuit’.

[63] Fuller, Woman In the Nineteenth Century. It had been hoped that Margaret Fuller might preside over the first National Woman's Rights Convention at Worcester, Massachusetts, 23–24 October 1850. However, she, her husband and their small son were lost in a shipwreck off the coast of New York while returning from Italy. See: Robinson, Massachusetts in the Woman's Suffrage Movement, 19–41.

[64] The New England ‘Transcendentalists’ were generally supportive of a much more liberal education for women than was then the vogue. For an assessment of their views concerning ‘physical education’ see: Park, ‘The Attitudes of Leading New England Transcendentatists’. Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of the Transcendental educator Bronson Alcott, wrote. ‘Active exercise was my delight. … No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb a tree, leap fences and be a tomboy’. Quoted in Lerner, The Female Experience, 7.

[65] Quoted in Higginson, Margaret Fuller, 22.

[66] Fuller, Life Without and Life Within, 116–19.

[67] Coxe, Claims of the Country, 99–102.

[68] See for example, Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls; Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 70–5, 805–10.

[69] Quoted in Martin, The American Sisterhood, 59.

[70]The Una, 1 (1) (1 Feb. 1853), 8–9.

[71] The importance of such journals was discussed by Stanton: ‘Then we [Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton] would get out our pens and write articles for papers, or a petition to the legislature; indite letters to the faithful here and there: stir up the women in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts; call on The Lily, The Una, The Liberator, The Standard to remember our wrongs. … I am the better writer, she the better critic. In Stanton and Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 154–5.

[72]The Lily, 1 (5) (1 May 1849), 36.

[73] Ibid., 1 (6) (June 1849), 411. This article was reprinted from the New York Commercial. The author of this article was probably Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

[74] Ibid., 1 (9) (1 Oct. 1849), 74.

[75] Mary Wollstonecraft had written in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman: ‘I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body. Let us then by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but youth, arrive at perfection of the body, that we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends’.

[76] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ‘Man superior – intellectually, morally and physically’, The Lily, 2 (4) (1 April 1850), 31. Stanton's preoccupation with improving society's attitudes towards women appears to have begun at an early age – possibly when her father expressed his wish that she had been a boy. When she was sent to Emma Willard's Troy Seminary in 1830, Stanton recalled ‘The thought of a school without boys, who had been to me such a stimulus both in study and play, seemed to my imagination dreary and profitless’; she concluded from her own experience that it was a mistake to send girls and boys to separate schools. See. Stanton and Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 37–9.

[77]The Lily, 7 (7) (1 April 1855), 5.

[78]‘Our Costume’, The Lily, 3 (6) (1 July 1851), 50. The originator of the costume is purported to have been Elizabeth Smith Miller, whose father George Smith once declared that ‘as long as women wore clothes which crippled and handicapped them physically, they would remain in a state of slavery’. Active women seemed to appreciate – even delight in – the freedom of the new costume, which was patterned after that worn ‘in sanitariums by women recuperating from the effects of tight lacing and the lack of physical exercise’; it was also used by gymnasts and skaters. In advocating its adoption, The Lily increased its circulation. See Lutz, Created Equal, 63–9. See also Laver, Manners and Morals, 180–5: ‘A growing number of women were beginning to think that the Adam's rib theory of women's origin had been over-exploited in a patriarchal society … they could never compete with men in the work of the world so long as they were clad in the voluminous and hampering clothes of the mid-nineteenth century. Emancipation inevitably meant emancipation in dress.’

[79]The Lily 3 (8) (Aug. 1851), 60; ibid., 7 (19) (15 Oct. 1855), 150–2.

[80] Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 34. See also Blackwell, Pioneer Work. Wood, ‘The Fashionable Diseases’.

[81] Blackwell, The Laws of Life, 94–106: ‘every organ is intended to receive a certain quantity of fresh arterial blood … and send off the refuse venous blood. … Muscular exercise aids … the return of the venous blood. … All the organs of the body are impaired by lack of exercise if the tone of the muscles is destroyed. … the tone of the organs will be destroyed in corresponding degree’.

[82] Ibid., 112–21, 178.

[83] Shryock, Medicine in America, 111–22; Medicine and Society, ch. 4. See also Betts, ‘American Medical Thought’; Betts, ‘Mind and Body in Early American Thought’.

[84]The Boston Medical Intelligencer, 3 (1) (17 May 1825), 130; 4 (23) (24 Oct. 1826), 196–199.

[85]Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 13 (17) (2 Dec. 1835), 270–272; 13 (23) (13 Jan. 1836), 357–61.

[86]Health Journal and Advocate of Physiological Reform, 1 (6) (27 May 1840); 11 (23) (23 April 1842).

[87]New York Medical and Physical Journal, 4 (1825), 522–4.

[88]Water Cure Journal, 3 (1) (Jan. 1847), 11–14, 20–1; 3 (10) (May 1847), 151; 3 (12) (June 1847), 183–4; 4 (4) (Oct. 1847), 306–7; 5 (6) (Dec. 1848), 154–6.

[89]Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, 2 (18) (1 Sept. 1838), 285; 2 (20) (29 Sept. 1838), 311–12.

[90] Duffin, The Influence of Modern Physical Education, 103–10. Athletic exercises, the author held, were too violent for girls; callisthenics were more appropriate; A Ms Mason is said to have selected appropriate activities for women from the work of Clias.

[91] Caldwell, Thoughts on Physical Education, 60–4; 116–32.

[92] Combe, The Principles of Physiology, iii, 112–30.

[93] Bell, Health and Beauty, 199–253.

[94] Warren, Physical Education, 5–52. It was Warren's views that were referred to by Margaret Fuller in her Life Without and Life Within.

[95] Alcott, Confessions of a School Master, 173. See also Mills, ‘William Andrus Alcott’.

[96] This attitude has been referred to as ‘Christian Physiology’. See Whorton, ‘Christian Physiology’.

[97] Alcott, The Young Woman's Guide To Excellence, 17–44, 207–17; 280–6.

[98] Noted in Bennett, ‘Reaction to “William Andrus” Alcott’, 35–6.

[99] Alcott, The Library of Health. In this work Alcott excerpted from a large number of contemporary sources.

[100] Alcott, Young Woman's Book of Health, 18–45.

[101] Alcott, Laws of Health, 19–75. Alcott made extensive efforts to correct the lack of knowledge concerning health, which he felt was prevalent in America. His The House I Live In, Or the Human Body, intended for ‘the use of families and schools’, was quite popular.

[102] Hackensmith, History of Physical Education, 352–3, 373–4. Weston, The Making of American Physical Education, 30–1; Leonard, Pioneers of Modern Physical Training, 83–8.

[103] Lewis, ‘New Gymnastics’; Lewis, The New Gymnastics.

[104] Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 68; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 145–58.

[105] Stanton, ‘The Health of American Women’.

[106] See for example: Betts, America's Sporting Heritage; Gerber et al., The American Woman in Sport; Barney, ‘The American Sportswoman’.

[107] Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 92–3.

[108] See, for example, Wood, ‘The Fashionable Diseases’; Vertinsky, ‘The Effect of Changing Attitudes’. Degler, ‘What Ought To Be’, contends that ‘muscular exercise’ and ‘education for usefulness’ were often offered as antidotes to ‘woman's denial of her sexual impulses’. This article also contains a detailed discussion of the work of Clelia Duel Mosher, MD, associate professor of personal hygiene and medical adviser of women at Stanford University, where she also served as director of the Women's Gymnasium. Dr Mosher's articles sometimes appeared in the American Physical Education Review (Nov. 1911; Dec. 1925).

[109] Clarke, Sex in Education. For a persistence of such ideas see for example, Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement.