Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout [1st ed.] 9783030587635, 9783030587642

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Introduction: Exorcising a Forgotten Physical Culture (Shannon L. Walsh)....Pages 1-18
Progressive Era Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Whiteness (Shannon L. Walsh)....Pages 19-55
Dudley Allen Sargent’s Classed and Classing Fitness: Nature, Science, and Mimetic Exercise (Shannon L. Walsh)....Pages 57-89
“These Walls Could Not Contain Me”: Social Motherhood at the YWCA (Shannon L. Walsh)....Pages 91-129
Racialized Surrogates in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture (Shannon L. Walsh)....Pages 131-166
Exercise for Assimilation: Physical Culture for Indigenous Girls and Women (Shannon L. Walsh)....Pages 167-187
Conclusion: Community Fitness for Social Change? (Shannon L. Walsh)....Pages 189-195
Back Matter ....Pages 197-202

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY

Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era Watch Whiteness Workout Shannon L.Walsh

Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History

Series Editor Don B. Wilmeth Emeritus Professor Brown University Providence, RI, USA

Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History is a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study but utilized as important underpinning or as an historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series and works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14575

Shannon L. Walsh

Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era Watch Whiteness Workout

Shannon L. Walsh School of Theatre Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History ISBN 978-3-030-58763-5 ISBN 978-3-030-58764-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: duncan1890—Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to Scott, Josephine, and Elliot.

Acknowledgments

I am by nature a very social person. Writing in isolation does not come naturally to me. I have begged, borrowed, and pleaded for the time and energy of so many people as I’ve worked on these sites over the last fourteen years. To you, all my love, friendship, and gratitude. This book is a revision and expansion of my dissertation. As such, I’ve been presenting pieces of it throughout my entire academic career so far. Rather than attempt to name each presentation, working group, plenary on which I’ve received support, I’d rather express my gratitude toward the academic organizations that have helped me deepen and expand my work. Thank you to the American Society for Theatre Research and the Mid-America Theatre Conference for creating spaces for generous support and critique. Without those spaces I would not have met and been able to have conversations with scholars whose work has deeply influenced mine including Amy Hughes, Robin Bernstein, and Shannon Jackson. Thank you to the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for being large enough to allow for affinity spaces to pop up and support work outside the mainstreams of conversation. Finally thank you to the North American Society for Sports History and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association for helping me expand my interdisciplinary approaches. I am incredibly grateful to those at Palgrave Macmillan who have shepherded this project from its early stages, especially Ranjith Mohan, Geetha Chocklingam, Jack Heeney, Tomas Rene, and Vicky Bates. Thank you for

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your guidance, enthusiasm, and critique. Your efforts have made this book stronger. Additionally, the foundational archival work of my project was supported by the generous staffs at the Harvard University Library, the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport at the University of Texas at Austin, the YWCA of Minneapolis Collection at Social Welfare History Archive at the University of Minnesota, the Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection of the American Medical Association in Chicago, the YWCA Records of the US at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, and the Delsarte Papers in the Special Collections at Louisiana State University. I’d especially like to thank Cindy Slater and Jan Todd of the Stark Center, and Linnea Anderson of the SWHA for going above and beyond the call of duty by providing me with incredible access, warm support during my visits, and amazingly remembering who I was and the details of my research over vast spans of years. Thank you to the many colleagues and institutional supporters that have helped this project come to fruition including my institutional homes. To Kristin Sosnowsky, Todd Queen, Femi Euba, Nick Erickson, George Judy, Rick Holden, Jim Murphy, Ken Ellis, Josh Overbay, Stacey Cabaj, Tara Houston, Sandra Parks, Susan Perlis, Rocky Sansom, E.J. Cho, Shannon ONeill, Kyla Kazuschyk, Jeremy Bernadoni, Brandon McWilliams, C. Touchet, Sonya Cook, and Isaac Pletcher at Louisiana State University, I am grateful for your patience, encouragement, and grace during this process. To Margaret Werry, Sonja Kuftinec, Cindy Garcia, Gil Rodman, and Michal Kobialka thank you for helping get this work up on its unsteady feet in the first place. This book would have been impossible without the regular and sustained support of fellow writers who helped keep me accountable to my writing goals by talking with me and sometimes just occupying space together, silently in libraries: Karen Jean Martinson, Jackie Bach, Chandra Owenby Hopkins, and Jocelyn Buckner. Finally, to my Minnesota clan of colleagues and friends who nurtured me during cold winters and continued to boost and bolster me once I moved south: John Fletcher, Alan Sikes, Scott Magelssen, Wade Hollingshaus, Megan Lewis, Stephanie Lein Walseth, Kimi Johnson, Eric Colleary, Ivone Barriga, Pabalelo Tsane, Beth Ellsworth, Elliot Leffler, Rita Kompelmakher, and Mike Mellas. My family has shared space and time with this project for 13 years. To my in-laws, Annette and Gregory, who graciously smiled at my regular distraction and absence from family get-togethers. To my dad, who still

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texts for reminders about what my book is about. To my sister for support and love. To my mom who left this world when I had just begun this work. And to my husband and children, to whom this book is dedicated.

Contents

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1

Introduction: Exorcising a Forgotten Physical Culture

2

Progressive Era Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Whiteness

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Dudley Allen Sargent’s Classed and Classing Fitness: Nature, Science, and Mimetic Exercise

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“These Walls Could Not Contain Me”: Social Motherhood at the YWCA

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Racialized Surrogates in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture

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Exercise for Assimilation: Physical Culture for Indigenous Girls and Women

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Conclusion: Community Fitness for Social Change?

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1

Drawings from François Delsarte’s notes, Box 1, Folder 36a, Delsarte (François) Papers (Mss. 1301), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La “The Typical Negro Face,” MacKaye Notebook while studying with Delsarte (1869–1970), Box 2c, Folder 10, page 51, Delsarte (François) Papers (Mss. 1301), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La “Typical Irish Face,” MacKaye Notebook while studying with Delsarte (1869–1970), Box 2c, Folder 10, page 51, Delsarte (François) Papers (Mss. 1301), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La Wood chopping exercise from Health, Strength, and Power. New York and Boston: H.M. Caldwell, 1904 Newspaper clipping handwritten date 1893, from the Minneapolis Journal. Box 12, Clippings 1895–1898, Minneapolis YWCA Records (Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 6.1

One of the images accompanying the article, “Sights Seen During a Visit Made to the Rooms of the Young Women’s Christian Association,” Undated, unnamed newspaper clipping (though must have been between 1894 and 1897), Box 12, Clippings 1895–1898, The Minneapolis YWCA Records (Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota) Rose Read, first before-and-after photograph. Bernarr Macfadden. 1901. “Our Thin Subject.” Women’s Physical Development 1.3 (June) Girls in Ella Deloria’s physical culture class at the Haskell Institute, 1922. Ella Deloria. 1924. “Health Education for Indian Girls.” Southern Workman 53: 67

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Exorcising a Forgotten Physical Culture

Our ideology is simple: Weakness is a sickness which rapidly degenerates the quality of body and mind…. It means purging the willfully weak people out of your life. It means the burning away of everything and everyone which does not benefit you. Therefore, we at Vengeance, battle weakness here and at home, pledging to help you do the same…. The elite all do certain things in common. “only the inferior strive for equality.” … Instead of becoming victims to life’s circumstances, join the rebellion against the world’s complacency and sloth. Take the Profane Oath to do battle against that force which degrades humankind into the disgusting, diseased, incapable, grey masses that you see before yourself. We leave no revenge up to the slavery of a god that does not exist. (Vengeance Strength Kvlt)

The mission statement of the Vengeance Strength Kvlt gym in Nashville, TN, embracing a long history of eugenic rhetoric, does not explicitly mention race, but instead relies on an extreme ideology of individualism (burn away everything that does not benefit you), social Darwinism (only the fit survive), radicalism (don’t let them victimize you), and atheism (God does not exist). Additionally, it dispenses with utopian narratives (“you too can be happier if you are more fit”) and positions itself as against all other forms of physical fitness, including the form it is most like, CrossFit, even though it borrows heavily from the CrossFit aesthetic. The implied violence here is not directed at any one © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2_1

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person or group, but instead takes the form of a masochistic maneuver to purge the self, and therefore society, of weakness. Despite its vague references and neutral language, the iconography on the Web site and news stories position Vengeance Strength Kvlt as, at the very least, aligned with the alt-right. As I read through the “About” page visions of Charlottesville flash across the screen of my memory. When protesters from Showing Up for Racial Injustice Nashville confronted gym founder Sky Lemyng about his ties to Operation Werewolf and Wolves of Vinland (WOV), groups tied to white supremacy, he responded, “This business doesn’t have ties to our personal lives. I think the controversial claims made against the WOV ultimately come from a place of ignorance, fear and bigotry. Vengeance is comprised of an eclectic group of people who support many different ideals” (Wade Gervin 2017). He moved on to point the reporter to his non-white gym members for their opinion. White supremacy has always been adept at covering its tracks and traces. Black activist and educator DeRay McKesson references this maneuver in his regular use of the phrase “watch whiteness work” on Twitter.1 Any time a white person is treated with more compassion, sympathy, or restraint by police or others in positions of authority than a person of color, McKesson invokes the mantra. His regular and repeated invocation of the phrase (sometimes separated by periods to add emphasis, as in “Watch. Whiteness. Work.”) operates on multiple levels. First, it highlights whiteness in a culture practiced at invisibilizing whiteness, making it assumed and therefore unmarked. Here, whiteness becomes absorbed into the fabric of “everyone’s” experience. Second, “watch whiteness work” is theatrically framed. We are watching whiteness. We are compelled to witness its workings. The phrase implies an audience. Finally, it also implies that the whiteness is performing. It is working in a double sense of the word. It is certainly working for white people. It is also laboring, even though, as I argue in this book, it often performs effortlessness to mask this labor. Whiteness in these cases works very hard to convince its audience it is one thing, while actually being another. As performance scholar Faedra Carpenter argues, “whiteness is by being what it is not ” (2014, 9). The white supremacist rhetoric and symbolism Lemyng mobilizes to describe his form of physical training borrows from

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a long, long history of purposeful disguise. McKesson’s “watch whiteness work” asks us to witness whiteness putting on sheep’s clothing, and then calls it out for doing so. This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US. Not unlike recent arguments about the healthcare system, this project forwards physical culture as part of an ensemble of institutions that historically and ideologically privilege and invest in white middle- and upper-class bodies, ensuring they have the fitness needed to succeed as productive agents in the workplace and the world. The following chapters refuse to forget the paradoxical history of fitness in the US. That history and those who made it have both empowered and demeaned women, offered economic transcendence while abjectifying the economically disenfranchised, and uplifted Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities while also denying them access to and excluding them from gyms and programs. Physical fitness programs have done all of this while remaining celebrated by federal government, social welfare, and educational institutions. Fit is the desired state of being. Everyone, it seems, should engage in physical activity and exercise, and want to be fit. Such widely circulated assumptions enable moral and ideological equivalencies to be made about a person’s value to themselves as well as society. For instance, the cover of Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine barked, “Weakness is a crime. Don’t be a criminal!” at its readers for decades in the early twentieth century. You can now buy a t-shirt bearing the phrase, along with an image of Bernarr Macfadden flexing, on Zazzle, an Etsy-type online market (Physicalculture). Such nostalgic cross-marketing demonstrates the broad array of powerful institutions and media through which corporations and ideologies compel people to work on our bodies. The ubiquity of such messages and products masks the way such ever-present incitations to workout sideline ideals of community and connection by asking us to focus solely on ourselves. Why has the physical fitness movement been, and continue to be, so white? How were individual exercise routines meant to shape entire populations to act and perform “whitely,” as performance scholar Megan Lewis suggests, over time and why?2 How do private acts of self-management enable categorical differentiations of class, race, and gender?

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In this book, I trace how various sites of physical fitness performance—known in the Progressive Era as physical culture—became sites of whiteness-in-the-making. My book investigates five sites: Steele MacKaye’s Americanized Delsarte philosophies between 1871 and 1873, physical director Dudley Allen Sargent’s work at Harvard and the Harvard Annex for women 1889–1914, Minneapolis YWCA physical director Abby Mayhew’s physical culture curriculum 1893–1897, Bernarr Macfadden’s physical culture publications 1891–1915, and the physical culture exhibitions performed at the Model Indian School at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis. These diverse sites were part of an explosion of physical culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US. I focus on physical culture—systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert— because tracing how people practiced physical fitness in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, program accessibility, and ideologies of individualism combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. I choose to explore these sites because they give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for women during that time. First, they demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical fitness practices, illuminating the ways in which whiteness became a default identity category absorbed into the “universal” ideals of culture, arts, and sciences. Second, they show how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions and production design, audience, and promised profitability. Third, they reveal fraught connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenic movement’s incitement toward more reproductively efficient white bodies. Finally, to conclude I look at the remains of these ideologies and practices as they manifested in the rise and fall of CrossFit—a high-intensity physical training program. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, this study insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

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Why Performance Performance theory provides a means to address how physical culturists utilized exercises and discourse in specific communities across cultural strata as a way to shape individual bodies and—through repetition and reproduction—entire populations. Looking at physical culture through the framework of performance allows us to see how bodies imbibe, transfer, proliferate, and remember specific physical culture practices. By looking at how everyday, mundane “techniques of the self,” affect global ideological, symbolic, social, and economic orders, this project refigures the position and impact of eugenics on physical culture in the US.3 Additionally, I argue that performance serves as a citational strategy that frames in a historical moment—either in photographs or live exhibitions—a specific body’s or bodies’ practices. Performance is crucial to understanding how these daily routines and habits became a “natural” way of being and moving through the world for a modern subject. Using performance as a framing mechanism allows me to examine how physical culture practice moved through and among bodies, making visible its historical contingency. By looking at moments in Progressive Era physical culture that expose the contingency of certain naturalized practices, I aim to open spaces to consider how physical culture might help us be governed, and govern ourselves, “differently and, perhaps, less.”4 The repeated references to government, management, and regulation in Progressive Era physical culture demonstrate the ways it aligned with emerging ideas of what Foucault referred to as liberal governmentality.5 To summarize his series of lectures on biopolitics, Foucault suggested that he spoke of liberal governmentality “not as a theory or an ideology, and even less, obviously, as a way in which ‘society’ ‘represents itself,’ but as a practice, that is to say, a ‘way of doing things’ directed towards objectives and regulating itself by continuous reflection” (Birth 2003, 318). As a “way of doing things” I align liberal governmentality with Elin Diamond’s assertion that performance is always “a doing … embodied acts, in specific sites, witnessed by others (and/or the watching self)” and “a thing done … the completed event framed in time and space and remembered” (1996, 1). Viewing liberal governmentality as a performance enables an exploration of how individual performative acts of self-cultivation serve as “vital acts of transfer,” travelling from one body to the next through witnesses, eventually spreading across entire populations (1996, 2). In return, biopolitics provides a way to examine how

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these various acts are then utilized not only to govern populations, but also order and separate those populations according to performative categories of race, gender, and class. Examining physical culture through these lenses opens up a space to understand how its practices govern our bodies, to examine its contingency and in so doing provide an opening for different forms of (self) government, and thus the potential to reconsider, and perhaps redraw, boundaries of class, race, and gender. The repeated doingness of performance helps explain how certain acts of transfer cease to bear the markers of their creation and come to be perceived as natural, or given.6 In Derrida’s deconstructive sense “performativity signals absorption,” a naturalness to the way something is enacted that masks its constructedness.7 In other words, in order for a behavior or an act to become a “nature” or “essence” it must disappear, or as Bourdieu suggests, be “internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history” (1990, 56). As a medium for staging moving bodies, physical culture performances facilitate the construction of the nature of populations, make that nature visible, and in doing so make the bodies involved calculable and governable. However, performativity, as Derrida and Butler suggest, is always already “a citational practice,” and as such often destabilizes the “given” nature of certain conducts (Derrida 1988; Butler 1993). In order for a conduct to be absorbed it must be practiced and repeated. For example, women’s physical culture used repeated practicing of exercises in order to showcase the practitioners’ absorption of certain movements into their bodies, demonstrated in the final performances as a naturalness through the perceived effortlessness of the movements. However, returning to Diamond’s definition, performance as a process of naturalization is never foreclosed or complete in that, with every performance, the unnaturalness of the movements is misremembered. It is at this crossroads, where both the “doingness” (its immediacy as an action happening right now, in the moment) and the “doneness” (its history as a series of repeated gestures with historical and ideological weight) of performance come to the forefront, that we have an opportunity to reimagine ways to change or shift the way power operates on us. Taking both the radical contingency and the historicity of performance into account, performance scholars Shannon Jackson and Joseph Roach articulate theories that provide the foundation for this book’s exploration of physical culture. Jackson formulates her theory in relation to the

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Progressive Era’s reform mission, specifically addressing the reform activities performed by Chicago’s Hull House residents around the turn of the twentieth century. She suggests that the shared etymology of reform and performance link both processes together to “re-create individuals by restoring behaviors and environments along alternative lines” (1996, 339). In other words, reform practices borrowed from past behaviors in order to reimagine the present through the body. Roach’s theory of surrogation imagines a similar combining of past, present, and ultimately future as he explores circum-Atlantic performances of racialization. Roach proposes that societies cope with loss—variously expressed in death, trauma, and/or historical distance—by refashioning substitutes to perform the functions and replace the affective weight carried by the person/custom/thing that has left. Such a process, Roach argues, demonstrates a “doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins,” highlighting the ties and tensions between historicity and contingency (1996, 3). For example, Progressive Era physical culturists often asked their middle- and upper-class white students to mimic the movements of rural and urban manual laborers in order to keep them in shape in their more sedentary work. In several examples in this book surrogation enacts both the citational and absorptive aspects of performativity by appropriating the daily physical actions of racially or economically disenfranchised groups, then perform those actions as effortless, therefore natural, aspects of an ideal white upper-class physical fitness practice, thus continually staging the actions of people depicted as part of an evolutionary past. These instances of surrogation not only destabilized an ideal white masculinity, but also demonstrated how performing race, class, and gender operated to spur white women to adopt behaviors that would ostensibly make their bodies and minds better suited to motherhood. The following chapters genealogically trace the ways that physical culture organized, categorized, and cultivated bodies in ways that shaped them to occupy specific roles in the productive and reproductive economies of early liberal capitalism in the US. The remnants of these processes remain in contemporary ties between the physical fitness of individual bodies, and the mental and emotional health, economic productivity, and whiteness of the nation as a whole. By examining magazines, newspaper reports, visual media, medical examination logs, exercise manuals, committee reports, and physical culture discourse around the turn of the twentieth century, this book investigates the incessant, though disguised, labor involved in the practices and discourses that are taken for granted as part of fit living today.

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Defining Physical Culture Physical culture emerged as a historical movement throughout Europe and the US around the middle of the nineteenth century as Swedish and German systems of gymnastic exercise began to spread into colleges, universities, and newly built city gyms mainly run by Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations (YMCAs and YWCAs). Physical culture most often described daily habits meant to affect and correct bodily functions (digestion, breathing, musculature, circulation) and enable individuals to manage their behaviors through interventions into dress, bathing, posture, and diet. Reformers saw it as a way to combat the confined, polluted, and often sedentary character of urban living because the exercises and routines could be effectively deployed in small indoor spaces. Physical culture exhibits appeared at World’s Fairs in both Chicago in 1893 and St. Louis in 1904, at exhibitions in Madison Square Garden beginning in 1902, and also at multiple smaller exhibitions given by schools and classes based out of the multitude of city gyms. In this emerging urban economy, consumption—the purchase of services, products, and entertainment—became justified as a central aspect of rational recreation, a pivotal practice for the emerging middle class. Rational recreation was then sold to the working classes in a way that historian Chris Waters suggests used middle-class values to keep them “working,” and thus outside of the boundaries of the middle class (1990, 22; see also Holt 1990). By the turn of the twentieth century, the physical culture movement hit its peak with classes in most public and private schools, numerous exhibitions on both local and national levels, mass production of related equipment and machines, and a panoply of rapidly circulating media–magazines, books, photographs, and films—championing its positive results for men, women, and children.

Muscular Motherhood I focus primarily on young white women practicing physical culture because, as a group, they were the main target of much physical culture rhetoric and practice in the Progressive Era, in part because their successful birthing of healthy white offspring became a central concern of the emerging eugenics movement. During Reconstruction and moving toward the Jim Crow Era, deep concerns surfaced about the strength of the so-called native-born white race in the face of the

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northern migration of freed Blacks and the steady stream of immigrants to USAmerican shores. Anxieties began to appear in newspapers, novels, and magazines about white women’s physical and mental capacity to bear and raise children as white birth rates plateaued and began to fall off. As a result, as sports historian Patricia Vertinsky points out, nineteenth-century medical and physical culture discourses constructed white women’s bodies as “eternally wounded,” and focused on the maintenance and protection of women’s reproductive organs in order to tether women to their appropriate sphere, the home. In response to this repressive apparatus, she argues, many women turned to exercise as a way of “freeing themselves” from the restraints of the Victorian ideals of femininity, which included maternity (1990, 15). In contrast, sports historian Jennifer Hargreaves argues that emerging patriarchal physical educational and medical institutions were more concerned with restraining women. The Victorian cult of the family, she suggests, functioned as a “bourgeois ideology and acted as a dominant and constraining force on the early development of women’s sport,” concluding that women were victims of patriarchal institutions (2002, 52). Most feminist sports historiography on the Progressive Era tends to focus on physical culture as either a form of self-government that led to agency and liberation from hegemonic patriarchal forces or the constraining force that bound women to the domestic sphere. Athletic women in these narratives are either hapless victims or empowered pioneers.8 In addition, I argue, exercise, correct diet, and healthy habits came with the promise to young white women that they could be the saviors of a white race perceived to be under threat and in decline. Too much exercise, say in overexertion, competitive sport or heavy apparatus work or lifting weights, would result in a further weakening of the already prone-toward-weakness white femininity or worse, her masculinization.

Watching Whiteness In this book, I join in with a chorus of other scholars and public intellectuals who suggest that we are now reaping the fruits of what the dominant white culture sowed into whiteness during the Jim Crow Era in the US.9 Physical culture provided a convenient and pervasive mechanism by which to stitch whiteness and white supremacy into the seemingly racially neutral discourses of health and fitness. As a result, to be fit meant to

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be white. Nothing demonstrated this more fully than the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. My project foregrounds eugenics as a key driving force that enabled the institutionalization of physical culture into education—whether formal or popular (i.e., self-help discourses)— and contributed to its popular appeal for those who championed the strengthening of young white women. Overt and subtle eugenic calls to “strengthen the race” appeared in the writings of each of the figures discussed in this project, one they frequently pointed to as an end that justified their means. It’s important to note up front that eugenicists endeavored to define “race” as a term that referred to all humanity, and so avoid accusations of racism. However, most references to race by whites were accompanied by numerous recontextualizations that made it quite clear they were referring to the white race, a maneuver that will be expanded on in numerous examples throughout the book. Early eugenic rhetoric in the Progressive Era provided a pivotal synthesis of promoted and acceptable gendered and racialized behavior, and coercive techniques that ensured the proliferation of white, middleand upper-class populations, and denied privileges to other non-white, lower-class populations. Foucault found modern racism to be a manifestation of a form of modern sovereignty with “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death,” or “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (1976, 138; Society 2003, 241).10 The sterilizations of individuals in Black and indigenous communities during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century in the US served as a negative type of eugenics, a “letting die” by forcibly preventing those perceived as “unfit” by governing institutions from being able to reproduce.11 What Foucault’s definition of racism enables is a more thorough investigation of how positive eugenics, the making live, “allows for a hierarchization of ‘those who are worthy of living’ but also situates the health of one person in a direct relationship with the disappearance of another” (Lemke 2011, 42). In other words, an analytics of biopolitics opens a theoretical field that positions both positive and negative eugenics as two pieces of a whole, where neither can be entirely absent from a conceptualization of the other. This repositioning also demonstrates how positive eugenics utilizes modes of self-government, like exercise and diet, as a means of governing entire populations. This biopolitical framework focuses on how the “making live and letting die” of eugenics outlived its popular but problematic ubiquity, to be converted into a pervasive but subterranean ideology of white supremacy. Long disguised in racially neutral terms, its omnipresence

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regularly re-emerges with renewed fervor and ugliness at various times in history. My work adds to this conversation by forwarding whiteness as a form biopower deployed as an inherently narcissistic endeavor. I follow Sara Ahmed who points to the narcissism of whiteness, and “discourses of love,” as the fuel that “elevates whiteness into a social and bodily ideal” (2004, par. 7). Borrowing from Audre Lorde’s discussion of whiteness as a “mythical norm,” Ahmed suggests that rather than “making visible what can already be seen,” we need to make whiteness “visible in a different way” (ibid.). Part of her charge then is to investigate “how racism operates to shape the surfaces of bodies and selves” (ibid.). The narcissism of whiteness is echoed in postcolonial theories, such as Homi Bhabha’s concept of racial mimicry, where white colonizers gaze at the Other in order to find themselves (1979). In this book, I discuss how mythic self-representations of whiteness are mobilized to justify legislative, economic, and cultural rules and norms that secure whites at the top of a racial hierarchy and strive to bring mythic versions of whiteness into reality through performance. Consequently, I am cautious in this book about the radical possibilities of the performance and performativity of whiteness in physical culture. I look instead primarily at the dangers of performance histories and repetitions. Historiographies investigating genealogies of whiteness have become more critical than ever in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. As historian Nell Irvin Painter pointed out in her post-election NYT article, “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era,” during the trajectory of the campaign “white identity became marked as a racial identity,” and for the first time “the white men in charge will not simply happen to be white; they will be governing as white” an assertion echoed by some months later by Ta’Nehisi Coates in his Atlantic article, “The First White President” (2017). As Vann R. Newkirk II asserts in his article, “The Language of White Supremacy,” in The Atlantic, “The repackaging of Jim Crow into a ‘race neutral’ set of policies didn’t just arise as a wink-and-a-nod deal in southern political backrooms a few years near the end of the civil-rights movement, but was a half-century-long project forged by thousands of lawyers and mainstream political leaders that costs millions of dollars, and was played out in every arena across the country from the Supreme Court to town hall meetings” (2017). It is time to take stock of the ways in which white scholars and historians have contributed to the centuries long project of white supremacy. This book traces the discreet maneuvers deployed by physical culture practitioners

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and teachers to lay the foundation for the articulation of whiteness to perceptions of white supremacy.

The Drive to Delineate Class New technologies in the workplace further enflamed manufactured fears about the perceived threats to whiteness posed by immigrant, Black, and indigenous communities during the Progressive Era. Some of these new technologies sought to make the invisible visible and root out degeneracy. Discoveries in science and psychology and inventions like the camera and X-ray upset assumptions about the alleged fixity of visible markers of gender, class, and race. These disciplines began to build their institutional clout and legacies on a practice of categorizing and multiplying the abnormal. Such drives resulted in a pervasive paranoia about white degeneracy; hidden diseases and dysfunction within what appeared to be the ideal white body. Such hidden grotesqueries, medical experts and popular media at the time suggested, polluted white racial stock. Eugenicists frequently referenced and made analogies between human breeding and animal breeding. Our beauty pageants are contemporary antecedents of how the Progressive Era judged and marked those bodies bred to the ideal. The ambiguity of whiteness caused eugenicists at the beginning of the twentieth century to focus not on what could be seen, but on what could not be seen: varying degrees of so-called purity.12 As historian Matt Wray points out, “Poor whites posed a serious problem of classification and categorization … how could authorities distinguish between a white person who was merely poor by circumstance and one who was biologically predisposed to poverty, crime, and low social standing?” (2006, 73). Eugenics then was as much about distinguishing degrees of whiteness through class as it was about maintaining distinctions between races. As Wray has pointed out, the initial field studies of the Eugenic Records Office (ERO) catalogued white degeneracy in an effort to “delineate class status, and encourage and ensure their social growth and reproduction” (2006, 74). All of these elements combined to make the performance of whiteness as class an externalization of an alleged internal fixity, paramount during the Progressive Era.

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Sites of Exploration Four themes—ideologies of individualism, access to programs, degree of institutional regulation, and pervasiveness of popular performance— orbit at greater and lesser distances from each of the sites explored in this book. In Chapter 2, I give a global snapshot of the physical culture movement and its Americanization during the Progressive Era. I look specifically at Americanized Delsarte because of its ubiquity in virtually all physical culture programs across institutions and geographic areas in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Americanized Delsarte’s emphasis on individual practice and its position as the most popularized performance form in physical culture exhibitions marked it as both unique and universal. It is perhaps unsurprising then that this prevalence and popularity focused on young white usually elite women performers either draped in white flowing gowns, painted in white powder or paste, or donning white union suits. More than any other practice of its time, Americanized Delsarte linked grace, effortlessness, and enlightened consciousness to white, feminine bodies, making whiteness itself into an aesthetic. Chapter 3 takes a closer look at higher education’s uptake of physical culture by investigating the work of Harvard’s physical director, Dudley Allen Sargent (1879–1919). Here, institutional regulation paired with ideologies of individualism in order to plant physical culture as a necessary habit of the white urban elite class. Sargent emphasized customized, prescriptive routines for his students based on averages of accumulated data. This data came in the form of tens of thousands of measurements of men and women taken by him and other physical directors in gymnasiums along the East Coast. He collated and averaged the data to establish a “normal” body for his students to strive for through physical routines. Part of those routines included mimetic exercises that imitated rural and manual labor. These acts of surrogation refigured that labor as a leisure practice of the professional managerial and elite classes. Chapter 4 follows the physical culture movement from colleges into urban gymnasiums, the most well-known being those in the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations. Here, I explore the YWCA in Minneapolis under the direction of Sargent’s one-time student, Abby Shaw Mayhew from 1893 to her departure in 1897. Mayhew’s group classes fused multiple schools of physical culture, all supported by her muscular Christian ethos that physical culture freed both body and spirit.

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Mayhew’s classes spilled out of the gym into the streets, parks, and waterways of the city, embracing what appeared to be the image of the New Woman as independent, career-oriented, and mobile. These practices, however, masked white supremacist aims. Mayhew’s rhetoric neatly and subtly stitched social motherhood and calls for white strength into her work and teaching. Such maneuvers demonstrated how progressive reform rhetoric began to layer in eugenic ends to a burgeoning popular physical culture practice. Chapter 5 examines a more overt manifestation of physical culture’s eugenic investments in the life, philosophy, and publications of early media tycoon Bernarr Macfadden. The heightened accessibility to his products, especially his cheap and widely available magazines, helped increase the spread of an ethic of work-on-the-self as both a moral and physical imperative of the early twentieth century. For women, his moralizing rhetoric emphasized their duty as wives and mothers, speaking candidly and sometimes crassly about sex, pregnancy, birth, and parenting. Although he championed women athletes, marrying worldrenowned swimmer Mary Williamson, he expected all women’s energies and strengths to be engaged in reproduction and child rearing. Similarly to Sargent, Macfadden encouraged his female readers to adopt the physical habits of distant others, but in this case he relied on tall tales of strong indigenous women to encourage his presumed white housewife readers to exercise. Through such popular performances, Macfadden staged his own fantasy of the rise and reign of the physically and morally fit white race. Chapter 6 opens with three snapshots of ambivalence toward and failure of physical culture programs in indigenous communities during the Progressive Era. Here, I pose questions about how educational leaders secured the whiteness of physical culture by both active and passive exclusion of indigenous girls and women. The bulk of the chapter looks at the relative absence, and even active prevention, of physical culture programming, especially for women and girls, in government-run indigenous boarding schools between the 1890 and the 1920s. Despite the lack of explicit, organized physical culture training, the schools’ leadership and the Bureau of Indian Affairs nonetheless relied on the spectacle of physical culture as a popular performance at the Model Indian School at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair in order to demonstrate the degree to which the government’s curriculum for these students facilitated their assimilation into the behaviors and conventions of whiteness.

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The conclusion picks up these threads in our current moment by investigating and engaging in the rise and fall of CrossFit. Since its founding in 2000 by Greg Glassman and Lauren Jenai, CrossFit has exploded in popularity like no other physical fitness phenomenon in US history. Promising short, intense, varied workouts with little to no equipment, CrossFit gyms (called “boxes”) proliferate in both urban metropolises and suburban subdivisions. CrossFit’s emphasis on community building, its refusal to “buy-in” to corporate fitness trends, and its embrace of a workout-tillyou-drop philosophy have made it arguably the most contested fitness practice of our time. It is simultaneously the ultimate evolution of the eugenic practices put in place in the sites in the previous chapters and also the adamant contestation of those practices. This chapter wrestles with those contradictions. Is CrossFit the current manifestation of watching whiteness workout or a space to physically practice a feminist, queer, and/or BIPOC resistance? I interrogate this question by looking at the wealth of writing on this debate by both practitioners and critics, as well as relying on my own personal experience as a member of a CrossFit box.

Notes 1. To see more of McKesson’s work, including his book and award-winning podcast Pod Save the People, visit his Web site, www.deray.com. 2. I use “whitely” here in reference to Megan Lewis’ use of the term as describing “a state of being, an ideology, a set of behaviors or habits, or an enactment, performance or staging with distinctly white attributes” (2016, 11). 3. Foucault frames techniques of the self as “intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain ascetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.” See The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, 11. 4. Quote taken from Schachter’s discussion of Foucault’s governmentality, specifically why resistance is an important aspect of governmentality (2008, 10). 5. See Foucault (1978). 6. Performance scholar Richard Schechner refers to it as “twice behaved behavior” (2002, 22). 7. Performance scholars Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick use this phrase to refer to Michael Fried’s discussion on performativity. These conceptions rely on the Austinian notion that the performative ushers the thing it says into being; it does what it says. In the context of bodies,

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8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

the performative, in the Austinian sense, makes reality. If, Austin argued, the performative fails to enact what it claims to do, then it is “infelicitous” or “unhappy.” Consequently, the performative in traditional performance is always “unhappy” or a failure because it doesn’t occur in reality, but is merely citational. Derrida critiqued the Austinian argument by suggesting that, in fact, citationality is a key aspect of the performative, because in order to usher reality into being, performativity must rely on previous performances. Pairing this idea with governmentality, in order for something to be thinkable, it must be repeated. See Parker and Sedgwick (1995, 2), Derrida (1988), Austin (1962), Fried (1967). In addition to the scholars mentioned in this paragraph, I rely heavily on the work of numerous women’s sports historians who point to the historically entrenched marginalization and medicalization of women’s bodies as both a by-product of and requirement for their entrance into sports in the mid- to late nineteenth century. See Park (1997), Todd (1998), Verbrugge (1988). See Alexander (2012), among others I mention in the section. Emphasis in the original. Most of these sterilizations occurred in prisons for men and institutions for the “feebleminded” where many of the sterilizations on women occurred. See Kline (2001). As Matt Wray has pointed out in his historical survey of the term “white trash,” the “racial inferiority of people of color was seldom in doubt” for eugenicists at the end of the nineteenth century. See Wray (2006).

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of AntiRacism.” Borderlands e-journal 3.2: 49. Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, revised edition. New York: The New Press. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1979. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) and Edward Said, Orientalism, 25th Anniversary ed. New York: Vintage Books. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge.

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Carpenter, Faedra. 2014. Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Ser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Coates, Ta’Nehisi. 2017. “The First White President.” The Atlantic. October. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-whitepresident-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/. Accessed November 5, 2017. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Signature Event Context (1972).” Limited Inc. 1–24. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Diamond, Elin. 1996. “Introduction.” Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1976. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, Michel. 1978. “Governmentality,” trans. Rosi Braidotti, rev. Colin Gordon. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault. 1991, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 2003. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–9, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Masey. New York: Picador Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Defended”: Lectures at Collège de France, 1975–76, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador Press. Fried, Michael. 1967. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum (June). Hargreaves, Jennifer. 2002. “The Victorian Cult of the Family and the Early Years of Female Sport.” Gender and Sport: A Reader, eds. Sheila Scranton and Anne Flintoff. London, UK: Routledge. Holt, Richard. 1990. Sport and the British: A Modern History, Oxford Studies in Social History Ser. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Amy. 2014. Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in NineteenthCentury America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Jackson, Shannon. 1996. Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, HullHouse Domesticity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Kline, Wendy. 2001. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, 61–94. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, trans. Eric Frederick Trump, Biopolitics, Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century Series. New York: New York University Press. Lewis, Megan. 2016. Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.

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Newkirk II, Vann R. 2017. “The Language of White Supremacy.” The Atlantic. October 6. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-lan guage-of-white-supremacy/542148/. Accessed November 5, 2017. Painter, Nell Irvin. 2016. “What Whiteness Means in the Era of Trump.” The New York Times. November 12. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opi nion/what-whiteness-means-in-the-trump-era.html. Accessed November 14, 2016. Park, Roberta. 1997. From Fair Sex to Feminism: Sport and Socialization of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Eras. London: Routledge. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 1995. “Introduction.” Performance and Performativity, eds. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. New York: Routledge. Physicalculture, “Weakness Is a Crime, Don’t Be a Criminal!” https://www. zazzle.com/weakness_is_a_crime_dont_be_a_criminal_shirt-235992547280 385592. Accessed March 31, 2018. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, The Social Foundation of Aesthetic Forms Ser. ed. Jonathan Arac. New York: Columbia University Press. Schachter, Marc D. 2008. Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction, 1st ed. London: Routledge. Todd, Jan. 1998. Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women 1800–1870. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Vengeance Strength Kvlt. https://www.vengeance.me/about/. Accessed March 4, 2018. Verbrugge, Martha. 1988. Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth Century Boston. New York: Oxford University Press. Vertinsky, Patricia. 1990. The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century. International Studies in the History of Sport Series. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Wade Gervin, Cari. 2017. “Vengeance Strength Kvlt in East Nashville Has Ties to Alt-Right,” Nashville Scene. July 20. https://www.nashvillescene.com/ news/pith-in-the-wind/article/20868176/strength-cult-gym-in-east-nashvi lle-has-ties-to-altright. Accessed March 4, 2018. Waters, Chris. 1990. British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884– 1914. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Wray, Matt. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Progressive Era Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Whiteness

I’m presenting at my first non-theatre conference. I am also on my first solo trip without my infant son and running to the restroom every two hours to pump breastmilk. The paper I’m presenting advocates using performance as a lens through which to analyze the performances at the Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions put on by physical culturist Bernarr Macfadden in 1904 and 1905 at Madison Square Garden. I open and close the presentation with a short film, shot by Thomas Edison’s production company in 1905, of two of the contestants from the 1904 exhibition, Albert Treloar and Beatrice Marshall, competitors in the Most Well Developed Man and Woman contests (“Treloar and Miss Marshall”). In the film, Marshall moves through a series of Americanized Delsarte statue poses on an elevated white pedestal, wearing a white body suit, against a black background. She is relaxed, fluid, smiling. She is followed by Albert Treloar—naked above the waist, wearing a leopard print loin cloth, and white tights—who uses many of the strongman poses we are still familiar with today, but also uses Americanized Delsarte statue poses. His movements highlight his control over his muscles and strength (“Treloar and Miss Marshall” 1905). The primary gist of my argument in the paper that day frames both performances reproductively in order to highlight physical culture’s troubling eugenic tendencies, and especially Macfadden’s brand of physical culture. I am the last presenter on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2_2

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the panel and in desperate need of a pumping session by the end. A very prominent scholar in sports history raises their hand at the conclusion and chastises my analysis of the film in particular. “How can you call what she is doing exercise? That isn’t labor. She’s barely moving,” they say bluntly. I weakly try to say something about performativity and habitus and the way we learn habits that appear effortless. They are unconvinced. I am embarrassed and in pain by that point. That interaction has resurfaced at many crucial points in my trajectory since that conference. I want to use it in order to frame some of the main points of this chapter. Several aspects of the interaction have stuck with me over the years. First, my lingering suspicion that latent anti-theatrical bias in sports and exercise studies drove some of those comments. Modern physical culture and theatre have common roots in the US, as this chapter will point out, but physical culturists and sporting folks sometimes resist any association with leisure or entertainment, or worse, theatre. The film’s placement not in a collection on physical education or exercise, but instead on American vaudeville reveals its historical position as popular performance. Physical culture as a popular movement has long struggled to gain legitimacy alongside its institutionalized and more “practical” kin fields such as kinesiology, physical education, and sports management. Second, my worry that the eminent sports scholar was right. Any person might watch this video and say the same thing. Marshall’s wrists are floppy, her transitions from pose to pose imprecise and languid. What exactly was going on with Americanized Delsarte and why was it so popular as a form of performance and exercise for women? Third, no matter how many times I’ve shown this clip, no one remarks on how white they both appear. The fact that their body suits and tights, skin, and pedestal blend seamlessly together and seem to radiate in contrast to the black background always goes unmentioned. Finally, I felt betrayed by my maternal body and its refusal to comply with my efforts to keep it under control. As we continue to witness with the expansion of the #metoo movement, institutional and individual efforts to control and regulate women’s bodies never fully achieve the complete containment they want. I begin this chapter with an overview and brief history of physical culture in Europe and the US during the nineteenth century gleaned from the numerous handbooks written by physical culture instructors, as well as numerous press accounts from newspapers. At the time, many

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in the press referred to a “battle of the schools,” as teachers and gymnasiums attempted to attract students based on adherence to the various primary systems: Swedish/Ling, German/Jahn, British/Athletics, and French/Delsarte. Once these European systems entered circulation in the US, practitioners such as Dr. William G. Anderson at Yale (1892–1932) and Dr. Dudley Allen Sargent at Harvard (1879–1919), Americanized and adapted them for the broadest possible appeal. Physical culture experts freely and openly discarded and adapted the premises of these systems in order to meet their needs. I argue that through this process of adaptation, physical educators helped construct and solidify economic, gendered, and racial hierarchies at play in the US as particular shapes of bodies, repertoires of gestures, and modes of movement. I investigate Americanized Delsarte more thoroughly than the others because it occupies an ambiguous place in histories of both theatre and physical culture. Schools and academies focused on elocution, expressive movement, and physical culture embraced it with enthusiasm, though contemporary scholars either disavow or discredit it, as evidenced by the sports history scholar’s disdain at my labeling Marshall’s movements as exercise. Relying primarily on material from the François Delsarte papers at LSU, I trace its genealogy beginning in François Delsarte’s late nineteenth-century French classroom where he emphasized philosophy, spiritualism, and voice. I then follow its migration to the US in the more physically-based approach of Delsarte’s pupil, actor and director Steele MacKaye, to its eventual legacies in popular performance forms like modern dance, film, and stage acting. Due in part to its widespread dissemination and assimilation into multiple reform instruments of the Progressive Era, Americanized Delsarte rapidly made its way into women’s gymnasiums in social welfare institutions and newly established women’s colleges and normal schools. It became a fundamentally feminine method of mandatory physical culture classes in women’s colleges, promoting a distinctly progressive form of self-fashioning, a topic to which I will return throughout the book. It also imbued the roots of physical culture, as well as US acting and dance programs, with assumptions of white superiority at the same time that its rhetoric disguised its racial project under the banner of “culture” as universally beneficial. Reading this popular public performance form and private self-culturing practice as a cultural and gendered project demonstrates how it stitched so-called universal principles of being into conceptions about appropriate performances of white femininity.

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The European Schools: British, Swedish, and German Physical Training Physical culture proved to be an invaluable management tool for emerging liberal democracies in both Europe in the early nineteenth century and later in the century in the US. The British, German, and Swedish schools of physical training professed ideals of nationalism, brotherhood, and economic growth. The German, British, and Swedish governments promoted the use of all three systems in schools as unstructured play and necessary disciplining techniques. Additionally, the nationalistic impulses in the rhetoric and practice of these different physical training regimens tied national identity to race. For instance, in the British translation of Swedish Professor Anders Wide’s Home Gymnastics According to the Ling System, an adaptation of Per Henrik Ling’s (1776–1839) gymnastics system, he proposes that Ling’s “aim in life was to develop a strong and healthy race by the reintroduction of the natural simplicity of habits of our forefathers and the diligent use of rational physical exercises, in the form of pedagogical gymnastics” (1908, 25). Wide gendered the practitioners as masculine with the use of “forefathers” and used “race” to refer specifically to the native Swedish or Scandinavian or Teutonic race. The word “race” at the time, especially in Europe, referred to those races believed to have been “native” to European areas. So, for instance, in sociologist William Ripley’s 1899 book The Races of Europe he spoke of three European races: the Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. He created his categories based on head, nose, and face shape; eye and hair color; and stature (1899, 121). Notably absent was any mention of skin color, which he spent some time disqualifying as an aspect of race, an instance of the erasure of presumed whiteness of these three categories in favor of phenotypic characteristics (103–4). Furthermore, Wide referred to the physical work of training in the Ling system as a “reintroduction” of the habits of forefathers. These were not new habits, he claimed, but forgotten practices introduced by national forefathers. Finally, these exercises served a pedagogical purpose. Advocates of Swedish gymnastics often argued that its pedagogy set it apart as the most popular school used in the US. The links between nationalism and race, however, characterized all three of the major European schools of physical training. The British system primarily consisted of athletics. Despite its foundation in competition, like all the European systems, the philosophy behind athletic games was what truly contributed to its popularity, especially in

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educational contexts. British athletics in the nineteenth century espoused what would come to be known as a muscular Christian ethic. Muscular Christianity came out of the writings of nineteenth-century British novelists Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes (Putney 2001). Their novels, especially Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), sports scholar Nick Watson suggests, promoted the idea that “participation in sport can contribute to the development of Christian morality, physical fitness, and ‘manly’ character” (2007, 80). Elite British boys schools readily incorporated the ideals espoused in their novels, where, as sport historian William Joseph Baker asserts, the “games ethic” enabled the British to simultaneously address fears of the degeneration of the white British stock and promote an imperialist spirit by producing the future leaders of the Empire carrying “the flag of muscular Christianity in the one hand and the Union Jack in the other” (2007, 33). Muscular Christianity brought religion, education, nationalism, and race into play on sporting fields across the UK. Its connection to competitive sport, however, distanced it somewhat from the two most widespread schools in practice at the time, Swedish and German gymnastics. Advocates claimed the Ling—or Swedish—system’s strength lay in its relative simplicity and the fact that it could be used by anyone, anywhere. It was easy to learn and easy to teach which made it an ideal tool for the nascent medical establishment and growing government institutions to use en masse with patients and citizens alike. As shown in Wide’s book, the Swedish system required either no equipment or equipment that could be readily supplied in the home. Accessibility proved to be the key selling point for the system early in its development. From its emergence at the beginning of the nineteenth century, most physicians preferred it to any other system of physical training. As a result, it is often referred to as “medical gymnastics.” Proponents like Wide argued the exercises worked equally well with the fit and the unfit. All one needed, they said, was expert guidance whether in the form of a teacher or a handbook. The course of study involved increasingly difficult levels of exercise. For instance, in Wide’s handbook the first series of exercises involved bends from standing, sitting, and lying positions. It wasn’t until you reached the third program of study that jumping, pull-ups, and push-ups came into play. Only in the most advanced levels were cartwheels allowed, though Wide noted, “This movement is suitable for boys and young men. Only very strong and healthy other people who are used from their youth to wheeling, ought

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to try it” (1908, 60). Most practitioners felt the exercises’ subtle strengthening of muscle made this particular system most suitable as a corrective mechanism. British physician M. Roth felt the Swedish system’s biggest strength lay in its ability to bring about “by a diminution of disease amongst the working classes the number of destitute poor must necessarily be diminished” (1853, v). While he clearly felt this system, instituted in every training school, would primarily benefit the working classes, he also felt it would be useful “in female institutions, in institutions for the blind, in those for the deaf and dumb, and idiots” (vi). Both Wide and Roth, though separated by time and space, clearly felt the Swedish system would elevate the race and nation by keeping its workers, especially those prone to breakdown, healthy and strong enough to continue in their occupations. However, they also stop short of suggesting the system might bring about a personal transformation in students or a change in class status. As Roth’s statements make clear, many relegated the Swedish system to those already presumed to be inherently weak. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), on the other hand, created spaces and workouts focused on shaping young healthy men’s bodies to reflect a burgeoning sense of nationalism and fraternity in Germany in the midst of French domination. In 1811, Jahn created his first Turnverein, a gymnastics club modeled after the Greek palaestra (public gymnasiums), inside a turnplatz, an open-air gymnasium that included equipment such as parallel bars, balance beams, and climbing ropes. Here, according to performance scholar Kimberly Jannarone, Jahn built “a shared sense of German community through embodied experiences” (2017, 2). As Jannarone points out, for Germans these activities replaced the loss of “other kinds of structured embodied meaning,” while also forging a common sense of resistance to other dominant European powers, especially France (3). From this marginalized position, Jahn helped craft a sense of “radical equality” among Turners, as they were called, in an effort to promote a broader philosophy practiced through communal physical exertion. Some of the tenets of this philosophical embodiment included a diminution of competition (it could be used to spur further performance, but was not an end in itself), placing the individual in service to the group, and communal creation and ownership of the exercises themselves. For instance, exercises were sometimes generated by individual gymnasts, tried out and adapted by the group, and then collectively added to the repertoire of existing workouts after group discussion.

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Such instances of what Jannarone calls “democracy in microcosm” pushed Jahn’s gymnastics out of the Turnplatz and into the realm of politics (4). Jahn, an outspoken opponent of Napoleon and his grip on what was then Prussia, naturally attracted like-minded students to his Turnplatz. In 1819, when a Turnplatz gymnast murdered a well-known German playwright, the government, who until that point had been rather ambivalent toward the Turnverein movement, shifted course and closed all the Turnplatz and outlawed Turnvereins. Jahn was placed under house arrest and many of his followers fled to the US. His disciples took positions as instructors at schools in New England and began teaching many of the tenets of the German system. The Jahn/German school genealogy back in Prussia did not pick up steam again until 1860 when the ban was lifted and they held the first public competitions. By then, Jahn’s work had been translated into English and freely adapted by his disciples and followers outside Europe, feeding an already rapidly expanding popular physical culture practice. During the mid-nineteenth century many governments, Germany included, began to rethink the potential of communally practiced exercises in terms of how such practices, especially public mass demonstrations, might contribute to a collective sense of national pride. Though Jahn, and many other practitioners including Dudley Allen Sargent in the US, advocated for the use of physical culture with young, white middle- and upper-class men as a means of uplift, group accountability, and radical microcosmic democracy, they never completely disavowed its connection to military readiness. Jahn’s gymnastics also helped keep many of the country’s potential soldiers battle ready. As theatre scholar Scott Venters points out, in Jahn’s turnplatz, “Battle readiness and youthful games were integrated into a crusade for the reclamation of the country and the casting off of French oppression” (2016, 44). After physical culture’s heyday between 1880 and 1920, totalitarian leaders and regimes quickly mobilized such sentiments and public demonstrations of masculine physical virility for their own ends. As Venters points out, the ultimate performance of this manipulation of physical culture for totalitarian ends can be seen in the performance at the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany. Here, on the path toward war, the German government opted for a mass performance of gymnastics as part of the opening ceremonies. The organizers asked youth from every country to participate, in a seeming tilt of the hat to the radically democratic roots of the movement. The performance, however, ended with the Hitler youth asking the assembled audience to defend the German Fatherland at all costs from those

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who would threaten it from the outside (39–40). These public performances helped spread both the democratizing and fascistic ideologies leaders attached to the practice throughout Europe and eventually to the US. To summarize, the British (athletics), Swedish (calisthenics), and German (gymnastics) systems had similar goals in terms of the ends of the work. They all viewed exercise as a way to build and develop a person’s health as well as their character. They all viewed the work as directly benefitting nationalist interests by stoking national pride and helping hone and correct the bodies of those engaged in building and maintaining the industries and businesses of their countries. They all also relied on public performances and demonstrations in order to prove the efficacy of their methods. By contrast, these systems, and their battle, thrived as much on their differences as their similarities. Ling and his followers viewed their corrective exercises as utilitarian and based on physical work connected to more natural/rural ways of living. For instance, many exercises mimed manual labor, a topic I will return to in much greater depth in the next chapter, whereas Jahn gymnastics aimed toward the more virtuosic performances of physical strength and agility. Therefore, while Swedish work did happen in public exhibitions, it did not rely on public performances in the same way as did German gymnastics. Furthermore, Ling work focused primarily on improving the health of the individuals that practiced it, while Jahn gymnastics stressed form over function, unless that function went into political resistance outside the gym. As a result of this contentious relationship, when these schools traveled overseas to the US, their similarities and differences continued to build in a rapidly expanding market for physical culture and education.

Delsarte: “Too Rooted in Eternity to Negotiate with History”1 French aesthetic gymnastics, or Delsarte, named after its eccentric creator François Delsarte, never became a real player in the “Battle of the Schools” during Delsarte’s lifetime due in part to the fact that his philosophies and practices did not circulate widely in either Europe or the US until after his death in 1871. Several of his students published interpretations of his work and taught classes based on his methods throughout Europe, including Abbé Delaumosne, Angélique Arnaud, Alfred Giraudet, and Gustave Delsarte (his son). While his daughter,

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Marie Géraldy visited the US, it was actor/director Steele MacKaye who brought Delsarte practice to the US in 1872 and built its repertoire (Ruyter 1999). François Delsarte’s story and history are difficult to pin down and, when archival material is present, tough to translate even when the scholar is fluent in French. François Delsarte (1811–1871) was a mid-nineteenth-century Parisian teacher and theorist of music, voice, aesthetics, and acting. His father, an inventor, left the family early in François’ life while his mother left him to be fostered by an innkeeper. After working at many odd jobs, a professor of music, Monsieur Bambini, took Delsarte in as a student and a ward, of sorts. Under Bambini’s guidance, Delsarte excelled at music, eventually getting into the royal music conservatory. After several years of success at the conservatory, it appears Delsarte suffered massive damage to his vocal chords and, as a result, was dismissed from the school in 1829. In the years after his dismissal he worked briefly as an actor at Opéra Comique and diligently endeavored to correct and cure the problems with his voice. He ultimately prevailed and his success with his own voice drove him to share his techniques with others. For years afterward he mentored many famous singers and eventually began giving public vocal concerts once again. However, his lifelong struggle with craving the spotlight and his desire for privacy pushed him once again into a more reclusive existence and he spent many of his final years rarely leaving his home, but continued to teach classes and give lessons (Porte 2005; Ruyter 1999). In 1869, American actor Steele MacKaye’s (1842–1894) arrival in Delsarte’s drawing room changed the trajectory and history of the French artist’s life’s work. “It was a meeting of flame and fire,” according to Delsarte biographer Alain Porte (2005, 27). MacKaye’s wife Mary’s recollection of the meeting supports such hyperbolic exclamations, saying MacKaye came home “walking on air, wrapped in a mantle of enthusiasm, reverence and delight, which from that day to his latest hour he never relinquished” (MacKaye 1927, 134). Based on MacKaye’s notebooks from his year with Delsarte, it’s clear the two shared a passion for a philosophically-based approach to vocal and physical expression. What François Delsarte lacked in terms of his reclusivity, MacKaye more than made up for in social gregarity and physical energy. Shortly after their first meeting, MacKaye began to push for, and even occasionally teach in Delsarte’s studios, Delsartean physical aesthetics, as opposed to what had been a primarily vocal pedagogy. For almost a year MacKaye worked with Delsarte in his home before the War of 1870 drove MacKaye back to the

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US and Delsarte to the north of France. Back in the States, MacKaye worked diligently to build support for a school of which, he hoped, Delsarte would eventually be the head. MacKaye toured and lectured on Delsarte and his principles at universities and conservatories. He wrote to Delsarte asking for his papers in 1871, but in July 1871 Delsarte unexpectedly passed away. By this time, however, MacKaye had already done much of the work to ensure the spread of what would come to be called Americanized Delsarte in the US. Delsarte published none of his work during his lifetime. What we are left with are mainly transcriptions and translations of class notes from pupils.2 However, from what we do know from his notes and MacKaye’s class notes, it appears that the vocal and gestural techniques he taught were based on an intricate and complicated philosophy of the cosmos. MacKaye’s notes from his classes with François Delsarte record the idea that, “We judge of the nature of a being by its appearance and its actions” (Notebook of Steele MacKaye). Delsarte firmly believed that actions— speaking, singing, and gesturing—would bring humans into a better alignment with heaven and therefore closer to our ideal nature as God intended. As speech scholar Claude Shaver suggested, “The basis for the Delsarte system of expression is a philosophical-theological conception of a triune universe” (1937, 112). These practices and the cosmos Delsarte created to support them relied on the Divine Trinity, a concept that combined an unlikely mixture of Catholicism, mysticism, and scientism. Life, mind, and soul sat at the center of this triune universe as the core of humanity, according to Delsarte. Feeling was attached to life, thought to mind, and love to soul. Furthermore, the core trinity matched up with movements of the body through the voice (feeling and thought) and gesture (love). The voice, through sound and words/thought, expressed feeling, while the face and body expressed love. Each instrument of expression then connected back to the core trinity. For example, in the body the torso best expressed life, the head the mind, and the face the soul.3 Expression could be elevated to art by a careful balancing of the various sets of trinities, hence why such a system would be so valuable to an actor like MacKaye. François Delsarte’s work held the promise of a formula of gestures that—when performed in sequence, with practice, and subtlety—gave the performer access to both inner life and resonance with heaven. François Delsarte’s students, most especially Steele MacKaye facilitated the transition of Delsarte method from small studio practice to a comprehensive system that could be applied more broadly in schools and gymnasiums.

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Delsarte’s Drawings While the philosophies behind Delsarte practice are most clearly demonstrated in transcriptions of class notes, the phenomenology of Delsarte practice appears in the pages and pages of drawings of body parts in both Delsarte’s and MacKaye’s notebooks. The sheer visuality of the Delsarte Papers at Louisiana State University is its most striking and enigmatic feature. Several of the archivists have confessed to me that part of the issue with the collection is that they are just not sure how to curate this particular aspect of so much of the material. This enigmatic quality might be why this aspect of the papers is almost never mentioned in the scholarship using this particular archive. François Delsarte had a minor obsession with bodies, especially faces. He relied on the empiricism of scientific approaches to observe human bodies in action in life. He doodled his observations endlessly, sitting as cafes, scribbling in his study, even traveling to the site of a mine disaster and visiting an asylum in order to capture bodies and faces in extreme circumstances. Through observation and experimentation, Delsarte meticulously documented how body parts like eyes, mouths, faces, torsos, and legs could and should express certain feelings. The meticulous study and practice it must have required to maneuver and perfect the movements across multiple body parts and the voice would have been an epic undertaking.4 Many of François Delsarte’s sketches aren’t focused on the symmetry of gestures or emotions, but the symmetry and phenotypes of particular kinds of people. It appears that, through an overlaying of perfect triangles which represented the perfection of the Divine Trinity, Delsarte began physiognomic categorizations of the faces he doodled. One set of drawings, for instance, shows a series of profiles described as “joviality,” “gloominess,” “arrogance,” “sensibility,” “entitlement,” “nobility,” and “vulgarity” (Francois Delsarte Notes). It seemed Delsarte concerned himself not only with how gesture could best express character in acting, but also how innate attributes expressed a predetermined character as well. While not all the sketches are so conveniently labeled, it is clear that certain face shapes were more capable of manifesting the Divine Trinity in their appearance than others, in his opinion. For instance, profiles that most closely adhered to two equilateral and symmetrically balanced triangles (for the nose and face) designated “fineness” (“finesse”) (Fig. 2.1).

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Fig. 2.1 Drawings from François Delsarte’s notes, Box 1, Folder 36a, Delsarte (François) Papers (Mss. 1301), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La

Read alongside Delsarte’s trinitarian philosophy, equilateral triangles— here seen as the face and nose—seem to be indicative of “fineness” while increasing degrees of non-equilateral triangles trend toward “harshness,” according to Delsarte. Balance and symmetry appear to contribute positively toward more positive character attributes in these drawings. In other parts of his drawings, Delsarte mapped similar equilateral triangles on top of plants and flowers and other items found in nature. Like the naturalists, Delsarte found symmetrical and balanced patterns to be closest to those found in nature. These conceptions of “fineness” then transferred into the body as well. For François Delsarte, the body should also attain balance and symmetry by moving in harmony, though voice and body, with the Holy Trinity. As many of these attributes were fixed and unchangeable according to popular assumptions about “nature” of the day, then some bodies, faces, noses were more predestined toward

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perfection and harmony than others. As such, Delsarte’s drawings also paralleled the work of nineteenth century physiognomists who utilized skull measurements to justify racist ideas, a topic I will return to in the final section of this chapter. These expanding levels of triangular symmetry lie at the core of how, once transferred and translated to a US context, Delsarte practice became integrated into physical culture. Calls to “culture” oneself, at the time, relied on the assumption that industry and technology had led many already presumed to be naturally superior classes, genders, and races away from nature. Physical culturists emphasized ways to regain what was lost. However, these calls to self-culture operated on the assumption of an original loss of natural symmetry and harmony for certain classes, genders, and races. For others, it was assumed, nature had never bestowed those gifts to begin with. Recall that the Swedish system focused primarily on correction of defects. These assumptions only became more pronounced as these physical training methods crossed the Atlantic. Progressive Era America was both radically progressive and deeply xenophobic. As these systems transitioned into the US in the 1880s, the adaptations, expansions, and contractions of European physical training reflected this duality.

Progressive Era Physical Culture in the US: Governing the Strenuous Life Scholars tend to characterize the Progressive Era as a period of economic and social crisis (Saxton 2003, 350–2).5 Physical culture trends reflected this instability. The movement’s popularity rose on the tide of what many scholars, including social science scholar John J. MacAloon and historian Clifford Putney, argue to be a crisis of white masculinity (MacAloon 2006; Putney 2001). Progressive Era shifts in the organization of work and industry saw laborers increasingly separated from the products of their work and instead rapidly incorporated into the market as wage earners rather than craftsmen. This shift toward corporatization and urban industrialism accompanied an influx of new immigrants, Black working class, and women into urban industries and workplaces. Additionally, the workers themselves—whether in the office or on the factory floor—were often at the mercy of institutional hierarchies that destroyed workers’ sense of autonomy and self-reliance. Workers’ bodies frequently broke down in factories or weakened in office settings. As a result, numerous figures of “ideal” manhood, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Eugen Sandow,

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emerged in political and popular spheres. These figures demonstrated both muscular and moral fortitude, aspects closely linked with white masculinity in both political and physical culture, forging an implicit connection between physical and mental capabilities. In the final decades of the nineteenth century in the US, physical culture took place primarily in educational settings and institutions. Its transformation into a popular movement paralleled a general reform sentiment that also contributed to the increased visibility of the labor movement, the women’s movement, the agrarian movement, and the corporate reorganization movement. These movements disseminated their organizational legacies through the establishment of the American Federation of Labor in 1886, the Food and Drug Administration in 1906, and the Federal Trade Commission in 1914. Additionally, reformers put national social reform imperatives into action at the local level through social welfare programs via the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations (YMCA and YWCA), the settlement movement, and the playground movement which paired spiritual and social reform with physical fitness and freedom. While these reforms sought to push against State control and transform government in general, Progressives also reinforced mechanisms of social and cultural regulation. In other words, centralized mechanisms of government became dispersed into more localized people and institutions. Foucault traces these governmental shifts in his essay, “Governmentality” (1978). As part of this process, Foucault argues, citizens are increasingly managed by discourses and practices promoted by educational, medical, and cultural institutions, and a growing print and media culture. All encourage regular and repeated engagement with those institutions—doctor’s visits, schooling, evening workouts—in order to increase an individual’s ability to self-manage. The result is what he called “biopower,” increasingly specific ways in which these regulating cultural forces made their way into people’s private spheres and practices especially through imperatives to improve health (Foucault 1976, 1980). During the Progressive Era the dispersion of regulatory techniques through social welfare movements and institutions responsible for managing the bodies of immigrants, women, children, the poor, and BIPOC communities, helped sow the seeds for eugenically-based regimes of power. Physical culture operated as a part of this ensemble, managing individuals and thus the population through a system of everyday practices designed for the individual, but meant to increase the physical and mental efficiency of the population as a whole. “As it is with the individual, so it is

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with the nation,” said then governor of New York Theodore Roosevelt in his 1899 speech to the Hamilton Club in Chicago titled, “The Strenuous Life.”6 Hence, exercises used in schools and gymnasiums served as a means to an end, enacted on the individual level to strengthen muscles and increase the cardiovascular capability of a population of more physically efficient workers. As an arena of physical, and increasingly moral, cultivation physical culture became intimately connected to conceptions of white masculinity and nationalism. The “strenuous life” promoted by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and others linked physical fitness—through political, economic, and Christian rhetoric—to morality and character. He concluded his speech saying, “Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.” Roosevelt argued in his speech that if all Americans committed to living a “strenuous life” then America’s overall strength and prosperity would increase. The key to increasing the country’s strength (including greatly expanding the military) lay in expanding the family. “In the last analysis,” he argued, “[A] healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives.” Such rhetoric easily squared with two decades of reform efforts in the arenas of civic and personal hygiene, physical culture, especially diet and exercise, and hard work. That work happened in offices and factories, but also domestic spaces. He went on to add, “The man must be glad to do a man’s work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.” Roosevelt’s thoughts on motherhood were later expanded in a 1905 speech before the National Congress of Mothers where he, now as president, charged mothers to focus on birthing and raising children in order to prevent “race suicide.” Like many other eugenicists, he made no direct reference to skin color when talking about race. He did make clear that “race” referred specifically to what was then termed “native-born Americans” and therefore purposely excluded immigrants. Additionally, while statistics at the time showed that falling white and black birth rates, the implied address here to an entirely white and largely upper-class white female audience was clear. Progressive Era nationalism, as promoted by Roosevelt, blurred the boundaries between economic, social, and racial

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spheres. In blurring these boundaries, it also concerned itself with what went on in citizens’ beds. Encouraging white reproduction, in the workforce and in the domestic sphere, became the driving force behind much political and popular discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Calls by politicians and experts alike to adopt the strenuous life placed the work of physical culturists in the spotlight. While the white working class, according to physical educators, needed rational forms of exercise and correction, the emerging white middle class needed the play of leisure in order to cope with the trials of the business world. Hence, many sports historians connect sports and leisure to the emerging professional managerial class who not only needed to counteract physically sedentary work environments, but also needed leisurely pursuits that improved their personal satisfaction, thus allowing them to refuel for the growing work of capitalism. The growth of sports and fitness movements sparked by this mass turn to leisure and athletics led to what sport historian Elliott J. Gorn considers to be the origin of modern sports. Sports historians like Gorn acknowledge that the term “modern” hides the implicit whiteness, masculinity, and elitism of such pursuits in the late nineteenth century (1997, 51; Verbrugge 2012). This deceptive christening of the modern in sports also disguised the appropriation of physical culture practices from working classes and racialized communities. Physical culturists’ move to elevate white middle-class pursuits and erase their connection to previous practices proved crucial in order to establish the naturalness of physical culture as a means to overall mental and physical health, and the so-called natural superiority of whiteness.

Eugenics and Whiteness in the Progressive Era In order to conduct a deeper analysis of how these calls to increase racial health operated as an incitement to white women and men to exercise we must also consider how physical culture facilitated the separation of the population by categories of race, gender, and class. The influx of Southern and Eastern European, and Asian immigrants, the migration of displaced and disenfranchised Blacks to northern cities, the expropriation of Mexican land in the southwest by white settlers, and the sequestering of indigenous communities onto reservations and into government administered boarding schools, activated debates over degrees of whiteness in the late nineteenth century. While agrarian and labor reform sought to create bridges between native-born and white immigrant laborers in the

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US, and even white and Black farmers in the South, historian Carol Horton argues that the lack of federal action against Jim Crow laws, and continued discrimination and segregation of Asian immigrants in urban areas, revealed an underlying assumption of white supremacy on both local and national levels of reform (2005, 225–6). In the Progressive Era, this assumption of whiteness played out through the project of “manifest destiny.” Manifest destiny assumed that the Westward expansion of largely European-descended white settler population was noble and inevitable. As historian Reginald Horsman points out in his book Race and Manifest Destiny, as a government policy, manifest destiny propelled, justified, and supported so-called racial sciences that argued for the “innate superiority of the American AngloSaxon branch of the Caucasian race” (1981, 1). For example, pseudoscientific disciplines such as phrenology and physiognomy utilized then recent evolutionary science to argue for the intellectual superiority or deficiency represented by particular physical traits such as head shape. These pseudo-scientists forwarded the outward manifestation of these traits as an expression of inner character. Such practices art historian Allan Sekula argues, allowed these disciplines to “legitimate on organic grounds the dominion of intellectual over manual labor” (1986, 12). These disciplines almost always attributed intellect solely to Anglo-Saxon characteristics. The mapping of inner character onto outward physical characteristics wove together Progressive Era assumptions about race, class, and gender. As Sekula’s assertion highlights, these sciences linked whiteness to a host of other attributes including nationality, intelligence, and gender. Similarly, Delsarte’s linking of outward symmetry to inner character traits participated in such elevations of whitness. Progressive Era physical culture in the US was then both radically democratic (methods were accessible to all) and fundamentally exclusionary (some bodies were assumed to be beyond correction). In order to fully grasp the details of physical culture in the US at the time and the ways it affected conceptions of whiteness and femininity, it’s important to have some idea of how practitioners adapted the European practices from which they borrowed. The adaptation process itself demonstrated the paradoxical relationship this blossoming field had with race and nationality. US-based physical culturists relied on connections to European methods in order to boost their institutional legitimacy, especially in educational settings, while they simultaneously distrusted any methods not born out of their own gymnasiums. The result was a complicated negotiation with their European colleagues. Ultimately, US physical

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culturists turned to science in order to mask the politically, socially, and culturally predetermined assumptions they built into the emerging field.

Americanization of the Systems In 1889, several women leaders in the physical education movement in the US organized and convened what is now widely considered to be the conference that catalyzed the profession of physical education in the United States.7 Boston philanthropist Mary Hemenway financed and co-organized the agenda with the then director of the Boston Normal School for Gymnastics (also financed by Hemenway) Amy Homans. Reformer, physician, and missionary Isabel Barrows reported on and edited the conference proceedings over the course of two days in Boston at MIT. Despite their position as organizers, these women remained in the background during the actual conference in order to highlight the primary goal of the meeting: the official adoption of a physical education curriculum in the public schools.8 In order to push this agenda, they invited experts in all the various “schools” of physical training including the Swedish and German systems, but also military drill, athletics (linked with the British), Americanized Delsarte, and the various systems in use at US colleges and universities. Most speakers addressed all of these topics with the exception of Delsarte, a system not mentioned by name throughout the conference, an issue to which I will return later. They then invited physicians and educators from across New England as respondents to the talks in order to push for a dialogue across disciplinary lines. Almost every speech concluded with a public exhibition of the techniques discussed followed by a general discussion with the attendees. The conference proceedings provide a crucial look at the concerns of US physical culturists at the time as well as giving clues as to how these experts viewed the European schools and their place in the blossoming field of physical training in the US. While the central purpose of the conference was to “place before educators different systems of gymnastics … with a view to clearly ascertaining the needs of schools, and determining how they may be best met,” the proceedings also showcased the philosophical concerns and pivotal adaptations made to the European schools (Barrows 1890, i). The issues not up for debate offer as much insight into the field as those that were hotly contested. Most speakers, across systems, defined their work as an attempt to affect involuntary muscle functions (stomach, kidneys, digestion, lungs, heart, etc.)

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by bringing voluntary actions and movements under the control of individual will. Then, as the US Commissioner of Education William T. Harris pointed out in his opening remarks, the “transition of these voluntary movements into involuntary ones again through the principle of habit” (1890, 2). Will and willpower were crucial to conceptions of physical culture and the US and, as I will demonstrate, also provided justifications for limiting physical culture to certain classes, genders, and races. The history of US sports and physical culture is unique and contentious. The majority of the survey histories of sport and physical education trace only white sports and fitness from the coming of the Puritans in New England, the Dutch and Quakers in the Mid-Atlantic, and white aristocrats and plantation owners in the South. While, as I’ll discuss in a moment, many educators referred to a discreet American system, that system was comprised of a hodge-podge of culturally appropriated games already. For many of the pre-Revolutionary years, Puritan or Puritan influenced communities either forbid or strictly regulated play and dancing in the Northeast. Some of the games they did play, including a game called “shinny,” were appropriated from indigenous games (Rice et al. 1958, 182; Oxendine 1995, 50–1).9 Similarly, USAmerican sports like baseball and football evolved from what sports historian Frank Zarnowski calls “work-sports,” competitions for the rural working class, immigrants, and slaves. These competitions, usually created by supervisors and plantation owners, pitted individuals and sometimes groups against one another in order to maximize production of a specific product. Such games, like corn-husking and cotton-picking, made these tasks a modicum more enjoyable, but also underscored the inequity and problems of the sports establishment in the US (Zarnowski 2013). Some, like New York Times sports columnist William C. Rhoden, argue that a similar system exists today only the product now is the Black, and often broken, body of the athlete for the entertainment of a white audience (2006). The activities physical educators put in place in schools and gymnasiums in the early nineteenth century were an accumulation of these layers of influence, but spoken of as coming solely from the invention, work, and determination of white European ingenuity. Additionally, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the political environment in many European counties and especially Germany (then Prussia) drove many, many more non-British speaking immigrants to US shores. As I mentioned previously, many of Jahn’s students brought his

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work to the US and were then hired by schools like Harvard to teach gymnastics. While the initial burst of German teachers faded toward midcentury, in part because many of them enlisted as soldiers in the Civil War and also because their work began to fall out of favor with the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments, German Turnvereins inspired many of the US practitioners who claimed to be uniquely American in their approach. Some of the German Turnvereins led to what sports historians Elmer Rice, John Hutchinson, and Mabel Lee refer to as “strength seeker” gymnasiums and clubs. These practitioners took the strength training of the German system and moved it toward the body building culture of today. Catharine Beecher—borrowing from the games outlined above, the emerging play movement, and a dialed back version of the German system—taught and wrote about the importance of calisthenics in girls’ education. Similarly, Dio Lewis, the founder of the Boston Normal School for Gymnastics (1861), modified exercises from the German system in order to accommodate those students who were not already strong. The college curriculum set in place prior to the 1889 Conference on Physical Training structured their system primarily after the Dio Lewis method. It appeared that almost all of the European-based systems came under scrutiny and critique during the 1889 Conference on Physical Training, with the so-called American techniques receiving the most praise. Presenters showed a clear bias toward the Swedish system as well, in part because the organizers also endorsed the Swedish system. Speakers resoundingly critiqued the British system of athletics. In his lecture on physical training, Dr. Edward Hartwell, physical director at Johns Hopkins, called British athletics “childish,” “crude,” and “unspecialized” and cast the British love for sports as representative of their cavalier and impetuous attitudes (Hartwell 1890, 20). Despite the widespread disillusionment with athletics as a practice, the muscular Christian philosophy that supported British athletics permeated Americanized physical fitness systems, especially those at the YMCAs and YWCAs. Anthropologist John J. MacAloon, in an introduction to a special issue on muscular Christianity in the International Journal of the History of Sport, suggests that discussions of muscular Christianity are often marginalized in histories of sports and physical fitness as cursory or limited only to religiously oriented organizations. Such compartmentalization, MacAloon argues, neglects the secular uptake of muscular Christian ethics in such widespread, socalled American, ideals of “school-spirit, teamwork, duty, protection of the weak, [and] individual virtue” that underpin not only the public

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school system, but also “outdoor education, the playground movement … self-help practices, [and] volunteer movements.” Such a multilayered and inter-institutional framework is “broadly constitutive of life in American civil society” (2006, 692–3). As a result, muscular Christian discourse became detached from athletics and circulated through the rhetoric of both overtly Christian organizations, but also the secular strains of physical education circulating in schools and colleges grounded firmly in the Protestant work ethic. Though the organizers clearly arranged speakers in order to favor the Swedish system, participants picked both the German and Swedish systems apart in discussions. By and large, US physicians and educators felt the German system, with its tumbling and apparatus work, favored already fit young men. Many questioned its usefulness with those who were already weak (which of course always included women). In addition, American Turnvereins existed primarily near large German immigrant populations, a fact which appeared to cast some doubt on its appeal to the white native-born Bostonians present. However, many also questioned what they felt to be the inflexibility of the Swedish system. Nils Posse, the expert on the Swedish system, scoffed at those wanting “beauty in performance” in their work and stressing that music was banned from Swedish gymnastics as it distracted students (Posse 1890, 44). In the discussion that followed, rather than pushing for the national adoption of the Swedish system into US schools (which is really what the organizers had hoped for) US physical directors pushed back. Dr. W. G. Anderson, physical director at Yale argued, “The so-called American system, is as scientific as that of Ling” (Anderson 1890, 54). By the time the conference concluded it didn’t seem any clearer which system would win the “Battle of the Schools,” but educators certainly had a broader spread of options from which to choose from in their classes, and they borrowed freely from them all. Overall, several common philosophical and practical threads emerged from these proceedings in US physical culture. First, the political investments of the European systems, especially the German school, were replaced by a scientific investment in data and expertise. The majority of the speakers called for more trained physical education teachers. This replacement by no means meant the disappearance of nationalist sentiment in physical culture. What it provided instead was a sublimation of nationalist sentiment beneath a veil of scientific objectivity. Second, physical directors at the time de-emphasized the benefits of group work

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(affective bonds, team rapport) in favor of individual self-management. The movement away from athletics demonstrated this shift, as well as the widely practiced convention of measuring individuals and prescribing individualized exercise routines based on those measurements. I will discuss the ramifications of these methods much more thoroughly in the next chapter focused on Dudley Allen Sargent at Harvard. Third, US-based physical educators preferred institutional oversight and selfmanagement to government oversight. The government at the time seemed to prefer this as well. This line of thinking, stressing selfmanagement and oversight by an expert trainer, bore traces of both the strenuous life and muscular Christian rhetoric focused on individual masculine strength serving nationalistic needs. Again, the nationalistic impulse did not disappear entirely, but, ala governmentality, spread to the point of seeming invisibility among and ensemble of institutions. The unlikely crystallization of this sentiment appeared at the 1889 Conference on Physical Training in remarks by Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic movement. In them he argued, like others, that the importance of physical training lay in its ability to train the will, especially of young men aged twelve to nineteen. The result, he forwarded, would be the ideal young man, free-minded, self-governing, who “will not look upon the State as a baby looks upon its mother,” but instead be “training for freedom” (de Coubertin 1890, 113). Though the means, athletics, may have differed for de Coubertin, his statements about the ends of physical culture certainly would have resonated with his American colleagues’ ideas at the conference. Two other important shifts came about as a result of the combination of all of the aforementioned changes. The move toward more data-driven, expertly taught physical culture in the US cleaved off the inclusion of the very popular gymnastics that marked many of the European systems. That anti-popular stance drove a suspicion of physical culture and education outside of institutional settings, and outside the discipline specific boundaries that the 1889 Conference on Physical Training helped establish, a topic to which I return in Chapter 5 when I discuss Bernarr Macfadden’s popular and populist physical culture. The relationship between physical culture and theatrical performance started out as tenuous. As shown by the numerous and much discussed exhibitions demonstrating the various techniques at the conference, physical culturists, especially physical educators, relied on public displays to spread the gospel of physical training. They simultaneously cast doubt on the spectacularity of the German

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Turners’ exhibitions of virtuosity, the mass appeal of athletic competitions, and relinquished aesthetic beauty to embrace hard science. So where did such a stance leave Americanized Delsarte at the 1889 Conference on Physical Training? A speaker who might best be described as the conference crasher directly confronted what could be viewed as the anti-popular, antitheatrical position of the conference. S. S. Curry of the Boston School of Expression opened his address to the conference in the final session by thanking the organizers and remarking that the “special phase of training” that he represented had been omitted (Curry 1890, 115). He continued to critique the content of the previous days, asserting no one had addressed “the relation of physical training to the voice and the responsiveness of the body to emotion” (116). He took all systems mentioned up to that point to task for sidelining the place of the voice in regard to physical training and told the story of an actor whose voice was almost ruined by the labored breathing and constrained muscles of his physical culture practice. He excoriated those assembled for creating exercises that forced the body into exaggerations that are not natural and center men in their hips rather than the more graceful and natural center of the chest. The aim of physical training, he said, should be “the actualization of the ideal man through exercise” rather than some wrestling match with the will (119). The teacher’s job, he argued, was to be able to recognize in the student “what nature intended him to be” and give him exercises to achieve that. He concluded, hotly asking, “Have you had any principle even hinted that can enable you to better make your diagnosis and apply prescribed exercises so as to elevate a man in the scale of manhood and not degrade him into an animal?” (120).10 As it was the concluding session of the conference, it appears no discussion followed, so we are left without a sense of how the audience took Curry’s resounding critique of the ideas presented. Samuel Silas Curry was a student of Steele MacKaye’s and utilized Delsarte in his school in Boston, though neither he nor anyone else at the conference mentioned Delsarte by name. Although MacKaye lectured on Delsarte beginning in 1871, by 1889 the practice had already spread like wildfire through the Northeast with numerous handbooks and classes in Americanized Delsarte at most institutions with physical culture for women.11 MacKaye brought Delsarte’s principles to the US and spread them through a seemingly never-ending series of lectures between 1871

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and 1878. Though Curry seemed to place the goals of the physical educators and physicians at the conference at odds with Delsarte, the majority of the educators at the conference, including Sargent and Anderson, moved on to embrace it as part of their curriculums, though mainly for use with women. The elocution-focused Delsarteans like Curry continued to move away from the physical culture-based Delsarte (he would later resoundingly critique Genevieve Stebbins, who would become one of the primary sources of physical Delsarte techniques), but despite its seeming absence from the 1889 Conference on Physical Training, MacKaye’s Delsarte-based aesthetic gymnastics became a compulsory component of most physical culture systems for women in the US in the waning years of the nineteenth century.

Americanized Delsarte: Classicism as Self-Culture Like its unnamed status at the 1889 Conference on Physical Training, Americanized Delsarte appears everywhere and nowhere in the annals of theatre history, elocution, dance, and physical fitness. While you can find it mentioned in almost every theatre history textbook, the contemporary book-length studies on Americanized Delsarte are difficult to find, especially in English. At best, scholars position the practice as a convenient bridge from stage to silent film acting, and a stilted relic of melodramatic nineteenth-century conventions at worst. Even scholars who write extensively about Americanized Delsarte characterize it as a kinesthetic dead end. Claude Shaver, in his 1937 dissertation on Americanized Delsarte, concluded, “While there are many valuable points in the system, in the main it is mechanical, artificial, and fallacious in basic principle” (5b). As modernist theatre scholar Julia Walker points out, it has long been considered a “failed idea” by theatre historians. Even dance scholar Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, who has arguably written the most extensively on Americanized Delsarte, sees it as a brief flash that by the 1890s had become “as mechanical and dogmatic as any rigid tradition” (Walker, 6; Ruyter, Reformers and Visionaries, 27).12 Though often cited as an elite pastime, Americanized Delsarte crossed classed and gendered boundaries, as comfortable on bourgeois bodies in salon performances as it was on midway strongmen and burlesque dancers. Despite this fluidity, it remained a staunchly white phenomenon. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I investigate how Americanized Delsarte’s conventions and

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philosophies contributed to emerging ideas about the production and reproduction of whiteness. It is difficult, if not impossible according to most Delsarte scholars, to ever get to the “original” François Delsarte without going through Steele MacKaye. As Porte asserts, “It is he, and none other, who is the true ambassador of François Delsarte on American soil. Because of all the Delsarteans—from the earliest converts to the last-minute opportunists—he was the only one to have ever met Delsarte during his life, shared his intimacies, and gained his friendship, his affection and, truly, his love” (Porte, 29). In the US virtually all genealogies of Delsarteans can be traced back to MacKaye, even those who ultimately pushed against and challenged the principles they learned from him or heard about in MacKaye’s lectures. Whereas Delsarte’s own teaching emphasized voice (the voice comprised two of the three physical manifestations of Delsarte’s triad system), MacKaye’s work emphasized and expanded Delsarte’s work on aesthetic gesture. He focused mainly on actors and taught specialized classes first in Boston and then later New York to elite mostly women students. MacKaye’s six-week Delsarte course in New York was $100 for two classes a week. Unfortunately, like his mentor, MacKaye passed away unexpectedly early at the age of 52 of stomach cancer.13 Despite later accusations of artificiality and inauthenticity, part of Americanized Delsarte’s appeal lay in its process. Like the advocates of the Swedish and German gymnastics systems, aesthetic gestural Delsarte relied on the assumption of an originary form of human bodily perfection that industry and technology had since ruined. The exercises, both vocal and gestural, attempted to reclaim the so-called natural poise, grace, and strength of the human body that industrialization had taken away. At the heart of this reclamation was a reliance on regular, repeated, and sequential practice. Ultimately, advocates argued, these practices would become ingrained in the muscles of practitioners so much so that they would eventually perform the moves without thinking about them. The take-up and adaptation of MacKaye’s Americanized Delsarte methods in the US spawned vast arrays of books on and classes in Americanized Delsarte. Genevieve Stebbins, Elsie Wilbor, and Anna Morgan, all students of MacKaye’s, each wrote how-to books on Americanized Delsarte between 1885 and 1895. Delsarte practice could be found in almost any place offering classes in physical culture, elocution, and acting in the late nineteenth-century US. While the methods ran a full

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spectrum of styles (some leaning more toward gymnastics, others emphasizing elocution, and still others germinating the seeds that would spawn modern dance) statue posing was by far the most popular and widely performed form. While most of what has been written about Americanized Delsarte focuses on how it contributed to the histories of dance and theatre, little has been written about its use in physical culture. In the case of physical culture for women, Delsarte is often absorbed into discussions about the Swedish school, or referred to under MacKaye’s title of “aesthetic gymnastics.” Most research in physical education history overlooks the influence of Americanized Delsarte. But then, most such histories concern themselves primarily with the physical education of men and boys; courses in Americanized Delsarte were filled primarily with girls and women. The physical and spiritual components, and their combined ability to affect the construction of moral character, positioned Americanized Delsarte as an effective means of addressing what was then viewed as the problem of physical culture for women. Lucille Hill, physical director at Wellesley, argued at the 1889 Conference on Physical Training that women’s physical training was the central issue of their time. The biggest issue, she attested, happened at puberty, when little girls became women. “I tell you it will take the combined wisdom of every specialist in the country to meet the needs of the case,” she forwarded in a discussion following Dudley Allen Sargent’s paper (Hill, 79–80). Why did women occupy such a central place in the Americanization of physical culture? According to Hill, because the future depended on them. “If strong be the frames of the mothers, the sons shall make the laws for the people,” she quoted, then stated, “and we are working for the future generations” (80). Consequently, Hill and others framed women’s participation in what was then mandatory physical culture classes in colleges and schools through a reproductive lens. Furthermore, the moral and spiritual connections in the philosophies behind Americanized Delsarte made it especially attractive for use with white women students. First, the emphasis on movement as a manifestation of the spirit served a dual function across a spectrum of institutional settings. For example, at the YWCA it allowed physical directors to promote physical culture as a Christian practice while at colleges it sat comfortably as not gymnastics, but also not dance, both controversial practices for young white women to engage in at the time. Second, aesthetic gestural Delsarte opened the possibility for

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a broader range of physical practices—lighter activities such as club swinging, Swedish gymnastics, and marching, but also the incorporation of pulley machines and eventually basketball—by foregrounding techniques within the acceptably feminized Americanized Delsarte system. Furthermore, under the guise of Delsarte practice, some physical directors in women’s gymnasiums could incorporate heavy gymnastics (tumbling and apparatus work) that, in other contexts, might violate the stated goals for greater self-control and reduced “nervous energy,” a topic to which I will return in much more depth in Chapter 4.14 Third, Americanized Delsarte, as an aesthetic art form and a training system for actors, operated on the assumption that its vocal and gestural expressions would be performed in front of an audience. Consequently, despite the distrust of theatricality permeating the Americanization of many of these systems, virtually all physical culture programs utilized public performances as a means of spreading their maxims and practices. Charged with growing their classes and, in some cases the finances attached to their gyms, many physical directors relied on exhibitions as a critical form of advertising. The philosophical basis of the training remained central to practitioners’ arguments about its efficacy and eventually a key component of its elitism and ties to growing eugenic sentiment in the US. At the heart of Americanized Delsarte philosophy lay a belief that movement and gesture should express the ideal in nature rather than demonstrate man’s control of his own will. The idealized body in the Progressive Era US was always a white body. MacKaye, like his mentor Delsarte, had a penchant for observing and drawing bodies in his journals as part of his studies. In one set of drawings of eyes he labeled a set of increasingly deep-set eyes with character traits like “well balanced,” “weak,” and “sensual.” Below he then sketched out a series of eyes labeled “poet,” “artist,” and “teachers.” The next page showed a series of chins in profile with similar characteristics ascribed to them. Several pages later he put all the pieces together and showed whole faces. He noted at the top of this page, “Apropos of these facts, it may not be out of place to call your attention to three types of face which predominate in America.” The three he described and drew were the “typical Yankee,” “typical Irish,” and “typical Negro.” He continued, “Each of these faces manifests characteristics which it would be well for us to recognize and learn how to meet in our public school education.” The Yankee sketch has little description except to note that it is the “ideal.” The profile of the Negro woman is described below as “Extremely sensuous—very susceptible to influence. Yielding—underdeveloped” (Fig. 2.2).

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Fig. 2.2 “The Typical Negro Face,” MacKaye Notebook while studying with Delsarte (1869–1970), Box 2c, Folder 10, page 51, Delsarte (François) Papers (Mss. 1301), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La

Next to her is the description of the Irishman, described as “Obstinate—Cunning. Determined—sagacious. Great physical courage—but a generally unscrupulous disregard of truth or anything that stands in the way of the indulgence of its impetuous impulse” (Fig. 2.3). MacKaye’s notebook drawings and descriptions carry all the hallmarks of other similar photographs and drawings from the nineteenth century that apply the categorizations used for plants and animals to humans in order to explain the natural superiority of white men, in this case, the typical Yankee. We see a clear trajectory from characteristics associated with shapes of body parts, particularly faces, building toward assumptions then based on race, nationality, and gender. MacKaye chose a woman to represent the typical Negro revealing assumptions about the feminization of blackness during the Jim Crow Era. Such maneuvers enabled a papering over of overt racism and sexism through a process of decomposition and categorization. Similar to Ripley, who created a chart of the races with no mention of skin color, MacKaye’s drawings overdetermine

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Fig. 2.3 “Typical Irish Face,” MacKaye Notebook while studying with Delsarte (1869–1970), Box 2c, Folder 10, page 51, Delsarte (François) Papers (Mss. 1301), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La

Negro and Irish identity not through reference to one characteristic, like skin color or nationality, but instead to a myriad of features. For example, for the typical Irish face it is the combination of multiple features that externalize assumed interior character flaws and, in turn, make the Irish a problem. His poor character is clearly written, these drawings seem to suggest, into his chin, nose, eyes, and hair and we haven’t even seen the rest of his physique, nor do we need to is the implication. The judgments here make plain that “we” can read all we need to know about a person’s character through their face shape. Assumptions about who needed and/or might be capable of improvement reverberated beyond faces in Americanized Delsarte. The popularity of MacKaye’s aesthetic gymnastics spread, much to the chagrin of many of his more elocutionary-minded colleagues. Its most popular manifestation, it might be argued, appeared in statue posing. Statue posing surfaced in the emerging arena of self-culture practices that unsurprisingly tied themselves to classic ideals embodied in ancient Greek statues. Historian Caroline Winterer suggests the connection between the Greeks and the elevation of the mind and body marked a mid-nineteenth century shift in

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American thought from “classical texts as grammar lessons to classicism as self-culture” (Winterer, 50). Victorian’s infatuation with the Ancient Greeks was also driven by a belief in Athens as the cradle of democracy and consequently a useful ancestor to claim in the genealogy of American democracy—a concept still under development in the work of Progressive Era reformers like John Dewey and Jane Addams (Winterer, 49).15 Thus, urban reformers utilized culture as a regulatory force of rational governance aimed at “problem” populations, especially the working class. As performance scholar Jennifer Brody asserts, “when most Victorians … spoke about the beauty of sculpture—of its pure white forms, smooth unblemished surfaces, and unchanging solid structure—they spoke simultaneously of an idealized form of white beauty that complimented their racialized nationalistic ethos” (69). Performers imbued the ideal whiteness staged in statue posing with Victorian commercial flare by draping the bodies of the performers miming the statues of classic antiquity in flowing “draperies.”16 Hence, these performances implicitly connected the idealized whiteness of classic statuary with the Victorian material consumption of the upper classes and its performative expression in the white clothing of elite women. Furthermore, the promotion of “classicism as self-culture” aligns with cultural studies scholar Tony Bennett’s arguments that museums were seen as an “improving force of culture” on the working class. As “improving forces” culturing institutions like physical culture, and especially Americanized Delsarte, assimilated the white working class into urban populations, Bennett argues, in order to avert the “threat of anarchy.” Culture, Bennett claims, acted as a “moral force through which individuals might improve themselves.” Art could also serve as a culturing force, Bennett argues that those viewing art would strive to “close the gap between their rough empirical selves and the poise and harmony represented by the work of art” (65). In other words, according to Bennett, cultural institutions and practices helped nineteenth-century audiences visualize their ideal selves and those selves were white, middle class, and male. It was into this gap that Curry suggests American physical culturists had fallen. It was into this gap that Delsarte and MacKaye worried white humanity had fallen. Consequently, much of the rhetoric of Americanized Delsarte, but also other forms of physical culture in general as I’ll demonstrate in the next chapters, relied on the belief that the white working classes were capable of assimilation into white middle classness, while immigrants and non-white communities were not, and therefore not only incapable of becoming cultured, but existing outside of culture entirely.

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Conclusion: Americanized Delsarte Moves Americanized Delsarte’s central appeal lay in its promise of spiritual and intellectual illumination through physical movement. In performance, literary scholar Carrie Preston tells us, “motion is arrested in the pose to create a rhythm of unfolding movement and stasis, self-constitution, and self-presentation” (2009, 215). Its grounding in Delsarte’s foundational principles of life, mind, and soul attracted both performers and audiences hoping to be inspired by idealized bodies attempting to harness the harmony of heaven on earth. In a public sphere increasingly driven by an inducement to self-culture, Delsarte attracted dancers like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, strongmen like Eugen Sandow and Bernarr Macfadden, and early film stars like Ted Shawn who all donned white togas or union suits, or even painted their bodies with white powder or paint, and moved through a series of poses inspired from classic statuary like the Dying Gaul, David, and Aphrodite. In almost all cases, performers posed against a dark background. Americanized Delsartean statue posing mapped Delsarte’s supposedly universal principles of being onto sometimes blindingly white bodies at a time when the geographies of whiteness were being re-mapped. Statue posing, and the whiting up that went along with it, took off during the same period that sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue the working class in the US began to be defined in racial terms as white (1994). In addition, scientific theories in genetics and psychology focused not on visible characteristics of whiteness, but on what could not be seen: varying degrees of invisible degeneracy on otherwise healthy, able, and sometimes very desirable white bodies. Eugenics, a movement spawned in part by anxieties about falling white birth rates, focused primarily on rooting out and making visible these invisible degeneracies. As a result, Matt Wray argues, eugenicists began to obsess over categorizing different degrees of whiteness through field studies. As Wray points out, the initial field studies of the Eugenic Records Office (ERO) catalogued primarily white degeneracy in an effort to “delineate [white people’s] class status, and encourage and ensure their social growth and reproduction” (2006, 74). At a time when appearances lied, whiteness was often marked though social and physical performances. These categorizations represented in the drawings were reflected in many of the sentiments from MacKaye’s journals that attested, “All are predestined for heaven, and it is their own doing if they do not arrive

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there. The universality of providence is present with all men good and bad. The bad will not receive its blessings and their freedom of choice is restricted.” At a time when Christianity, economic vitality, and the alleged natural primacy of the Anglo-Saxon race were being marshaled by Europeans to justify colonization abroad and by Americans to justify social stratification and racial terror domestically, Delsarte provided a convenient stage upon which to assert white supremacy. Americanized Delsarte remained popular into the early decades of the twentieth century when artists such as Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis borrowed Americanized Delsartean movements, but ceased to claim it under the Delsarte banner in order to forge a school of techniques of their own which manifest in their establishment in 1915 of the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. At that point, however, many of the movements and ideologies that attached universal principles of being onto white bodies simply transferred into practices in modern dance, film acting, and stage acting. Though now universally disavowed even by Americanized Delsarte scholars, it merely went underground, silently and invisibly assimilated into a host of now conventional modern performance techniques.

Notes 1. Delsarte scholar Alain Porte uses this phrase when he refers to Francois Delsarte in his reflections (2005, 27). 2. Or did he? Delsarte’s scribblings litter the LSU archive, yet no one has really attempted to transcribe or translate them, preferring instead to go with MacKaye’s neatly written, and in some cases translated into English, notes from the classes. Even Shaver’s work with the archival material, a lot of which included his wife’s translations of the French, only transcribed and translated MacKaye’s notes. Many of Delsarte’s are simply illegible. See Shaver (1937). 3. Shaver, 5b. At the end of Shaver’s dissertation, he includes an extended abstract that begins again with page 1. In the notes here I’ve marked citations from that extended abstract with a b. after the page number. Additionally, the trinitarian universe imagined by Delsarte is reflected in numerous “compendiums” (his and MacKaye’s term) in his papers at the Hill Memorial Library at LSU. 4. I find the similarity between many of the gesture charts in MacKaye’s notebooks and similar charts for expression in kathakali to be uncanny. Despite digging, I have yet to trace a connection via Delsarte or MacKaye to that form. I feel certain it must be there somewhere.

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5. Saxton in particular discusses the difficulty in categorizing the 1890s due to its political and moral instability in his section “The Hegemonic Crisis of the 1890s”. 6. The Hamilton Club was a social club invested in forwarding Republican candidates for office. Theodore Roosevelt delivered his speech entitled, “The Strenuous Life,” on April 10, 1899 in Chicago. 7. While American Alliance of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (AAHPERD) had been initiated in 1885 and had been holding conferences annually since that time, this was the first conference to not only draw physicians, educators, and physical culture experts from both the US and Europe, but also to be covered in many newspapers and draw crowds up to 2000. 8. Most of those at the conference events aimed specifically at New England schools as at this point in history education policy was a state level policy decision rather than a national one. 9. This appropriation is usually not covered in mainstream histories of physical education. However, Oxendine discusses shinny as one of the main ball games played broadly across tribes before the arrival of white Europeans. 10. I should add that Curry at least spoke somewhat favorably of the Swedish system and Ling, but did not appear to feel that system was accurately represented at the conference. 11. The majority of the primary handbooks in Americanized Delsarte were published between 1887 and 1895. See Stebbins (1886) and Wilbor (1889). 12. Walker is actually discussing Curry’s promotion of expressive culture in this quote. 13. Biographical information on MacKaye from Porte (2005) and Ruyter (1999). 14. Basketball really pushed the limits of acceptable feminine behavior at the time, most especially because it involved competition—an impermeable barrier between the masculine and feminine in sports at the time. Many avoided potential conflict by only allowing women to watch women’s basketball games. 15. For further examination of the connection between Greek democracy and American Progressive democracy, see Mattson (1998). 16. While Delsartians like Stebbins utilized draperies, the living picture shows, like Macfadden’s exhibitions, sometimes used white tights to represent work of art containing nudity. As a result of the latent eroticism of such depictions, the living picture shows also ran into trouble with Anthony Comstock. See McCullough (1983).

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Bibliography Anderson, W.G. 1890. “Discussion of Posse Lecture.” In Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis. Baker, William J. 2007. Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Barrows, Isabel C., ed. and rep. 1890. Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis. Bennett, Tony. 2005. “Culture.” In New Keywords: Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, ed. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. 1998. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Feminity, and Victorian Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Curry, Samuel Silas. 1890. Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis. de Coubertin, Pierre. 1890. Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis. Foucault, Michel. 1976. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, Michel. 1978. “Governmentality.” trans. Rosi Braidotti. rev. Colin Gordon. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault. 1991, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 , ed. and trans. Colin Gordon, 166–182. New York: Pantheon. François Delsarte Notes, Box 1, Folder 36a, Delsarte (François) Papers (Mss. 1301), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La. Gorn, Elliott J. 1997. “Sports Through the Nineteenth Century.” In The New American Sport History: Recent Approaches and Perspectives, ed. S.W. Pope. Sport and Society Ser., 33–57. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Harris, William T. 1890. “Physical Training.” Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis, 1890, 2. Hartwell, Dr. Edward M. 1890. “The Nature of Physical Training, and the Best Means of Securing Its Ends.” In Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers

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and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis. Hill, Lucille. 1890. Discussion following Sargent paper, Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis. Horsman, Reginald. 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Horton, Carol A. 2005. Race and the Making of American Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Jannarone, Kimberly. 2017. “Mass Gymnastics and the Extraordinary Body Politic.” Paper Presented at the American Society for Theatre Research conference, Atlanta, GA, Nov. 15–19. MacAloon, John J. 2006. “Introduction: Muscular Christianity After 150 Years.” International Journal of the History of Sport 23.5: 687–700. MacKaye, Percy. 1927. Epoch: The Life of Steele MacKaye, Genius of the Theatre, in Relation to His Times and Contemporaries. New York: Boni & Liveright. Mattson, Kevin. 1998. Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy in the Progressive Era. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. McCullough, Jack W. 1983. Living Pictures on the New York Stage. Theater and Dramatic Studies ser. No. 13, 133–142. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Morgan, Anna. 1891. An Hour With Delsarte: A Study of Expression. New York: Edgar S. Werner Publisher. Notebook of Steele MacKaye while studying with Delsarte (1869–1870), Folder 13, Box 2C, Delsarte (François) Papers (Mss. 1301), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Oxendine, Joseph B. 1995. American Indian Sports Heritage, 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Porte, Alain. 2005. “Four Reflections on François Delsarte.” Mime Journal 23: 22–41. Posse, Nils. 1890. “The Chief Characteristics of the Swedish System of Gymnastics.” Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis. Preston, Carrie. 2009. “Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film.” Theatre Journal 61.2 (May): 213–233. Putney, Clifford. 2001. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Rhoden, William C. 2006. $40 Million Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. New York: Three Rivers Press. Rice, Emmett, John Hutchinson, and Mabel Lee, eds. 1958. A Brief History of Physical Education, 4th ed. New York: Ronald Press. Ripley, William Zebina. 1899. The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Roosevelt, Theodore. 1905. “On American Motherhood.” Address by President Roosevelt Before the National Congress of Mothers. Theodore Roosevelt Collection. MS Am 1541 (315). Harvard College Library. Roosevelt, Theodore. 1902. “The Strenuous Life.” The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, 1–24. New York: The Century Co. Roth, M. 1853. “Preface.” The Gymnastic Free Exercises of P.H. Ling, Arranged by H. Rothstein. London: Groombridge and Sons. Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa. 1979. Reformers and Visionaries. New York: Dance Horizons. Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa. 1999. The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth Century American Delsartism. Westport: Greenwood Press. Saxton, Alexander. 2003. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America. The Haymarket Ser. London: Verso. Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39: 3–64. Shaver, Claude Lester. 1937. “The Delsarte System as Seen Through the Notes of Steele MacKaye.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Stebbins, Genevieve. 1886. Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression. New York: Edgar Werner. “Treloar and Miss Marshall, prize winners at the Physical Culture Show in Madison Square Garden.” 1905. Prod. Thomas A. Edison, The American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870–1920 Collection, Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/var stg:@field(NUMBER+@band(varsmp+1905)). Accessed January 15, 2018. Venters, Scott. 2016. “‘Would You Die for the Fatherland?’: Disciplining the German Commemorative Body.” Theatre History Studies 35: 39–71. Verbrugge, Martha H. 2012. Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Walker, Julia. 2005. Expressionism and Modernism in the Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama Ser. New York: Cambridge University Press. Watson, Nick J. 2007. “Muscular Christianity in the Modern Age: ‘Winning for Christ’ or ‘Playing for Glory’?” In Sport and Spirituality: An Introduction, eds. Jim Parry, Mark Nesti, Simon Robinson, and Nick Watson. 80–94. New York: Routledge.

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Wide, Anders Gustav. 1908. Home Gymnastics According to the Ling System, 2nd revised edition of English translation. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company. Wilbor, Elsie. 1889. Delsarte Recitation Book and Directory. New York: Edgar Werner. Winterer, Caroline. 2006. “Classical Oratory and the Fears of Demagoguery in the Antebellum Era.” In Classical Antiquity and the Politics of America: From George Washington to George W. Bush, ed. Michael Meckler. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Wray, Matt. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zarnowski, Frank. 2013. American Work-Sports: The History of Competitions for Cornhuskers, Lumberjacks, Fireman and Others. Jefferson, NC: Macfarland and Company.

CHAPTER 3

Dudley Allen Sargent’s Classed and Classing Fitness: Nature, Science, and Mimetic Exercise

Imagine a time when building or strengthening the body was considered beneath the dignity of educated men—much less women, who rarely received higher education. Dr. Dudley Allen Sargent, a nineteenth-century educator, visionary, and inventor, helped change that belief for good. By emphasizing training for all students, not just athletes, he largely created the discipline of physical education. Dr. Sargent founded the Sargent School of Physical Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1881. He also built a reputation as an innovator by developing exercise machines that even weak and disabled individuals could use, thanks to pulley systems with adjustable weights. At his Sargent School, students learned training techniques to strengthen and improve the physical abilities of all people. (Boston University College of Health and Human Sciences: Sargent College)

These remarks are on the “Our History” page of Boston University’s College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College. They reflect on Dudley Allen Sargent, physical director at the Harvard Hemenway Gymnasium from 1879 to 1919 and founder of the Sargent School for Physical Training in 1881 (what would become Sargent College), as a major force in the establishment of physical education in institutions of higher education in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Like many other reflections on Sargent, the college emphasizes his innovations (pulley weights) and inclusive practices (“even weak and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2_3

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disabled individuals”). Many feminist physical education historians have more ambiguous feelings about Sargent. While he promoted women’s physical education and taught women physical culture, he was vocally opposed to women’s participation in competitive sports. Nonetheless, the vast majority of women physical educators working at universities and colleges, as well as the YWCA and other physical training institutions for women, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came out of his classes. Additionally, some of the first Black physical educators, Edwin Bancroft Henderson and Anita Turner, graduated from his summer school for teachers (Wiggins 1999). Sargent was an undeniable innovator in the realms of exercise machines, training women to be physical educators, and the establishment of physical education as a profession.1 However, Sargent’s blatant eugenic philosophies and promotion of physical training as a form of social control should temper historians’ championing of his work. In Sargent’s speech at the 1889 Conference on Physical Training, we can see the beginnings of the Americanized physical culture emphasis on race, gender, and class as opposed to the nation and community-building stressed in the European schools. Of all the invited speakers at the conference, Sargent was the only one to bring up physical training in gendered and racialized terms. The connection between gender and race was not happenstance. Sargent justified many of the techniques he promoted in his talk as demonstrating that “we” are at the zenith of a “civilized society.” “In primitive races individuals of the same tribe bear a close resemblance to one another,” he remarked, before expounding on the importance of the division of labor in more “civilized communities” (1890b, 72). The specialization in trade occupations in these societies, he argued, enabled a person’s occupation to be read on their bodies. According to Sargent, “men are moulded by their trades and occupations,” and many of the diseases with which they are afflicted arise from “physical defects due to faulty positions and want of appropriate exercise” (ibid.). One of the most afflicted, he added, was the student class. Sargent’s maneuvers here are at the heart of this chapter on race, class, and gender in Progressive Era physical culture, and also a key point in the books overall. On the one hand, Sargent justified what we see now as a racist gesture (they all look the same) beneath the veil of science, but he also then buried race within class and gender. On the other hand, he also promised the hope of holistic transformation to those physically burdened by their occupations. As I will argue throughout this book, such maneuvers enabled progressives like Sargent to forward their practices and ideas

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as accessible to all, but actually then constructed an institution, physical culture, with very clear ideas about which bodies were capable of transformation and which were not. Additionally, a physical practice bent on repeating movements until they became internalized, felt as natural, forgotten, and then read on the body as inherent characteristics of white masculinity and femininity further obscured the intentionally constructed physiques. Sargent enacted performatively what MacKaye hoped Americanized Delsarte would accomplish: a set of behaviors and physical actions that, through repetition, would be internalized, only to be externalized and read on the body as the ideal. Both also presumed not everyone was capable of the transformations and improvements promised by physical culture. In this chapter, I explore how Sargent’s gym work and handbooks promised transformation, especially in terms of class, at the expense of a eugenically grounded philosophy that positioned elite white men at the pinnacle of a social evolutionary trajectory. He yearned to bring his upperclass white male students at Harvard to a closer appreciation of their lower class, manually laboring brothers. For his women students at the Harvard Annex, he promised elevation to careers in universities and colleges as physical directors, while also expecting them to follow through on their duties to “the race” by becoming wives and mothers. Here, I rely not only on newspaper accounts and his handbooks, but also material from the Dudley Allen Sargent papers in the Harvard University Archives. I interpret these materials through a performance lens, looking for examples of where and how Sargent felt exercises eventually manifested on bodies that would propel white racial fitness forward. Throughout the chapter, I theorize these processes as what I call classed and classing practices. In doing so, I rely on Elin Diamond’s definition of performance as something with both radical potential (“a doing”) and fixed in space and time (“a thing done”) and therefore established as history (1996, 2). Sargent’s exercises imagined, created, and delineated the bodies in terms of class while also utilizing those bodies to define the boundaries of that class. Through mimetic exercises that simulated rural, manual labor tasks like wood chopping, Sargent promoted a fitter population of white urban professional workers. His physical culture system helped separate an elite class from both manual and rural labor, reframing their imitations of those labors as leisure. Consequently, I suggest that performance as the alchemical touchstone that enabled the transition from the body as a tool for the production of goods to the production of the

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body as a good in and of itself. Sargent’s physical culture made white upper-classness performable even for those who were not upper class and white themselves. His seeming progressivism, however, sat comfortably along a growing belief in eugenics and white supremacy in the US. The second part of this chapter looks at Sargent’s work with young women, some at elite colleges and others as teachers in his summer school, and how it unmasks the ways class, gender, and race became tethered to one another through exercise. Tracing similarities between scientific discourse and Sargent’s physical culture practices, it becomes clear that his exercises for women focused less on producing symmetry and focused more on perceived areas of deficiency, especially those deemed responsible for success in childbirth. While much of his rhetoric about exercise for men focused on creating bodies able to do work, the rhetoric for women focused on their bodies as work and thus able to do the work of childbirth. In other words, while Sargent’s exercises for men focused on their capacity as producers of capital, his exercises for women focused on increasing their capacity to produce themselves as reproducers of humans. Such a philosophy relied on physical exercises that kept white middle- and upper-class women strong enough to endure childbirth, but not so strong that it upset the established ideals of white femininity.

Dudley Allen Sargent: From the Farm to the Big Top to the Ivy League The public, rapacious for novelty, will not brook any repetition; so the ambitious artist must be constantly moving to new publics that have never seen his work. Then, too, I tired of having people look at me as a cross between a monkey and a gypsy, an interpretation of circus life which the performers must endure, even encourage, since the very strangeness of such a popular conception whets the curiosity of our precious audiences. (Sargent 1927, 8)

With this musing in his autobiography, Dudley Allen Sargent ended his brief career as a circus trapeze artist and moved onto physical education. As a boy growing up in New England, Sargent belonged to the rural working class, spending a significant amount of time floating from one physically demanding job to another as a seaman, janitor, lumberman, coal miner, and farmer.2 As a rural working-class transplant in the

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emerging professional managerial class, Sargent was the perfect ambassador for the transformation of functional exercise for the rural and working classes into a component within a regulatory system of bodily reform for the middle and upper classes. Once he discovered his desire to pursue physical training as a career, he abandoned his work as a gymnast and a circus performer. The tales of Sargent’s early childhood in his autobiography detailed how constant physical activity shaped his aspirations. As an unruly youth, the dehumanizing and often abusive physical punishments inflicted on him by teachers gave him faith in his own bodily strength and fortitude of mind. This faith grew into a desire to redirect what he felt was the “inherent destructiveness” of “pent-up energies” through “large movements” of his body, a corporeal philosophy that likely led him to many of his varied occupations (1927, 77). The string of unlikely positions preceding Sargent’s almost 50-year career at Harvard complicates his historiographic placement as the father of modern physical education in the US as much as it regularly complicated his position at Harvard. Furthermore, it troubled Progressive Era distinctions between elite academic institutions and popular performance, a separation I pointed to in the previous chapter as crucial for physical education’s legitimacy in higher education. Sargent was by no means the first physical director in higher education to have an official faculty position. Dr. Edward Hitchcock preceded him by twenty years, installing a program in physical education at Amherst College complete with apparatus, eclectic combinations of German and Swedish systems, and anthropometric measurements (body measurements like those of the hips and waist, but also lung capacity and strength).3 One of his predecessors at Harvard, Charles Follen, organized a student-run German turnplatz with several apparatus including bars, ladders, wooden horses, and suspended ropes (Lee 1983, 37). Sargent explained that his particular concern for women’s heath came from the philosophies of both Dio Lewis and Catharine Beecher who both viewed calisthenics as a way to cure the ills of so-called feeble girls. However, Sargent’s rural workingclass background set him apart from many of his predecessors. Hitchcock was an Amherst alum and son of the school’s president, and Lewis and Beecher were from wealthy, historied New England families. Additionally, Sargent may be considered one of the first hired to be primarily a physical educator. Follen was a German professor and Hitchcock the college’s physician (Lee 1983, 33–46, 79–109). As a result of his complicated background—rural working-class roots with a Yale medical degree, trapeze

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artist with extensive teaching experience—he was a risky hire for Harvard as it was shaping itself into one of the country’s premier institutions for educating elite young men. Sargent’s tenure at Harvard was peppered with conflicts about his “extracurricular” activities including several controversies surrounding his entrepreneurial pursuits, in particular the making and selling of his exercise machines, and his circus background. In his autobiography, he spends an entire chapter discussing the professional pressures that, lamentably, prevented him from patenting his exercise machines (Sargent 1927, 187– 8).4 “If I patented my appliances and went into business, I sounded my own death knell professionally,” argued Sargent, and went on to criticize what he saw as the “professional attitude” against “menials [who] work with their hands” (1927, 193). Sargent recounted another incident in his autobiography from the first physical culture exhibition he arranged at Harvard. He decided to perform an old feat from his circus days, balancing on a high wire in a rocking chair. The stunt drew the ire of a Harvard community “shocked to see a college professor teetering in so unacademic a position. People did not approve of my appearing publicly in the work I was supposed to be teaching” (1927, 176–7). Sargent constantly defended himself, his ties to popular physical culture performance, and his rural working-class roots. Rather than disavowing those roots, he used physical fitness as a way to embrace his own background and recast it as a scientific lesson in returning to humanity’s more naturebased roots. Using science, technology, and medicine Sargent successfully distanced his physical culture, and by default himself, from their rural lower-class foundations.

Back to Nature: Romanticizing a Rural Past Physical culturists, like many of their contemporaries, had a conflicted relationship with technology and nature. Fueled by the shift from more rural kinds of labor and living to more sedentary urban-industrial forms of work, physical training and education hoped to address physical problems attributable to smaller more congested living spaces. This issue drove the concerns voiced by those at the 1889 Physical Training Conference. Americanizing the European systems and advancing the homegrown physical training methods meant addressing what physical culturists felt were the unique circumstances and environments affecting US Progressive Era bodies. Consequently, physical culture built itself around the

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problems inherent in urbanization. Physical culturists endeavored to reform urban bodies, bringing them back to a more “natural state” in a nostalgic past before industry and technology intervened. Such a maneuver also enabled them to mobilize the rhetoric of scientific and social Darwinism. The idea was that “we” white Americans had advanced so far as to create technologies that propelled our country forward in terms of economic dominance, but along the way we somehow forgot or discarded the positive parts of more rural ways of living and, therefore, needed to manufacture ourselves by imitating physically what we used to do in our (mythic) rural past in order to live better in an urban environment. If we could manufacture goods on a massive scale and design technologies like the steam engine and the X-ray, this line of thinking concluded, we should be able to manufacture and design our bodies as well. Interestingly, Progressive Era feelings about technology and nature were not incompatible. In fact, they were often viewed in relationship to one another. Technology fit quite comfortably within the precepts of American pastoralism’s infatuation with nature espoused by such famous authors as Thoreau, Emerson, and Longfellow. Many of the earlier American romantics described their love of the countryside with industrial flair. Emerson pined in an 1844 lecture, “Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water” (1904, 364). The imagery in this passage conjured the railroad as a mystic divining stick, able to awaken heretofore dormant natural resources. It imagined technology as a means to harness and enhance the natural world, not as its inverse. However, this desire for the countryside was complexly sandwiched between a conceptual ideal and perceived reality. Even for Romantics like Thoreau, the pastoral was ideal rather than actual, argues Thoreau scholar Robert Milder, like a “weathered barn in the afternoon sun … most attractive from a distance; up close it showed the dry rot of tradition” (1995, 32). Blurring the boundaries between the urban and the rural, the industrial and the agricultural, solidified the connections and increased the distance between a pastoral ideal grounded in a nostalgic past and a perception of the reality of rural life. While Emerson revered the country, he also excoriated those who lived and worked there. In 1843, Emerson blamed urban commerce for the theft of the country’s “flower and first fruit,” accusing cities of taking the countryside’s best and brightest people. However, he also characterized the agricultural class

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as shiftless, poverty-stricken, and inferior saying, “the country is tilled only by the inferior class of people” (2010, 23). Hence, borrowing practices from rural ways of living, as mimetic exercises did, required some recontextualization to avoid the less than favorable associations. By contrast, Sargent revered those who worked with their bodies in rural and/or manually laboring occupations. This reverence and its connection to his work appeared in a description in his autobiography of his Harvard Annex gymnasium for women in Cambridge, a carriage house sandwiched between the stables and the blacksmith shop. Now I was perfectly aware of the fact that soft-coal smoke, the smells coming from our next door neighbor, the livery stable, and the odor of burning leather, of horses hoofs and of old paint pots from our handy blacksmith shop were not the most pleasant aromas in the world; nor did the noises rising from the machinists’ files, carpenter’s saw and smithy’s hammer form the most dulcet accompaniment to my lectures. But all these incidentals of trade had a significant bearing on the work at hand. These young people were learning that all kinds of manual labor and various physical activities had been not only the foundation of the wealth of the republic, but also the health and development of the majority of our people. (1927, 201–3)

To prove the physical effectiveness of manual labor, he claimed, he came up with his mimetic exercises. These exercises imitated different kinds of physical labor. One set of exercises imitated athletics like javelin throwing, football throwing, and crouching starts for races. The other set of mimetic exercises imitated manual labor like wood chopping, pitching hay, and grinding corn. Neither set of exercises required equipment. Sargent needed to justify the use of these practices in an elite institution like Harvard. Mimetic exercises needed to be maintained as rural practices tied to more natural modes of existence, but removed from subsequent associations with lower-class occupations.5 To avoid the lower- and working-class associations connected with rural and physically engaged occupations, physical culturists like Sargent cloaked their practices in the grammar of science, especially evolutionary hierarchies. Tied through a more widespread discourse about

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the “natural,” physical culture was part of a national trend of regulatory techniques that ushered in an economic and social “naturalism” buoyed by scientific theories of evolution. Foucault articulated the relationship between the natural, the economy, and the justification for more regulatory mechanisms in the US in his 1977 series of lectures Security, Territory, and Population. The “natural” mode of the US laissez-faire economy (peaking in the 1870s) operated according to what he deemed to be a demand “not so much to prevent things as to ensure that the necessary and natural regulations work, or even to create regulations which enable natural regulations to work” (2004, 17). In other words, this system was by no means natural in an organic, pure, unprocessed way, but rather a highly regulated machine that intervened to ensure a more natural, as in “essential” and “true,” functioning of “the course of things.” This system of processes manufactured the natural as a product of relations between people, their labor, and objects in their world. Hence, the institutions set in place by the US federal government during the Progressive Era, such as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, provided a corrective to what was viewed by many as the polluting corruptness of earlier nineteenth-century economic policies. These governmental regulators allowed the market to function more “naturally” by producing the nature they sought to maintain. In the US, Foucault argued, this naturalist discourse applied not only to the market economy, but also the social sphere. As a result, social Darwinists could claim that society, based on science, was actually functioning naturally when categorized and separated according to economic, racial, and gendered hierarchies.6 Similarly to Emerson, Sargent utilized this pervasive discourse on the natural to suggest that white professional and student classes were more “naturally” disposed to survive, but that urban environments prevented them from achieving their natural place within the economic hierarchy. As an inverse to Emerson’s suggestion that technology enhanced nature, Sargent instead proposed that more rural (therefore closer to nature) physical engagements would counteract the negative consequences of technology’s effect on the body. In the 1904 preface to his exercise handbook Health, Strength, and Power, he argued that the purpose of the book was to give everyone, especially those without access to gymnasiums or equipment, the benefits of his system of training (1904, xi–x). This statement, however, stood in stark contrast to his remarks in the introduction to the edition ten years later. By the time of the 1914 publication of the

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handbook, it was clear that Sargent’s feelings on eugenics had become much stronger. In it, he suggested that while improvements to “public health and municipal hygiene” had done much to advance the conditions of “the young, the ignorant or reckless and the so-called laboring classes who work largely with their muscles” those involved in more sedentary middle- and upper-class occupations the “students, the professional men, or the so-called brain workers” had been sorely neglected. In Sargent’s view, this situation resulted in an evolutionary upheaval. “While improved sanitation has undoubtedly prolonged the lives of those who are weak and would naturally have died young it has not prolonged the lives of those who are strong and would under other circumstances than those of our strenuous, one-sided modern life have lived to a ripe old age,” he argued (1914a, x). Viewed in this light, Sargent’s handbook of exercises set out to reinvigorate what he believed to be the natural, as in evolutionary, course of things. In other words, in evolutionary terms Sargent took practices from mostly rural spaces—where he believed evolution proceeded more freely—and ensured their continued progression in an industrialized urban setting. Work in genetics at the time further bolstered such thinking. For much of the nineteenth century, a Lamarckian version of hereditary natural selection held sway. Much like Sargent’s idea that exercise could markedly improve the race en masse throughout future generations, French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that characteristics acquired through the environment were inheritable. For example, a Lamarckian stance would argue that a giraffe’s neck is attributable to generations of stretching to reach leaves rather than biologically determined.7 Lamarckian genetics influenced the ideas of early eugenicists such as Galton whose work Sargent utilized extensively as a foundation for his anthropometry.8 However, by the 1880s biologists such as August Weismann, whose experiments with germ cells suggested that hereditary material was passed on to subsequent generations regardless of outside influences, began to debunk Lamarckian genetics (Wolff 2009, 2). By 1900, the rediscovery of Mendel’s experiments on peas rang the death knell for Lamarckian genetics and ushered in an era of biological determinism in the US.9 This shift seemed to undermine the eugenic foundations of Sargent’s argument. However, like other eugenicists, Sargent shifted his own ideas to incorporate biological determinism. Mendelian genetics, promoted as a version of natural selection by eugenicists, enabled Sargent to suggest that physical culture helped bodies to

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work more adeptly with their environment rather than being determined by the environment. Consequently, Mendelian genetics gave a substantial boost to eugenic claims for intervention into human breeding by working in the interests of a majority of the white population to ensure their superior adaptation to modern urban living. Furthermore, Sargent’s move to renaturalize white middle- and upperclass urban bodies carried an impetus toward the economic productivity of the population as a whole. The productivity accomplished by these remade re-created urban professional bodies would ultimately “serve to advance the condition of humanity as a whole” (Sargent 1906, 78). Sargent meticulously regulated and monitored bodies on an individual basis to ensure the seemingly effortless and natural performance of student bodies about to enter into the professional sphere. His physical culture simultaneously exercised social control over the elite and professional managerial class, while also acting as an invisible agent of the production process: he believed his system would literally produce better bodies. For Sargent, the ultimate end to his highly codified system of training was the betterment of the white middle and upper classes as a whole and, thus, the increased efficiency of the nation’s entire economic system. In his 1906 publication Physical Education, he continued to make connections between commerce and the importance of a good physique, returning again to the paradoxical relationship between the body and urbanization he argued, “Where civilization is most advanced, business competition sharpest, and social life most intense there will be the greatest activity and destruction of the population and the greatest demand for new people to take the place of those removed” (1906, 78). He acknowledged the destructive force that corporate, industrial, and social life in the city exerted on urban workers’ bodies.10 He went on to say that this “destructive tendency is admirably illustrated in our large cities, into which individuals enter as into a mighty furnace, and are consumed in order to generate the power that moves the machinery of the world and insures progress” (1906, 38). Though destructive, city life in Sargent’s view was necessary for the advancement of civilization. Sargent advocated mimetic exercises to help counter the physically, emotionally, and mentally corrosive effects of the urban landscape. This narrative, common in physical culture discourse, positioned ruralindustrial lifestyles in a progressive trajectory as a stepping-stone on

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the way to “modern civilization.” Rather than depicting mimetic exercise as a contemporaneous practice, Sargent, through nostalgic imagery, placed it as a dying way of life therefore neglecting how blacksmithing, carpentry, etc., contributed to the modern conveniences he spoke of, including the creation of the gymnasium in which these classes took place. Such a move enacted what Renato Rosaldo calls “salvage ethnography” where an ethnographer/colonizer attempts to “rescue” traces of what they determine to be a “dying” culture while simultaneously complicitly participating in the domination of that culture. In Rosaldo’s analysis, explorers used a romanticized nostalgic vision of the cultures they studied in order to mask their own complicity with imperialist agendas. Similarly, Sargent used a teleological trajectory and sensory-laden imagery to paint the picture of a shared rural national past that was “dying,” a maneuver that hinted at Sargent’s eugenic tendencies. Eugenically speaking, this move to distance manual labor from modernity glossed over current rural lives by (re)casting them as part of a physically vigorous national past. Combining this physicality with the benefits of urban modernity— science, education, and technology—was at the heart of eugenics as it rapidly solidified into concepts of national identity, its alleged universality obscuring its wealthy white masculinity and ties to white supremacy.

Mimetic Exercises and Class Surrogation Health, Strength, and Power contained not only instructions on how to exercise, but also Sargent’s philosophies for healthy living. Of the fifty-six exercises explained in both photographs and text at the end of the book, nineteen imitated athletic pursuits such as football, swimming, rowing, golf, and archery. It is important to note here that Sargent effectively evacuated all the aspects of athletics from the exercises that the 1889 conference participants found objectionable. By taking away the equipment and competition, Sargent effectively sanitized these athletic movements. The second-largest group, containing eleven exercises, imitated actions carried out by the “muscular laboring class” including exercise number four, wood chopping (see Fig. 3.1). Written instructions on the opposite page read as follows: Position—Stand with the feet about eighteen inches apart and the hands clasped together over the right shoulder, as shown in Fig. 7.

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Fig. 3.1 Wood chopping exercise from Health, Strength, and Power. New York and Boston: H.M. Caldwell, 1904

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Movement—Swing the arms downward between the legs as indicated in Fig. 8. Now return to a similar position with the hands thrown over the left shoulder. Repeat, alternating right and left. … Caution—In executing this movement, do not swing the arms too far out from the side, or plunge the head too violently downward, but twist the body to the right or left with every upward movement. (1904, 72)

The practitioner was to alternate sides, an action that might not occur if actually chopping wood. However, in order to achieve the symmetrical development Sargent desired, the actions must work the different muscles equally. Consequently, Sargent suggested that his students engage in eighteen to twenty-five different exercises twice a day to ensure symmetrical development of not only the outside of the body, but also the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems. Furthermore, the actual act of wood chopping was erased from this performance. The practitioner was not asked to “imagine” chopping wood, but to focus on body position and movements; “do not swing the arms,” “twist the body.” The product of this exercise was not wood for fuel, but the toning and strengthening of the “muscles of the lower back, right and left abdominal walls, and the upper arms and shoulders” (1904, 172). Hence, actual wood chopping would be considered functional exercise and mimetic exercise non-functional. It is also important to note that this exercise, as with all the exercises in the book, was recommended only for certain people, in this case young men. Mimetic exercises performed a symbolic erasure as well. Through this act of symbolic erasure, these mimetic exercises enacted a form of what performance scholar Joseph Roach calls surrogation. The core of Roach’s Cities of the Dead develops this concept as a process where communities fill the “cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure [by attempting] to fit satisfactory alternates” (1996, 2). For example, here I suggest that Sargent’s exercises attempted to substitute urban white middle- and upper-class bodies for rural lower-class bodies to deal with the feeling of loss invoked by an imagined collective American pastoral past. For Roach, such substitutions highlight both the differences and similarities between the surrogate and the collective memory of the body or idea it replaces. The tension produced by this performance of sameness and difference creates a “climate of heightened anxiety that outsiders will somehow succeed in replacing the original peoples” a pervasive fear in the

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Progressive Era (1996, 6). Often, Roach suggests, this presencing of the body in memory occurs in order to forget and enable the original body’s erasure through surrogation. The removal of the previous rural laboring body was a key aspect of these mimetic exercises. By erasing the original act of wood chopping, these exercises and the bodies that performed them actively relegated the rural practices they imitated to the past, erasing the actual presence of current rural bodies and their continued use of activities like chopping wood. In Chapter 5, I discuss surrogation in a racial context in Bernarr Macfadden’s publications on physical culture. Other examples of the wood chopping exercise demonstrated even more clearly how this surrogative act facilitated an ideological erasure. Take for instance this section of a 1901 teacher’s handbook for physical education grades first through eighth by Bertha Louise Colburn, a onetime student from Sargent’s summer school for teachers. This particular excerpt came before a section of exercises that included wood chopping: When a new exercise is to be taught the teacher first performs it alone then the children rise and try while watching her to imitate her movements she uses her left arm and leg while they use their right. In the primary grades the teacher puts a picture illustrating the story on the blackboard and tells the story before giving the new exercise. (1901, 24)

When the teacher led her students through the wood chopping movement, her imitation alienated the students from the actual functional labor of chopping wood. She was not actually chopping wood, but rather miming what she imagined that action might be. However, the story the teacher was to tell her students maintained the exercise’s link to a more rural setting: “Ned learned that people in the country did not burn coal but used wood instead. He went into the woods one day with his grandfather and watched him chopping down small trees for firewood. The next day his grandfather gave him a hatchet and let him chop some wood himself” (1901, 52). Then, presumably, the students would physically enact the end of this narrative by miming chopping wood. In this story, Ned maintained his distance from wood chopping itself; the practice was made strange and nostalgic because it was something familiar to the grandfather, but unfamiliar to Ned. It presumed that “Ned,” and by association the students, were city-dwellers or at least not familar with chopping wood themselves. He learned how to chop wood by imitating

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his grandfather. The functional practice was therefore placed two generations removed from those performing the exercise. The children then imitated the story’s main character by miming their teacher’s movements. Thus, mimetic exercise became doubly imitative, miming movements from a mythic rural ideal, but also imitating in order to “learn” something about a distant, in terms of both time and space, “countryside.”11 With an intimate knowledge of physical culture’s struggle for legitimacy within higher education Sargent understood the need to justify mimetic exercise and its association with rural and manual labor as an activity for privileged classes, and distance it from those connections, a conflict embodied within his own lifelong struggle for recognition.12 Sargent’s mimetic exercises, as demonstrated in his handbook and his gym, intervened into what he perceived to be a white urban middle and upper class in decline. He viewed regular, repeated practice of these exercises as ensuring the necessary evolutionary movement of so-called civilization through the continued production and reproduction of white middle and upper classness as ideal. To link this back to Diamond, the exercise relegated actual wood chopping as a thing done in the past, while reconstructing it as a mimetic practice that shaped the future of the white race within a strong white middle- or upper-class male body. Furthermore, Sargent’s students practiced techniques of self-cultivation that intimately linked access to leisure time with appropriate performances of white middle- and upper-class masculinity. Repeated performance of these exercises signaled a metaphoric erasure of the bodies they imitated. Each subsequent movement shoving rural-industrial manual labor and even athletics into the past and out to the borderlands of a bodily entrepreneurship focused on breeding better white middle- and upper-class urban men.

Anthropometry: The Mean and Symmetry Sargent’s use of anthropometric measurements and charts further alienated his mimetic exercises from the actual practices they imitated by converting physical bodies into an accumulation of numbers, much in the same way that MacKaye and Delsarte reduced nationality and race into an accumulation of allegedly deficient facial features. Cards included 41 different measurements including hips, waist, height, and weight. Sargent plotted students’ measurements against all the bodily measurements in his collection which included tens of thousands of students in physical

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culture classes from institutions as varied as Wellesley College, the Buffalo Industrial Gym, and a Boston Police Precinct.13 The center of the chart corresponded to the fiftieth percentile of all his collected measurements, and differed according to age and gender. Thus, the mean on the chart of the male Harvard student were different from those on a chart for, say, an adolescent woman. Most of the categories on the left side of the chart were measurements of body parts by girth, depth, breadth, and length. The remaining categories measured strength and lung capacity. Sargent was adamant that his charts be figured according to the mean rather than the average, in contrast to his colleague Dr. Hitchcock at Amherst who configured his according to the average (Hitchcock 1890, 5). For instance, in order to obtain the average height of a group of men, you add the heights of all the men and divide that number by the number of men. Sargent obtained the mean by “arranging the men in groups, and noting the height of the group which contains the largest number of individuals” (“Physical Tests” 1890a, 44–5). The mean, he argued, gave a better sense of typical bodies in a specific population as the method required the extreme ends of the measurements to be excised from the final tabulation. Consequently, points to the right of center indicated where the student exceeded the mean, points to the left of center where the student failed to reach the mean. The mean, he argued, best represented “those that are most in harmony with their circumstances and environments, and that the exceptionally large or exceptionally small persons have less chance of life than those of moderate size” (“Physical Tests” 1890a, 52). While these charts, according to Sargent, measured size, strength, development, and capacity, the ultimate goal of the chart and the mimetic exercises prescribed after examination, was the achievement of symmetry, a near straight line preferably to the right of center. Underlying this amassed information was Sargent’s desire to shift the mean of the “typical” portions of the population upwards, thus increasing racial health. Less than six months after the 1889 conference on physical training, many of the same people gathered again this time at Sargent’s own gym, the Hemenway, at Harvard to convene the fifth annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education. Sargent’s talk at this conference highlighted his concerns about the race. Here, he argued “the only way to produce the highest specimens of the individual, improve the condition of the race and better the quality of future humanity, is to raise the normal or mean standard of mental and physical development” (“Physical Tests” 1890a, 51). This elevation would

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not be accomplished by cultivating the very strong or the very weak, thus the importance of his use of mean rather than average. The processes involved in obtaining measurements included incredibly complex discursive and calculative techniques for measuring, organizing, and regulating bodies.14 Hence, no matter what state the student’s physique might be in when he entered Sargent’s gym, the Sargent system sought to bring “typical” student bodies into a highly regulated state of being that paradoxically framed that result of the exercises on teh body as the most “natural” way to be. Investigating his exercises and philosophies exposes the incredibly complex task of constructing the physically fit white upper-class male body as a natural body, disguising the labor involved in calibrating the measurements that fostered these charts. Progress here was measured and calculated by the outcome on the body. Furthermore, it was not enough to become stronger. According to Sargent, health symmetry and that pushed the mean forward. As Sargent, and Delsarte and MacKaye had argued, the most symmetrical objects and bodies were also more natural and therefore better. A symmetrical body, an emerging symbol of wealth and free time, became the product of this physical labor. Through these performances, actual wood chopping itself became an unimaginable practice to engage in for young white men at Harvard. The mere presence of manual labor tasks associated with the lower classes positioned alongside athletic movements involved in sporting activities, both classified as exercises, reinforced the alignment between athletics and lower-class physical occupations. Their presence in a handbook of mimetic non-functional exercises meant for people to practice in order to work on themselves served as an act of surrogation and reconstituted lower-class functional labor as middle- and upper-class leisure. Though a staunch advocate of physical transformation—and the potential for subsequent mental, economic, and social transformation it might lead to—even Sargent felt physical culture’s affect on bodies to be limited by heritage. Like Delsarte and MacKaye, Sargent argued that a person’s ability to attain symmetricality was limited by their heredity and environment. In an 1897 publication, The Out of Door Library: Athletic Sports Sargent compared three athletic physiques: an Englishman, an Irishman, and an American. After spending some time investigating a perplexing “peculiarity” in the marked difference between the Irishman’s small bone structure and large musculature, Sargent concluded that the subject “made the best of himself in point of development … but his

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ancestry and nurture prescribed the limit, and no amount of physical training at this late date could make up the deficiency” (1897, 37–8). In other words, this young man might follow all of Sargent’s health prescriptions to the letter, but his physical fitness would always be deficient on account of his Irishness and the substandard environment in which, Sargent believed, he grew up. Additionally, the visibility of such defective heritage, Sargent seems to imply, lay disguised and required anthropometry, as a pseudo-scientific element of eugenics, to make it visible on a chart. By contrast, unsurprisingly, Sargent touted the innate superiority in the American subject whose inherited traits enabled him “through a judicious course of exercise … to approach near perfect symmetry” (1897, 38). Consequently, taking all of the equations laid out above into account, the white upper-class American man had the most symmetrical, therefore most natural, therefore inherently superior body. In this manner, Sargent and other physical culturists could dismiss mere strength as a relic of less evolved classes and races. To bring all these ideas together, Sargent relied on the same tropes and metaphors as Emerson and Thoreau, and Delsarte and MacKaye. Based on typicality the white American upper-class man exemplified the mean. For instance, Sargent argued the advantages of symmetry over general strength in the following analogy from the same essay in which he compared, metaphorically, different nations’ physiques. A small, well-made engine, with all parts adjusted, will do more work than a larger one with parts loosely constructed and a great disproportion between the important members. So a small man, compactly built, with symmetrical proportions and a well-balanced organism, can accomplish more than a larger man less solidly made, with all parts wanting in symmetry and shapeliness. This adjustment of parts prevails throughout the greater portion of the animal kingdom. (1897, 42)

Here, he validated a symmetrical body (constructed through precise exercises, physical habits, and measured through highly codified calculations by an expert) as the biologically natural state of being. Hence, the markers of high class present on elite white men’s bodies with access to Sargent‘s system were rendered invisible by their universalization, scientization, and naturalization by physical culturists like Sargent. Sargent later used this analogy in the 1904 Health, Strength, and Power to justify a social division of labor suggesting that society must have farmers, railroad men,

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and shoe salesman just as higher forms of animal life require “certain cells [to] have special work to do, some to form the skeleton, others the muscles, others the organs … and so on through all parts of the body” (1904, 8). He then effortlessly transitioned to the machinery imagery from the previous quote, subjecting biological specialization, mechanization, and social stratification to the same force of nature. In Sargent’s analogy, even the mechanized engine can become “natural” because it ensured the “proper” functioning of a biological rule, but also increased the ability of individual bodies to effectively and efficiently win an industrial and commercial war. “To meet the competition growing out of this form of warfare,” he argued in 1906, “not only implies improved implements and machinery and the best facilities for doing work and carrying on business, but it also implies … the improved physical condition of the individual laborer” (1906, 29–30). While industry and urbanization, in Sargent‘s view, were responsible for the breakdown of bodies, they were an inevitable part of the so-called natural progression of white civilization toward ever-increasing organization and specialization. Just as higher organization and greater diversity of cells separated men from amoebas, the division of labor and professional/industrial specialization separated the “highly organized” white American urban population from “more primitive forms of society [where] every man is sufficient to himself in so far as he can do his own hunting, fishing, planting, hut-building, tool-making, etc.” (1904, 8). Urban industrialization and commercialization, therefore, required human adaptation, evolutionarily justified, and practiced through his system of mimetic exercises.

Body-Builders: Producing the Reproducers If physical culture for young elite white men focused on offsetting the costs of urban industrialization and technology, then physical culture for young white women focused on offsetting the costs of reproduction. Offsetting those costs meant focusing on three particular areas of concern in the rhetoric and practice of women’s physical culture: making women’s bodies more attractive to potential husbands, producing bodies better able to withstand the labor of childbirth, and constructing women morally as superior nurturers. The way physical culture might affect women’s bodies was a primary concern during the Progressive Era. Of particular concern was how exercise might make women’s bodies appear more masculine. In 1910, a flurry

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of articles in various newspapers reported and responded to Sargent’s assertion that women’s bodies had drastically changed over the previous two decades.15 Again relying on his previous references to undifferentiated sexes as a characteristic of more “primitive” cultures, Sargent suggested that “as civilization progressed” women’s physical characteristics had become accentuated to the point of being “almost painful to look at” (“Women Changing” 1910, C1). Using his accumulated measurements as a foundation, Sargent argued women’s physique has been thoroughly made over. It is approximating that of a man. The sloping shoulders of her grandmother’s time have disappeared… . In their place we find well-knit, athletic shoulders – broad ones. Her back, likewise, is better developed. (“Women Changing” 1910, C1)

He continued by praising the shrinking of the hips and enlarging of the waist as well as the flattening of the breasts. He acknowledged not everyone celebrated these changes, but cited them all positively as a result of dress reform (specifically abandoning the corset) and women’s increased involvement in physical activity. Furthermore, he marked this shift as a class-based phenomenon. As with his sentiments about the needs of urban white men, Sargent felt that upper-class women were oin desperate need of physical training. In a different article in The New York Times concerning the same debate in 1910, he heralded the results of physical training for elite white women by comparing them not only with their “weak” and “hysterical” predecessors, but to their lower-class sisters. Here, he stated that if one walked through the better parts of town, one would find “invariably well-developed, tall, well-proportioned women … on the other hand, examine women of the lower classes, the mill girls, shop girls, and others. You will find these diminutive creatures, probably muscular on account of the work they daily perform, but by no means showing the same physiques” as those who benefited from systematized physical training (“Woman Improves” 1910, SM11). While many critics took Sargent to task for these arguments, focusing their critique on his suggestion that women were becoming more masculine, Sargent held strong and argued that the physical shift was necessary to bring women closer to, again, their “natural” physique (“Sargent’s Critics”). However, he cautioned against the trend continuing in an unhealthy manner. The article concluded citing Sargent’s warning that women abstain from engaging in competitive athletics and any other

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“activities of a man” (“Sargent’s Critics”). If the trend toward masculinization continued unchecked, he worried, it would result in a devolution to an uncivilized state. Again, though Sargent avoids overt racialization, the implications are that athletics for women posed a threat to position in an evolutionary racial hierarchy. Furthermore, the terms of the debate were always framed through discourse that emphasized the aesthetics of women’s bodies; she was always framed as an object of men’s gazes. Progressive Era physical culture concerned itself as much with the hearts and minds of white elite women as with their bodies. Industries and corporations had not only changed the landscape of the urban workplace, it had likewise transformed the domestic environment. Health advocates worried about middle- and upper-class women’s confinement in small urban homes and apartments, spaces that required less physical work than the typical rural home. Additionally, the rise in the availability of consumer goods and increased technology in the home meant an increase in women’s leisure time, according to experts. It was widely believed that these new urban environments contributed to the enfeebled condition of white American housewives and, of greater concern, to infant and maternal mortality rates. While there is much debate about whether the birth rate for the white population in the US was actually in decline, the burgeoning popular press certainly perpetuated the idea that it was indeed falling.16 The proliferation of this popular idea in the wake of the publication of mid-nineteenth-century birth and mortality statistics drove an overall focus by physicians and educators on women as mothers. Physical culture for white middle- and upper-class women initially rose out of this concern over their bodies as immanently failing in health. As sports historian Jan Todd has so meticulously chronicled, early and mid-nineteenth-century models of women’s physical culture such as Dio Lewis’s system, the early program at Mount Holyoke College, and Catharine Beecher’s popular exercise manuals for women focused on cure and correction through development and strengthening, rather than development and strengthening as the ultimate end (1998). In other words, while white men’s bodies were viewed as naturally predisposed toward strength and symmetry, women’s bodies—urban, white, and homebound—were predisposed to weakness and illness.17 As a result, while Sargent advocated for women’s all-around development through, “Strong hearts, capacious lungs, and vigorous muscles,” his exercises for women emphasized certain body parts over others (Sargent 1904, 53). Girls, for example, benefitted most from exercises

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that “develop the muscles about the waist and abdomen, not alone because of the great muscular power in this region is required of women” (1904, 9). This physical vigor in women was key, Sargent asserted, because, “Giving birth to a child is a physical process in which muscular strength and vigor play a very important part” (“Race Improvement”). According to many of Sargent’s contemporaries such as Patrick Geddes (biologist), G. Stanley Hall (psychologist), and Herbert Spencer (sociologist) among others, women’s reproductive process—beginning with puberty, stretching through pregnancy and childbirth, and concluding at menopause—necessarily hindered their ability to fully evolve both physically and mentally (Geddes 1889, 267–71; Hall 1911; Spencer 1898, 219–83). Sargent’s rhetoric about women’s physical capacities echoed these popular thinkers. He argued several months before the pivotal 1889 conference in a Scribner’s Magazine article that the “earlier arrest of individual evolution in women [was] necessitated by the reservation of vital power to meet the cost of reproduction” (Sargent 1889, 179). The difference in Sargent’s distillation of these biological arguments, from those in other disciplines, was conceiving of reproduction in economic terms of “cost.” Combining biology and economy offered a framework of physical efficiency for white elite women. This conception utilized emerging ideas regarding reproduction in the Progressive Era and defined reproduction as a “cost” the subsequent value being the infant. As mentioned previously, Sargent echoed this economic philosophy in his exercises for young men, which focused on equally working and strengthening all parts of the body. As Sargent himself suggested in contrast to women’s stunted evolution “in man evolution continues until the physiological cost of self-maintenance very nearly balances what nutrition supplies” (1889, 179). Consequently, the resulting symmetry enabled the white elite men an increased evolutionary capacity to fuel economic, scientific, and industrial progress. From this perspective, American white, upper-class men were superior to all other classes, races, and genders; symmetrically developed and symmetrically consumed by industrial and technological progress. Taking this process to its ultimate conclusion, physical culture in Sargent’s view provided and endless recycling program for white men’s bodies. It was the early arrest of women’s development that set her particular needs apart from those of her white elite male counterparts, in Sargent’s view. If white men’s physically fit bodies, according to Sargent, were the fuel that stoked the fires of industry and progress, then women’s

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pelvises provided the mechanism for the reproduction of that fuel. The Progressive Era witnessed a mounting emphasis on the well-being of the infant. As newspapers and popular publications warned that birth rates among the upper-middle and elite classes had dropped, rhetoric surrounding reproduction began to shift from encouraging quantity to ensuring quality. While eugenicists like Sargent continued to argue that middle- and upper-class white women needed to have more children, there was a mounting call for better children. The 1908 Louisiana State Fair held the country’s first “Better Baby Contest.” These pageants spread in popularity by around 1913 contests were held at 40 state fairs (Dorey 1999, 1). Infant care in the Progressive Era became increasingly important because of what sociologist Lorna Weir describes as a massive shift in perceptions of the “threshold of the living subject” (2006, 1). As Weir argues, midwives, physicians, eugenicists, and also women’s right advocates focused chiefly on post-natal mortality—deaths occurring after the first month.18 The solution, of course, was twofold. First, birth ceased to be a process that happened at home and increasingly happened in doctor’s offices or hospitals. Second, educators and physicians (still largely male professions) began to focus on educating mothers about appropriate care of themselves and their infants. The result was a veritable explosion of motherhood manuals and advice columns, which will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 5. These moves to educate and improve maternal education and health worked to optimize the cost of reproduction to ensure a consistent and sustainable value in the living infant. These new experts constructed women’s reproductive mechanisms—the physical traits that enabled the growth and bearing of an infant—as inherent characteristics in women that affected both their physical and mental development. Physical culturists of both genders saw themselves as critical to this battle to save native-born white American infants and mothers in the US. For practitioners like Sargent, this meant not just pairing exercise with education, but creating exercises that targeted specific areas of concern for women. While many of his mimetic exercises, like Pitching Hay and Grinding Corn, were recommended for women, he praised one exercise in particular for its affect on women’s maternal capacities: wallscaling. His wall-scaling activity not only worked specifically to target the muscles women used during childbirth, but also honed so-called maternal attributes centered on nurture. This twofold method had become a central push by 1912 for the rapidly expanding eugenics movement. The

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wall-scaling game for women, like the rural exercises, needed to be justified by an expert like Sargent in order to displace its association with more masculine activities. In this case, it was doubly compromised not only because it drifted into the territory of sports, but also because it came out of military training. The headline, calling it a “fad,” and the header, “Though at First Sight it Looks Not Only Difficult but Harmful, Dr. Dudley A. Sargent, Physical Director at Harvard. Who Teaches Gymnastics to Wellesley Girls, Declares It Is of the Greatest Benefit for Women,” clearly questioned its legitimacy as an appropriate exercise for women (“Wall-Scaling” 1912, SM10). It originated, according to Sargent, as a training drill for the Army and Navy and then made its way into men’s gymnasiums because, as he argued, “in our present civilization [it has] gone out of date” (“Wall-Scaling” 1912, SM10). Like the mimetic rural exercises, physical educators used military drill, especially by the turn of the twentieth century, as a piece of national history and bodily memory. “That our young people still delight to do these things harks back to a time when life itself depended on one’s physical strength, skill, and alertness,” Sargent nostalgically opined about the roots of wall-scaling (“Wall-Scaling” 1912, SM10). The physicality and desire to engage in such activities, Sargent of course argued, was an “inherited instinct.” In the exercise/game two teams of twelve competed against one another to get the entire team up and over a twelve-foot high, eight-foot wide wooden wall with a platform on the other side to hold the team once they maneuvered themselves up and over the wall. The methods used to accomplish the exercise were various, but the modes used in this particular instance, based on the photograph in the article, included women boosting teammates up over the wall and then the women on top of the wall reaching over to pull up the remaining teammates. While Sargent used the exercise/game with both his male and female students, he felt it was of particular use for women. To that end, toward the end of the article he addressed the specific benefits for women. “Women need to be made strong, especially about the region of the abdomen, back loins, and waist, for their life and that of their offspring often depend upon the muscular power of these parts,” he stated (“Wall-Scaling” 1912, SM10). Thus, he justified the exercise’s transition from military training camps into women’s gymnasiums by grounding its use-value in increasing women’s reproductive capabilities. Of all the exercises and athletics that Sargent promoted for women, he felt this one provided the best results for women in particular. Wall-scaling, “as a means of developing the

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back, arms, and abdominal walls” was especially well-suited for women given the need to develop these particular muscles. In addition to its reproductive benefits, Sargent felt it also honed “mental and moral qualities” specific to women. While Sargent’s description of wall-scaling for men required and developed “responsibility,” “courage,” “strength,” and “agility” for women it fostered “courage,” “dependence,” and a “spirit of helpfulness” which justified, in Sargent’s opinion, the physical risk alluded to by the reporter’s subheading (“Wall-Scaling” 1912, SM10). Courage, a necessary trait for both men and women in this exercise, denoted the type of mental and moral toughness needed for Sargent’s physical training regimens. However, courage could not be gained at the expense of the morally appropriate nurturing characteristics of dependence on and caring for others. To this end, Sargent’s eugenic imperatives advocated for women’s health through physical culture as a method of racial betterment. By the early twentieth century, Sargent and other physicians, educators, and social reformers united their views under the umbrella of eugenics or “race betterment.” In 1914, one of the biggest conferences on the topic was held in Battle Creek, Michigan, hosted by John Kellogg, director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Over five days, invited speakers covered topics from the ills of tobacco and alcohol, to immigration, urban planning, child rearing, and prostitution (referred to at the time as “white slavery”). Booker T. Washington spoke on the importance of using eugenic principles in the elevation of the Negro race. Throughout the conference, it was clear the term “race” had some slipperiness to it. In the introduction, welcome, and keynote, speakers defined “race” as referring specifically to the “human race” as opposed to animals or plants, but then of course never referred to animals or plants in terms of race (Bailey and Kellogg 1914, 1–5). However, throughout the speeches “race” was regularly delineated as the Negro, white, or Oriental. For instance, Washington’s speech specifies that it addressed the “Negro race” and at various points in several speeches, especially when talking of statistics, the “white race” was spoken of separately from the “Negro race” (Washington 1914, 410–20). It is important to note in the proceedings, containing speeches by almost entirely white men and women, the way “race” was already being claimed as signifying the universal (human), while simultaneously utilized to distinguish skin color. As a result, in many cases where race

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was not marked by skin color, it was clear that the whiteness of those discussed was implied through absence as a default category. It was also clear in the proceedings that women occupied an important place not only in terms of speakers, but also in terms of topics. Though Sargent’s talk was given on a day devoted more generally to hygiene, his concerns focused primarily on women. His opening remarks focused on the importance of social Darwinism, and the place of physical education in racial betterment. For Sargent, physical education practiced on the largest possible scale focused on the health of individuals in order to influence the health of the race. Like many other speakers, he spoke on the problem of maternal and infant mortality arguing, “No amount of mental and moral education will ever take the place of a large well developed pelvis with plenty of muscular and organic power behind it. Indeed the mental capacity as well as physical proportions of the race are largely dependent on the size of the female pelvis. This is the gauge that eliminates the largest infants at birth and determines whether the large brainy children shall be born at all” (“Race Improvement” 1914b). Throughout the speech, both before and after this section, he drew on the now problematic pseudo-science of phrenology to dog-whistle whiteness into his assertions. It was well-known, he asserted, that as races became more civilized their heads grew larger. Here, not unlike MacKaye’s writings, the implications of white supremacy are evident. “Unless the bodies of our women are perfectly developed to meet the condition of our present civilization,” he warned, “it means immolation to the better class of women and deterioration of the race” (ibid.). Considering the maneuvers made to distinguish who precisely the “better class” was we might assume this speech centralized elite, white, native-born American women’s reproductive capacity into a eugenic equation. To Sargent, the acquired benefits of women’s mental and moral education were negligible without their physical ability to reproduce and reproduce well, a key justification for the continued use of physical training in women’s colleges. His exercises for women, like wall-scaling, made up for this gap by targeting pelvic development. Additionally, small pelvises and lack of muscular development meant the arrest of human evolution entirely because if white women could not birth larger headed men, the progress of white dominance would be halted. Physical training was Sargent’s solution to white race suicide in 1914, an idea he had already alluded to in the 1889 Scribner’s article, “When the young women throughout the land shall have felt the influence of this new religion, and become

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thoroughly aroused to the importance of making the most of themselves in body as well as mind we shall not only elevate the average mental and physical condition of the masses, and so raise the athletic standard, but we shall be much more likely than at the present time to produce a few of the intellectual giants that are needed to grapple with the great problems of our complex civilization” (Sargent 1889, 185). Thus, Sargent positioned upper-class white women’s bodies, or at least their pelvises, as the gateway to white racial progress. If higher intelligence, an acquired benefit of good education, was not passed on in larger heads— the inherited, physical manifestation of intelligence—then in Sargent’s estimation the native-born white race in the US would fall into ruin.

Conclusion: Habitus and Performance In Sargent’s view physical culture, the regular and repeated practicing of non-functional exercise, held the key to urban white society’s continued progress and dominance. Furthermore, bodies imbibed these exercises and, through repetition, sedimented them into the “naturalness” and “normalcy” of everyday life. As Bourdieu suggested, bodily practices serve as “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures,” or mechanisms that governed the body in such a way as to craft it to be an adept governor of itself (Bourdieu 1990, 53). Additionally, Bourdieu suggested that the “products” manufactured by this body—from material possessions to cultivated physical attributes—spoke “inseparably and simultaneously of his/her class” (1990, 79). Following Bourdieu, we might deduce that the bodily maintenance and cultivation practiced by those engaged in Sargent’s mimetic exercises reproduced themselves as ideal representations and performances of elite white masculinity and femininity and as a circulated and circulatable habitus. Furthermore, the theory of habitus provides an explanation of how these regulations produced a sense of the natural as an “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history” (1990, 56). This concept in the context of Sargent’s practices manifested as an instance of surrogation where the embodied history represented by these mimetic exercises was remembered, performed, erased, and repositioned within physical education as a way to maintain a “natural” physique. Circulating theories on heredity reinforced the corporeal ingestion of these embodied practices, and Sargent’s promotion of them as a gateway to racial betterment. The next chapter will look at how habitus functioned as a performance of

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effortlessness in the gymnastic exhibitions of women’s physical culture at the Minneapolis YWCA.

Notes 1. For Sargent’s impact of women in physical education, see Vertinsky (1990, 22) and Verbrugge (1988, 137). For more details on Sargent’s exercise machines, see de la Peña (2003) and Kunitz (2016, 13–161). 2. This job trajectory is traced through the first several chapters of his autobiography. 3. For more on the implicit racism of anthropometry, see Braun (2014). 4. This choice eventually led one manufacturing company to use his design, alter it slightly, patent it, and then sue him to prevent him from using his own machines in Hemenway Gymnasium. 5. For a more in-depth exploration of the pastoral in America, see Marx (2000). For numerous examples of American Romantics’ somewhat problematic relationship with urban industry and commercialism (see Gilmore 1985). 6. See Barry (2007) for an excellent overview and summary of connections between discourse on the natural and Social Darwinism. 7. Example taken from Nelson (2003, 136). 8. See, Sargent (1890a), “The Physical Test of a Man” in which he cites Galton extensively to justify not only his use of the mean in his anthropometric charts, but also to reinforce the eugenic impetus behind his physical training. 9. However, Nancy Stepan (1991) asserts that Lamarckism continued to exert broad influence over the eugenic movement in Latin American well into the twentieth century. Sargent himself made contradictory statements regarding the Lamarckian standpoint. In the 1890 AAAPE proceedings, he marked the inevitability of biological determinism, yet in 1904 when he wrote Health, Strength, and Power he claimed “[i]f the same [physical] work was persisted in for a few generations these modifications in the body would become hereditary” pointing to the uneven logic at the heart of much eugenic discourse (4). 10. While much of Sargent’s concerns about the effects of “business competition” and industry on the body are discussed at length in almost all of his writings, he gives little indication about what he means by “social life.” 11. The pedagogy of physical culture was widely practiced in primary and secondary schools as a way to subdue the potential delinquency of boys in adolescence, a phase of youth popularly constructed as “primitive” or “savage” by psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Childhood was popularly depicted by Hall and others including Sargent as a phase not requiring

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12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

distinctions between class and gender. Thus, children in this scenario could unproblematically imitate lower-class practices or, as in Sargent’s exercise manual, girls could be encouraged to practice the same physically rigorous exercises as boys. Vertinsky discusses the conditions under which women evolved according to not only Hall, but also Herbert Spencer(1990, 178–80). See also Sargent (1904, 58–65) and Jackson (1996, 113). Lee briefly and dismissively speaks about an early nineteenth-century tendency for industrial colleges to rely on manual labor as a form of physical education, a move which she claims stymied physical education’s “progress” in colleges. Ironically, these same philosophies served as the basis for Sargent’s promotion of mimetic exercises (1983, 38). For larger institutions, Sargent send out blank cards to be filled in by examiners in each respective gymnasium and then returned for tabulation to Sargent. The mechanisms of the process are not readily discernible in the material in his papers at Harvard. However, he often responded to individual requests for measurements (outside of Harvard) by agreeing to plot the person’s measurements on a chart for a small fee. See Sargent “The Physical Test” (1890a, 55–6). Also see Measurement Cards (1880– 1902). For an example of the measurement cards, see de la Peña (2003, 15). For an explanation of his measuring methods, see Sargent “The Physical Test” (1890a, 36–56). Many of these articles are in Sargent, D.A., Clipping File, F-1 to F-83. Harvard University Archives. Many sources point out that babies born to the “American born white wife” fell from 7 in 1800 to half that by 1900. Multiple scholars have contested those numbers based on who was counted and how the categories were created (see Weir 2006). This viewpoint was reinforced by obstetrical and gynecological texts that labeled women’s menstruation as the “monthly sickness.” See Vertinsky (1988) for an in-depth analysis of the medical construction of female bodies in both America and Britain during the late nineteenth century. Deaths occurring in the first month were viewed as inevitable, usually the fault of genetic or physical abnormalities which were untreatable. See Meckel (1990, 119). However, by 1920, as Weir chronicles, perinatal medical practices began to view the infant as a separate living entity prior to birth changing and complicating perceptions of the threshold of the living subject and enabling a medical separation between the fetal and maternal bodies during pregnancy (see Weir 2006, 1–30).

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Bibliography Bailey, John and John Kellogg. 1914. Proceedings of the First National Conference on Race Betterment. Battle Creek, MI: Race Betterment Foundation. Barry, John. 2007. Environment and Social Theory, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Boston University College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College. “Our History.” https://www.bu.edu/sargent/about-us/our-his tory/. Accessed March 30, 2018. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Braun, Lundy. 2014. Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Colburn, Bertha Louise. 1901. Graded Physical Exercises. New York: Edgar S. Werner Publishing and Supply Company. de la Peña, Caroline. 2003. “Dudley Allen Sargent: Health Machines and the Energized Male Body.” Iron Game History 8.2 (October): 3–6. Diamond, Elin. 1996. “Introduction.” Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond. New York: Routledge. Dorey, Annette K. Vance. 1999. Better Baby Contests: The Scientific Quest for Perfect Childhood Health in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: McFarland and Company. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1904. “The Young American: A Lecture Read Before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, February 7, 1844.” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Concord. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2010. “The Trade of New England.” The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, Vol. 1 1843–1854, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Foucault, Michel. 2004. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart. trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador Press. Geddes, Patrick and Arthur Thompson. 1889. The Evolution of Sex. London: Walter, Scott. Gilmore, Michael T. 1985. American Romanticism and the Marketplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hall, G. Stanley. 1911. Adolescence. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Hitchcock, Jr., Edward, MD, 1890. “A Synoptic Exhibit of 15,000 Physical Examinations.” Conference Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education. Ithaca: Andrus and Church. Jackson, Shannon. 1996. Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, HullHouse Domesticity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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Kunitz, Daniel. 2016. Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors. New York: Harper Wave. Lee, Mabel. 1983. A History of Physical Education and Sports in the U.S.A. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Marx, Leo. 2000. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 35th Anniversary ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Measurement Cards, 1880–1902. Papers of Dudley Allen Sargent. Harvard University Archives. HUG 1768.60. Meckel, Richard A. 1990. Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Milder, Robert. 1995. Reimagining Thoreau. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Diane M. 2003. “‘The More You Kill the More You Will Live’: The Maya, ‘Race,’ and Biopolitical Hopes for Peace in Guatemala.” Nature and the Politics of Difference, eds. Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian, 122–146. Durham: Duke University Press. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, The Social Foundation of Aesthetic Forms Ser, ed. Jonathan Arac. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations: Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26 (Spring): 107–122. Sargent, D.A., Clipping File, F-1 to F-83. Harvard University Archives. “Sargent’s Critics Defend Fair Sex,” Folder: F-82 – Sargent’s Critics Defend Fair Sex – Pocket Hercules, Sargent, D.A. Clipping File, F-1 to F-83. Harvard University Archives. Sargent, Dudley Allen. 1889. “The Physical Development of Women.” Scribner’s Magazine 5.2 (February). Sargent, Dudley Allen. 1890a. “Physical Tests of a Man.” Conference Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, 36–56. Ithaca: Andrus and Church. Sargent, Dudley Allen, MD 1890b. “The System of Physical Training at the Hemenway Gymnasium.” Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889. Reported and edited by Isabel C. Barrows. Boston: Press of George H. Ellis. Sargent, Dudley Allen. 1897. “The Physical Proportions of the Typical Man.” The Out of Door Library: Athletic Sports. Charles Scribner and Sons. Sargent, Dudley Allen. 1904. Health, Strength, and Power. New York and Boston: H.M. Caldwell. Sargent, Dudley Allen. 1906. Physical Education. Boston: Ginn and Company. Sargent, Dudley Allen. 1914a. Health, Strength, and Power, 2nd ed. New York and Boston: Dodge Publishing Company.

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Sargent, Dudley Allen. 1914b. “Physical Education in Relation to Race Improvement.” Speech at the Race Betterment Conference, Battle Creek Mich. January 6–10. Folder: Sex/The Human View, Miscellaneous (Box12), Sargent, D.A. Articles and Speeches, Harvard University Archives, GV347SA 73AS to GV391SA 73. Sargent, Dudley Allen. 1927. Dudley Allen Sargent: An Autobiography, ed. Ledyard W. Sargent. Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger. Spencer, Herbert. 1898. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. New York: D. Appleton and Co. Stepan, Nancy. 1991. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and the Nation in Latin America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Todd, Jan. 1998. Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women 1800–1870. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Verbrugge, Martha. 1988. Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston. New York: Oxford University Press. Vertinsky, Patricia. 1990. The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century. International Studies in the History of Sport Ser. Manchester: Manchester University Press. “Wall Scaling New Athletic Fad of College Girls.” 1912. New York Times. May 19. Washington, Booker T. 1914. “The Negro Race.” Proceedings of the First National Conference on Race Betterment. Battle Creek, MI: Race Betterment Foundation. Weir, Lorna. 2006. Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject. London: Routledge. Wiggins, David K. 1999. “Edwin Bancroft Henderson: Physical Educator, Civil Rights Activist, and Chronicler of African American Athletes.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 70.2: 91–112. Wolff, Tamsen. 2009. Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early TwentiethCentury American Drama. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History Ser., ed Don B. Wilmeth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. “Woman Changing to Masculinity?” 1910. Chicago Daily Tribune. November 28. “Woman Improves Physically, But —.” 1910. The New York Times. February 13.

CHAPTER 4

“These Walls Could Not Contain Me”: Social Motherhood at the YWCA

As the warm weather came in I followed the laws laid down by scientists and began to expand with the heat until these walls could not contain me so I formed my pupils into Outing Clubs through which we were enabled to commune with nature and breathe in the pure air of the country and at the same time carry on the physical training. (“Annual Report” 1895)

With this 1895 Minneapolis YWCA Physical Department Report, physical director Abby Shaw Mayhew recorded the formation of what would become annual summer outing clubs for rowing, tennis, basketball, bicycling, and walking. The entry also marked the release of women’s moving bodies that, until that point, had been limited to the confines of a modest gymnasium in downtown. At this point, two years into her fiveyear tenure with this particular association, this former Sargent student had already built a robust three-year curriculum of physical culture that, in part, forced the association to continue to find larger spaces to accommodate the popularity of the classes. Following similar themes as those laid out by Sargent, Mayhew combined the rhetoric of science and nature to conjure a vision of an expanding body (or bodies) that seem to explode into the walkways and waterways of the country (though the “country” of which she spoke was less than a mile from their downtown building).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2_4

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I confess, I love this passage. I love the ways it pushes against the East Coast rigidity of the “systems” and arguments about them. I love the way it figuratively pushes women out of the still fairly private spaces of the women’s gymnasium and onto the streets of a rapidly growing industrial center in the Midwest. I love how it makes me think of my grandmother, who twenty-five years later would live for a short time just down the street from their YWCA building. I had to ask all my female relatives about their experience with sports once for a class and I was totally shocked to find out that my grandmother, who grew up in rural Wisconsin, had participated in sports and games throughout her youth often alongside boys in the early twentieth century. Then, I found out about Abby Mayhew in the Andersen Archives at the University of Minnesota while researching a seminar paper, and I suddenly had a context for my grandmother’s love of physical activity and sport. “This is what first wave feminism must have felt like,” I thought nostalgically to myself. Abby Mayhew’s pull on me was so strong I ditched my original dissertation idea in order to research Progressive Era women’s physical culture. The more I investigated her work, and all the figures she led me to who constitute the sites in this book, the more uncomfortable I became with some of what I found. I had that same heavy feeling in my stomach as when my grandma referred to my friend as “colored” no matter how many times I corrected her. I thought about the gestures of many white historians to not hold those in the past accountable to our standards. Then I thought about how these millions of seemingly insignificant gestures, practiced en masse by white authors, historians, feminists, and families over time have enabled white supremacy to cover its tracks, to appear as a fringe rather than attached to the mainstream. This chapter reckons with this complicated picture of our white feminist histories by positioning physical culture for white women in the Progressive Era as both radically feminist, the first part of the chapter, and proto-white supremacist, the second part of the chapter. I begin by looking at how reporters and later reminiscences by YWCA members framed Mayhew and her students as excessive, mobile, and grotesque. Once outside the confines of male-driven Northeastern institutions, women’s physical culture took on a life of its own, driven largely by a host of women physical directors. The result was a complicated and complicating figure of young white femininity; bold and bulging, firm and flailing, mobile and meddlesome.

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The second part of the chapter looks at the dangers of performance’s doneness and citationality. It investigates how, as Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggest “performativity signals absorption,” an unconsciousness about the way an exercise was performed or a behavior enacted that masked its original constructedness (1995, 2). I interrogate how physical culture’s citational practices ensured that behaviors denoting whiteness and maternal capacity became a habitus, as Bourdieu said, “internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history” (1990, 56). The second part of this chapter focuses on the problems posed by performance, how through physical culture it’s enabled us to absorb white supremacy into our muscles and minds. I suggest the YWCA offered a particular brand of women’s physical culture grounded in an ideology I refer to as social motherhood. Social motherhood justified the use of what was sometimes viewed as masculine training regimens as the means to an ultimately civic-domestic, and I will argue racial, end. Specifically, I argue that YWCA employees like Mayhew helped shape white, urban businesswomen’s bodies to be economically, morally, and socially productive, extending women’s reproductive duties beyond the sphere of the biological. Furthermore, I suggest Mayhew’s physical culture operated as a performance of effortlessness and then mapped that effortlessness onto ideologies of maternity and whiteness. While Mayhew and her students touted the empowering affects of the work on white women and pursued fairly radically feminist ideals about what a woman’s body could and should do in terms of exercise, the ultimate goal of such work, according to Mayhew, was strengthening the white race. This chapter examines how the discourse and practices at work on white women’s bodies at the Minneapolis YWCA between 1892 and 1897, through equal parts physical, mental, moral, and spiritual self-cultivation, endeavored to produce not just biologically capable, but socially and economically reproductive maternal subjects.

The YWCA, Physical Culture, and Abby Mayhew Benefitting from the railroad boom in the US (1860–1900), East Coastbased physical culture practices became mobile in a way not seen previously in the nineteenth century. Colleges and gymnasiums across the country eagerly snatched up graduates from the various teacher training schools for physical culture. While many of Sargent’s women students

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continued to expand the proliferation of his practices in educational institutions by teaching physical culture in schools, many others, like Abby Mayhew, took positions in social welfare institutions such as the YWCA. The social reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encompassed not only YM and YWCAs, but also took root in the playground movement and in settlement movement where mainly white middle- and upper-class women reformers utilized physical culture as a means to reform not only physical bodies, but mental acuity and moral character as well. For these reformers, performance scholar Shannon Jackson suggests, “Public recreation, quite literally, meant human-re-creation” (1996, 111). These reformers viewed physical culture as an especially potent activity for facilitating the growth of moral turpitude and steady character in young white girls and businesswomen. The YWCA movement began in England, growing out of a concern for the spiritual and social well-being of “women in industry” and particularly those women studying nursing in London. In a similar vein, the work of city YWCAs began in the US about ten years later centered primarily on housing and providing for “self supporting girls” (“Origin and Development”). While it focused on a membership of working girls who could pay the small membership fees, it was run by manager boards populated by elite and upper-middle-class married women who could provide financial backers for YWCA projects. Hence, despite broad claims by YWCA historiographers about the institution’s involvement in the origins of feminism and social justice in American democracy, conjuring unifying tropes about “social righteousness,” “Christian sisterhood,” and “cultural pluralism”— sentiments echoed by the YWCA’s current slogan, “Empowering Women, Eliminating Racism”—the YWCA started as an institution run by wealthy white women focused on servicing working white women who could, to some extent, help themselves (Robertson 2007, 2; Mohl 1997, 111; YWCA.org). Such pluralistic readings necessarily gloss over the YWCA and other social welfare institutions’ complicity in upholding the very economic, cultural, and social divides they claimed to bridge, a topic I will return to in more depth in the final chapter of the book. By the end of the nineteenth century, women newly graduated from women’s colleges began to look toward urban centers with the hope of employment in a rapidly expanding network of offices, retail stores, and institutions in need of clerks, secretaries, nurses, and teachers. The YWCA stood poised to assist these women. As Minneapolis YWCA Secretary

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1893–1915 M. Belle Jeffery pointed out in her reminiscences of the first twenty-five years of the Minneapolis YWCA: The need for a Young Women’s Christian Association was felt by a small group of business women, representatives of the Christian Endeavor Societies of a number of prominent churches, who were banded together to do interdenominational work, and to promote Christian culture among themselves…. There was no place downtown where a group of women could meet informally without trouble and previous arrangement. This idea suggested the inconveniences and annoyances to which business women were submitted, and the realization of the need prepared them to become interested in a remedy. (“Beginnings”)

Two elements of this quote are key to my argument in this chapter. First, the sense that there was “no place” for these women to meet in the city “without trouble and previous arrangement” indicated the extent to which white businesswomen also struggled to find a place within the city outside of the workplace. Second, the use of the word “trouble” points to the potential risk involved for women who might gather in the city. Though the term is vague, it points to potential consequences for those who tried to gather informally without previous arrangement. Third, as indicated by the statement that these women wanted to “promote Christian culture among themselves,” the beginnings of the YWCA in Minneapolis were rooted squarely in the aims and desires of the elite Christian women already active in numerous city churches. This upperclass foundation was also apparent in the frequent changes in location during the organization’s first decade that kept the YWCA a comfortable distance—one to two miles—from the poorer neighborhoods near the river.1 The five different moves in its first decade kept the organization near the burgeoning commercial and retail sections of Nicollet Avenue and within easy walking distance of the multiple churches on the city’s northeast end. While the Minneapolis YWCA eventually expanded its programming to reach out to white working-class, and immigrant women, at its inception and through Mayhew’s time there it focused on the needs of middle-class “business women.”2 Mayhew played a crucial role in building and sustaining the growth of the Minneapolis YWCA in these first years. The archival material at both the University of Minnesota’s Social Welfare History Archives and Smith College’s YWCA Records of the US in the Sophia Smith Collection afford

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an intimate look at the inner workings of Mayhew’s classes at the time. These specifics give a much more detailed and nuanced picture of the stakes and day-to-day business of this work. Though she traveled and lived all over the US and the world, working for some time for the YWCA in China, Abby Mayhew seemed most at home in the Upper Midwest.3 She was born in 1864 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Buoyed by the father’s position as a lumber manufacturer, her family was wealthy enough to send their daughters to Wellesley College, founded in 1875 by the Durants, prominent Boston elites and devoted Christians. Pauline Adeline Durant helped establish the first YWCA in the country in Boston in 1866 and her husband Henry Durant toured as a lay evangelist. Dedicated to “the glory of God and the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women” Wellesley’s emphasis on Christian ideals would have been a convenient fit for Mayhew’s strong Congregationalist family (Verbrugge 1988, 139; Cottrell 1993, 150). True to her background with the Boston YWCA, Mrs. Durant promoted a program of physical education at Wellesley as a means of developing mind, body, and spirit. Wellesley’s focus on physical education, as demonstrated by its physical director Lucille Hill’s participation in the 1889 Physical Training Conference, also expressed the national concern about the physical toll higher education took on women’s bodies by requiring physical culture as part of the students’ daily lives. As if proving the national concerns about higher education’s effect on women true, Mayhew found herself frequently ill and weak after leaving Wellesley in 1885—so much so that her health forced her to close a private primary school she and her college roommate, Ellen Means, had opened in Eau Claire only one year after her graduation. Frustrated by her physical obstacles, Mayhew turned to another former classmate from Wellesley, Grace Marsh, who was teaching physical culture at Lake Minnetonka just outside Minneapolis. After a summer’s worth of taking physical culture classes, Mayhew became convinced of the power of physical culture to improve other women’s health as it had her own (Mayhew “Autobiography”). It was at this point in 1891 that Mayhew contacted Sargent, who was enrolling students in his summer school for teachers in Cambridge. Mayhew was hired as the first physical director of the Minneapolis YWCA in 1892 after training with Sargent for only a year, an indication of the high demand for women physical directors at the time. The position brought her closer to home and aligned more easily with her strong Christian beliefs than did Sargent’s program.

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Mayhew’s classes grew rapidly, their popularity and size continually pressing her to come up with new ideas for the work and new spaces that would accommodate an increasing number of students. She used many of Sargent’s techniques in her classes, presenting herself in circulars in her first fall of 1892, as “Abby S. Mayhew, of Sargent’s Harvard School of Physical Training” even though the training school she attended was adamantly and forcibly kept separate from Harvard (“Fall 1892 Advertisement”). She used his initial intake forms for her own students, requiring physicals for new students and occasionally denying class participation based on the results.4 Like Sargent, she also took a broad approach to physical training. When she began her work in 1892, she was only the second paid employee on the YWCA roster in Minneapolis, the other being the General Secretary (who functioned as a manager). Starting at $350 a year, Mayhew offered classes for “ladies, juniors [girls], and teachers” in Swedish, German, and Americanized Delsarte techniques (“Fee Schedule” 1893). In addition, she utilized various apparatus including clubs, dumbbells, wands, and chest weights (“Advertisement” 1892). Since the Association occupied only one room, all activities occurred in this space. Students tucked gymnasium equipment into the walls and ceiling during the day when tables were out for businesswomen to take their lunch, and the tables folded into the walls in the mornings and evenings when Mayhew taught her classes (Jeffery). The opening of the new gymnasium at 808 Nicollet Avenue in December 1893 allowed Mayhew to expand the work of the physical department exponentially in response to the enormous popularity of the classes. By 1894, the physical department dominated the Minneapolis YWCA class schedule, pressing Mayhew to find more teachers in order to keep the department financially sustainable and independent. That spring the YWCA held twenty-seven classes a week, nineteen of which were Mayhew’s physical culture classes, divided into ladies beginner and advanced, and beginner girls (“1894 Weekly Schedule”). That same spring Mayhew added basketball to the schedule of activities. Initially, games were “ladies-only” events, but by 1896 the Association held outdoor games for “large audiences” (“Unnamed Newspaper Clipping” 1895). By 1895, the physical department offered beginning, intermediate, and advanced classes for women, and beginning and advanced classes for girls, necessitating an assistant, Miss Katibel Chadbourne. That fall they raised enough money to remodel the gym. Classes expanded and Mayhew separated the fee structure according to time of day: morning classes were $7, afternoon classes were $5, and evening and

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girls’ classes were $4 (“Fall 1895 Advertisement”). Mayhew also began offering private lessons—one-third of the proceeds were directed back to the Association—and added a thirty-course normal class for $12 to train women physical directors, most of whom then worked at local YWCA branches and churches (“Report of the Physical Director” 1895). That summer she started the Outing Clubs and sent her students out into the city and beyond to row, bicycle, and play tennis (“Report of the Physical Department” 1895&6). Mayhew’s 1896 salary, $675 a year, had almost doubled in four years (“Report of the Physical Committee” 1896). The work of the physical department continued in this vein until May 1897 when Mayhew surprisingly announced her departure.5 By then, the YWCA had become the center for the dissemination of women’s physical culture discourse and practice in Minneapolis, and Mayhew herself began receiving increasing recognition from the YWCA at the national level through her contributions to their regular national publication The Evangel . The necessity (and Mayhew’s desire) to perform their work put the women’s physical culture classes at the Minneapolis YWCA very much in the public eye. Many of these articles leaned toward imagery of excessiveness in describing Mayhew’s work. In April 1893 Mayhew began having her classes give public exhibitions of their work in local churches, in the YMCA gymnasiums, and, in 1896 and 1897, the Lyceum Theater downtown.6 The exhibitions provided revenue for the Association, but were also one of the primary reasons for the physical department’s ability to be completely financially independent by the end of its first full year (“Annual Report” 1893, 1894). Charging 25 cents a ticket, the department usually gave an exhibition at the end of each season, one in the winter and one in the spring (Tickets). Audience sizes varied depending on the size of the venue, though a January 12th entertainment in 1895, given in the small YWCA gymnasium on the second floor of the 808 Nicollet location, brought in a crowd of 220 (“Annual Report” 1895). The next year with the addition of a Ling class touring group the department gave a total of eight performances (including six on tour) in front of 568 people total, netting the department $142 (ibid.). The move to the Lyceum indicated big growth in the audience sizes. In addition to the short newspaper articles published before performances in order to boost attendance, the department began selling tickets through a local department store as well. Physical culture’s transition to the entertainment sphere in Minneapolis facilitated the transformation of individual

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private bodies, into a gendered public body, bodies knowable in a way that subjected them to increasingly complex modes of governance through the entertainment industry.

The Marvelous Miss Mayhew As entertainment, the Minneapolis YWCA’s gymnastic exhibitions relied on a repeated set of performances to draw in new potential Association members, potential wealthy donors, and justify the still somewhat novel practice of women’s physical culture. For instance in 1895, a large audience of men and women crowded into the YMCA gymnasium on 10th Street and Mary Place (now LaSalle Avenue) in Minneapolis’s bustling business district to watch a variety of exercise performances given by girls from age four up to women in their early twenties. The girls opened the evening with a series of choreographed marching drills—rapid walking or running in a circle—accompanied by a pianist. Interspersed within the marching would be snippets of choreographed country dances like the polka or mazurka. They were followed by the young women who moved through a series of choreographed throws and spins with gymnastic balls. Abby Mayhew usually concluded these programs with either a solo fancy club demonstration—a series of intricate arm movements, throws, and poses while gripping the equivalent of solid wood bowling pins—or a series of Delsarte poses. She was frequently pointed to by reporters as the highlight of the show (“Blue Caps Won”). Based on the sheer number of articles covering her classes and exhibitions with numerous illustrations of her and her students, it appeared Mayhew attained a minor celebrity status in Minneapolis in her five short years there. Her face and body—depicted in drawings or photographs—appeared in the local newspapers more than any other employee of the YWCA during her tenure.7 In the early years of the YWCA in Minneapolis, it almost appeared as if the only newsworthy subject to cover at the YWCA was Miss Mayhew. Written descriptions of her body and personality abound in both newspaper articles and reminiscences of other YWCA employees. For example, newspaper articles described her body as “a pleasing picture,” “light, elastic,” and “poised truly” (“Blue Caps,” “Like a Zouave Guard”). Association members’ reminiscences tended to focus on her personality and character describing her as “a magnetic personality,” possessing “energy and a fine Christian

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character,” a “beautiful Christian character [with] ever ready helpfulness,” and “a teacher of ability” (Gardner, Jeffery). This need to pin down Mayhew’s body and soul by her associates and newspaper reporters indicates a general unease with Mayhew’s mobile body. This sense of transience was deeply rooted not only in her body’s travels around the globe and her navigation of multiple class sites in the city, but also the motion of her body in its practice as a physical culturist. The insistent display of Mayhew’s body exposes an inability to comprehend her subjectivity, the depictions acting as overdetermined representations of “we know this body” in order to cover up the “we don’t know this body at all.” Most of the pictures and drawings didn’t show Mayhew’s body at all, but rather, like most portraiture of the time, focused on the face. Though, as I’ll discuss in a moment, written descriptions in newspaper articles discussed her body at length. The one notable exception was an 1893 full-body illustration from the Minneapolis Journal of Mayhew in a Delsarte statue pose, an illustration focused as much on displaying the gym costume as it was on the pose (see Fig. 4.1). She was drawn as if in motion. The pose worked narratively as she appeared to be looking into the distance at something. The unconventional nature of the costume (the typical gymnasium costume for women at the time) and, perhaps, Mayhew’s own unconventionality was offset by the femininity of the pose itself. While she looks as if she might take a step forward, the position of her hand also seemed to be suspended, as if about to go to her forehead in a swoon. Suspended between athletic motion and feminine over-activity, this drawing embodied the competing discourses about women’s physical culture at the time, working to symbolically contain the excesses of the active woman’s body. However, viewed in the context of the Americanized Delsartian statue poses, the image took on more complicated connotations. While Americanized Delsarte utilized a series of statue poses for women, such as the various poses of Niobe, in addition to various “attitudes,” Mayhew’s pose most closely resembled a modified version of a Borghese gladiator, a statue pose “especially suited to young men” and made famous by strongmen like Albert Treloar (who used the pose in the 1904 Edison film I discussed in Chapter 2) and Eugen Sandow (Wilbor 1893, 372). Whether Mayhew or the illustrator modified the pose is unknown, but that it needed to be modified indicated some acknowledgment that a woman posing in a similar fashion to someone like Treloar or Sandow— who posed with head down, arm extended out, fist clenched—might not

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Fig. 4.1 Newspaper clipping handwritten date 1893, from the Minneapolis Journal. Box 12, Clippings 1895–1898, Minneapolis YWCA Records (Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota)

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be a suitable pose for Miss Mayhew. A description by a woman reporter (only women were allowed at the afternoon performance) of Mayhew’s Delsarte posing at an 1895 exhibition at the Lyceum Theater described her as “a pleasing picture” (“The Y.W.C.A. Girls”). Such descriptions, which may or may not have been accompanied by the drawing, still seemed to freeze Mayhew’s motion, like this drawing, pinning her to the page, arresting her motion in the moment. Such descriptions and depictions of a still Mayhew stood in sharp contrast to many of the descriptions of her body in action in her classes. These descriptions demonstrated her flexibility and mobility, and a pedagogical omnipresence. This sense of omnipresence was best captured by an extended description from an 1893 class: In her jaunty Zouave costume of Syrian trousers, black silk blouse, black hose, and low shoes, she directs the movements of the drill from a low rostrum, at one end of the gymnasium hall … Miss Mayhew is now in the middle of the hall, her light, elastic carriage being an inspiration to all would-be healthy girls to imitate. Her head is well set, her body poised truly, and her feet seem to be shot with India rubber, so light and full of spring is her step. (“Like a Zouave Guard”)

In this description, Mayhew seemed to defy even the reporter’s attempts to capture her in words. She started out stabilized at one end of the hall, but then quickly moved to the middle and appeared in constant motion, the “rubber” in her feet preventing her from ever fully affixing to the ground. She was in constant flight. The use of the term “Zouave” positioned her in a military context as it was used to describe French military outfits. Such imagery placed Mayhew as a commander of her students. Throughout the description, Mayhew seemed to occupy every part of the space, filling it with her presence. Additionally, the reporter labeled such movement as something the students, and the readers, would and should want to emulate. The description not only struggled, though seemingly delightedly, to pin Mayhew down, it figuratively contextualized her body elsewhere. While other descriptions of the typical women’s gymsuit of the time referred to blouses and bloomers, this reporter chose “Zouave.” Though the zouave costume was adopted by many US military units during the Civil War, its roots lay in the uniforms originally intended for indigenous troops recruited from North Africa to fight for the French.8 This

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maneuver doubly othered Mayhew. It cast Mayhew as not only a gender cross-dresser, but a racial cross-dresser as well. In doing so, the reporter also feminized the foreign bodies the dress alluded to. She then doubled down on the foreign references by suggesting Mayhew’s feet were shot through with India rubber. India rubber was the term used at the time to refer to all kinds of rubber imported to the US from South America, East Africa, and India. After vulcanization, a new process discovered by Charles Goodyear, it was primarily used for tires but also basketballs and rubber bands (Nissenson 1891). Hence, Mayhew’s feet were not only compared to a foreign import, but also a material associated with mobility. Mobility, as I discuss in the next section, made Mayhew and her physical culture, both exciting and dangerous.

Skirts, Bloomers, and Bicycles Mobility served as a central motif in many of the descriptions of Mayhew and her students. While most of the Outing Clubs exercised on the lakes and parks outside the city proper, the bicycle club took runs in and through both downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. News of the first ride hit the papers with the following headline: “SKIRTS, Those of the Bloomer Variety Are In Favor, The Lady Bicyclists of the Y.W.C.A. Pledge Themselves, To Make the Weekly Club Run in Divided Skirts” (“SKIRTS”). Another seemed to shout, “IN BLOOMER COSTUME, An Unusual Site Witnessed on Nicollet Avenue Last Evening When Members of the Newly Organized Cycle” (“In Bloomer Costume”). The date and time of the rides were also printed in the article, as were the names of all the club’s members (numbering single and married women as well as a few women doctors). Such spectacularizing advertisements effectively elicited a crowd. As one club member recalled, “The sidewalks were lined with spectators to see those bold females make the start” (Gardner). Twenty women gathered that evening at 6 p.m. outside the YWCA rooms on Nicollet Avenue to start their ride which would take them down Hennepin Avenue to Lake Street, through the lakes district, and end at Lake Street and Park Avenue (“In Bloomer Costume”). Before beginning their run, the women paused to pose for a picture. While the quality of the archival copy is poor, spectators can clearly be seen along the sidewalk, witnessing the event as the women stand next to their bicycles in the middle of the street, their stockinged calves clearly visible, peeking out from behind the spokes and pedals.

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The bicycle served as a common symbol for the problematic connotations of women’s physical culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Unlike Mayhew’s affordable physical culture classes, only the middle and upper classes could afford bicycles (Eng 2003, 44–5). Thus, riding through the streets on a bicycle was also a performance of what sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen would call “conspicuous consumption” (1902, 68–101). Bicycles made white upper-class women more visible and mobile. Medical discourses responded to and seized on women cycling in order question the consequences of such an activity on women’s reproductive capacities. As sports historian Patricia Vertinsky points out, the bicycle proved pivotal in “expanding women’s views concerning their potential for mobility or in promoting a stream of cautionary and often contradictory advice from establishment physicians” (1990, 76). Similar to Mayhew’s conjuring of spaces unable to contain her body, Vertinsky stresses the emancipatory potential of the bicycle, a sentiment echoed by numerous women doctors, suffragists, and physical culturists at the time. On the other hand, as Vertinsky shows, the medical establishment used the bicycle as a reason to intervene in women’s lives, suggesting every woman should check with a doctor before cycling (1990, 75). As with the concerns about hysteria, the excess mobility provided by the bicycle also allegedly caused sexual excitement in women, a “problem” linked through medical discourse to numerous diseases of the reproductive organs. However, advocates also suggested that riding “fortif[ied] women during their childbearing years” (Vertinsky 1990, 78). Such debates foregrounded the ways that bicycling, regardless of where one stood in the debate, nonetheless ensured the recreation of reproductively capable women’s bodies. Moving bodies in the late nineteenth century evoked both positive and negative associations. Much of the anxiety about technological progress that permeated some of the “back-to-nature” rhetoric of physical culturists that I discussed in the last chapter centered on uneasiness with mobility, with speed, and how quickly that mobility might turn toward chaos. Photography like Eadweard Muybridge’s work in the 1870s and 1880s attempted to capture the motion of animals and humans (both clothed and naked) and might be viewed as a reflection of this anxiety with motion (several series capture bodies doing gymnastics). However, as Vertinsky points out, mobility, the ability to move, especially in public spaces promised women liberation from the domestic sphere as well. Both sides depicted mobility as something possessed by white bodies. As

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performance scholar Michelle Granshaw points to in her work on representations of vaudeville tramps on US stages in the 1870s and 1880s, tramps (most often depicted as Irish) stood apart from blackface characters in part because of their mobility. This alignment of whiteness with mobility, she argues, came about in part through these representations of the tramp that “imagined mobility as primarily a white right” (2018, 4). Regardless of the debates about women’s bicycling in the 1890s, their ability to move also served as a marker of their whiteness and privilege.

Flailing Limbs and the Grotesque Other articles framed women’s exercise at the Minneapolis YWCA as problematic and out of control. For example a newspaper reporter in 1897 began by telling her readers that she came to investigate “that most mysterious of all places known to woman kind and not to man, a girl gymnasium” (Untitled, undated, 1895–8). She opened by remarking that “the chairs had a delightfully untidy air,” before describing her mounting impatience that she had yet to be welcomed by any YWCA employees. This space of unkempt hominess was deserted, indicated by a “desk chair turned partly away” as if recently and swiftly abandoned by its occupant (ibid.). The lights were on in this “homelike apartment,” but no one was home. Additionally, the abandoned domesticity was further perturbed by the failure of the “home’s” mistress to greet her guests. The reporter’s impatience gave way to curiosity and “doors were opened and dark passageways explored without so much as a stir of a living thing except for the faint hum of voices … in some place or other.” Eventually, a young student entered the building and agreed to lead the reporter to the gym. The reporter opened the door to “a most bewildering chatter of voices, and a bevy of figures … in the oddest sort of attire and performing the oddest sort of feats with arms, legs, and body, carefully directed by another figure in the same style of gown” (ibid.). The article, subtitled “Sights Seen During a Visit Made to the Rooms of the Young Women’s Christian Association,” was accompanied by several drawings of women performing exercises in blouses, trousers gathered at the knee, stockings, and low shoes (see Fig. 4.2). Framed as “sights” these bodies became spectacularized, linguistically linked to the carnivalesque image one might have found on display at the circus, a museum, or zoo. It seemed to the reporter as if these women had abandoned the home and their duties for the circus-like atmosphere of the gym. As if to emphasize this point,

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Fig. 4.2 One of the images accompanying the article, “Sights Seen During a Visit Made to the Rooms of the Young Women’s Christian Association,” Undated, unnamed newspaper clipping (though must have been between 1894 and 1897), Box 12, Clippings 1895–1898, The Minneapolis YWCA Records (Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota)

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the article ended with an inducement to readers to come to an “informal entertainment” at which these women would perform their bodily feats. Consequently, the lack of domesticity demonstrated by the Association— no hostess to greet guests, untidiness— led directly to the “sights” in the gymnasium (ibid.). Here, exercising white businesswomen became a dizzying array of flailing limbs and cacophonous sound, a grotesque spectacle. Cultural studies scholars Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point toward the emergence of psychoanalysis to argue that the grotesque was not suppressed in the nineteenth century, as Bakhtin suggested, but rather pushed to the margins and disconnected through “neurotic sublimations” from the emergent bourgeoisie (1993, 388). As a result of this marginalization, they suggest, bourgeois society actually defined itself through its suppression of the carnivalesque and its grotesque bodies. White bourgeois audiences viewed the carnivalesque as “sentimental spectacle” in circuses, world’s fairs, and various forms of popular entertainment, perceiving it as abhorrent or even terrifying in order to reaffirm, on the psychological level, their power over the “low” in society (ibid.). Following a similar trajectory, feminist scholar Mary Russo points out in her book The Female Grotesque, that Bakhtin’s characterizations of the grotesque relied on an essential femininity, that during the nineteenth century forged ideological links between the grotesque and the hysteric body.9 Both the grotesque and the hysteric body were, she claims, rooted in the popular perception of a morally deformed femininity and diseased sexuality most notably portrayed in Charcot’s images of swooning and flailing women in the midst of hysteric fits (Russo 1994). This imagery of the grotesque body, like a demon infesting the otherwise calm visage of white bourgeois womanhood, was a pervasive threat circulated by a growing largely male medical establishment that worked to control hysteria and other allegedly feminine maladies such as neurasthenia, nervousness, and consumption. This sense of continual movement, of growth and bodily excess, pushed Mayhew’s students’ bodies into the category of grotesque spectacle and, especially through the Cycling Club, asserted their place within the masculinized commercial and industrial landscape of downtown Minneapolis’s city streets. Consequently, participants in Mayhew’s classes and outing clubs, by shaking the foundations of gymnasiums, and spilling out into city streets, presented the possibility for carnivalesque dissent through a grotesque body. These grotesque bodies in Mayhew’s

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gym were in a constant state of becoming, always remaking and remade. The grotesque body, according to Bakhtin, “outgrows itself, transgressing its own body, in which it conceives of a new, second body” (1984, 317). Here, the grotesque body was imagined in a constant state of motion, an idea grounded in Bakhtin’s theories of a popular performance (carnival) which reproduced excessive bodies as an imagined collective, social body. Bakhtin’s carnivalesque collectivity had a fluid and evasive mobility. At the Minneapolis YWCA that mobility became fixed for a moment in the image of women standing next to bicycles, but quickly unmoored in the flash of bodies pedaling past witnesses left in their wake. Left with nothing to gawk at but the fading fannies of women on the move, spectators had no choice but to go about their business while the performance continued. Both exciting and troublesome, these grostequed versions of women participating in physical culture were mobilized as liberated and simulataneously justified eugenic calls for women to prioritize their domestic duties as would-be mothers.

Social Motherhood and Racial Fitness Although some feminist historiographers believe the Progressive Era signaled a significant shift from “woman-as-mother” to “woman-asworker,” a close look at physical culture discourses and practices (as well as legislation, social reform projects, and popularly circulating handbooks and magazine articles) suggests instead that ideologies of motherhood underwent hybridization rather than going away entirely. Furthermore, domesticity and maternity shifted into civic and national spheres, shattering easy distinctions between private and public, home and the marketplace. In the space of the city, many reformers relied on an ideology of social motherhood to justify women’s increased presence in both the workplace and politics. Using the theorizations of social motherhood, Foucaultian conceptions of security, and performance theory, the second part of this chapter asks how the YWCA deployed governmentality to encourage the women in its employ and under its care to engage in social motherhood (Foucault 1978). More specifically, I suggest the YWCA accomplished this incitement to social motherhood through the embodied conditioning performed in physical culture classes. The remainder of this chapter focuses on how Abby Mayhew—armed with the tools of muscular Christianity and Delsarte—created a physical culture system bent on bringing

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the body and spirit under the control of the self. Mayhew used physical culture as a way to govern and teach self-governance, and thus secure, for herself and her students, a sense of white maternal selfhood. US industrialization during the early and mid-nineteenth century brought about structural changes to American families. As cities grew, families moved into urban areas, and even those remaining in rural towns began to rely more on machines rather than on manual labor. The result, historian Jeanne Boydston argues, was a shift in women’s roles from good wife to mother and from worker to nurturer (1990, 157–8). These roles were also racially and economically contingent on the whiteness and upper/middle classness of the women. These labor and familial shifts led to what historians deem to be the rise of moral motherhood (Plant 2010; Rogers 2005). The task of moral motherhood, suggests cultural historian Rebecca Rogers, was “shoring up traditional values and traditional social arrangements,” a process that also granted women enormous authority in the family that carried “broader social implications” (2005, 92). Re-envisioning mothers as governors of the household also meant the erasure of women as workers through a performance of effortlessness or magic. Returning again to Boydston, who relies on images of motherhood from Alcott’s Little Women (1868), this reimagining meant not seeing “women as actors, capable of physical exertion” (1990, 149). Instead, the moral mother became “not so much a physical as an ethereal being,” an ideology, Boydston argues, that facilitated the pastoralization of housework (ibid.). She further suggests that such conceptualizations also served to justify the intrusion of middle- and upper-class white women into the homes of immigrants, people of color, and poor whites. Numerous feminist historiographers hail the Progressive Era as an end to the ideal of moral motherhood, ushered in by the entrance of the New Woman. The emergence of the New Woman, historian Carroll SmithRosenberg argues, “replaced the purity, piety, domesticity, and obedience of [Victorian True Womanhood] with a model of womanhood committed to women’s social, political, and sexual equality” (1985, 2). However, the valorization of the New Woman has also been criticized by some scholars who argue that such a conception neglects multiethnic experiences. Literary scholar Martha Patterson suggests the New Woman is an “anxious and paradoxical icon of modern American power and decline,” and another agent of colonizing imperatives and desires (2005, 3). Additionally, as Patterson points out, to many Progressive Era female fiction writers “maternal status was central to their vision of the New

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Woman” rather than separate from it (2005, 6). While the emergence of the New Woman paradigm in the 1890s reignited debates about “the woman problem,” advocates that embraced the ideal were careful to stitch their rhetoric into more comfortable assumptions about women’s role in society. For instance, Jane Addams coined the term “civic housekeeping” at a 1906 speech at the National American Women’s Suffrage Association convention. The term, Shannon Jackson suggests, demonstrated how reformers “used the language of domesticity to rationalize women’s increased knowledge of municipal regulations” (1996, 87). Broadly speaking, these civic housekeepers extended women’s domestic responsibilities from the home into the larger space of the city, justifying their participation in a bevy of civic projects such as child labor reform, immigrant education, physical health, and sewage regulation. The idea of civic housekeeping provided a re-envisioning of women’s social roles in terms of their role as household managers, while also deflecting the ambiguities attached to moral motherhood. These linkages between management and motherhood provided a bridge to scientific motherhood, a concept firmly in place in the US by the 1920s. “Scientific motherhood,” via eugenic discourse, adamantly promoted biological reproduction as women’s primary duty to society.10 However, in between the New Woman in 1890, the civic housekeeper in 1906, and the scientific mother in 1920 was a rarely mentioned, but at the time widely discussed debate about social motherhood. As part of the civic housekeeping model, Jane Addams argued that civic problems such as “unsanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution and drunkenness” had been neglected because their solution lay outside the “military point of view” advocated by male city leaders (Addams 1900, 2). According to Addams, these issues could be addressed more fully if male city leaders would consult women, whose minds were “accustomed to detail and variety of work, to a sense of obligation for the health and welfare of young children and to a responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of other people” (1900, 5). Here, Addams brought white middle-class women’s experience as household managers to bear on the tasks involved in civic reform. She also implied that their duties were not necessarily to actually housekeep the city, say sweep the streets, manage sewage issues, or work on making the space more appealing and clean. Instead, she suggested civic

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housekeeping involved a kind of social hygiene—keeping kids healthy and other folks clean and comfortable. All of the problems she laid out were also implicitly linked to class- and race-based anxieties of the white middle and upper classes. As Addams’ statements make clear, white middle-class women reformers were tasked with the assimilation of non-white, poor, and immigrant urban populations into white middle classness through social welfare institutions packaging whiteness as “culture.” Their main qualification for such a job was their status as mothers or at least potential mothers. The connection between motherhood and civic hygiene, and the way civic housekeeping filtered reform work through a domestic lens also worked in the opposite direction by influencing ideologies of motherhood. By 1913, social motherhood emerged as a term that encompassed biological reproduction, feminism, racial hygiene, and class consciousness, though the exact meaning of the term was a topic of debate in the women’s movement. Two sides emerged in the debate about the position and place of motherhood within feminism. In 1913, Swedish feminist Ellen Key attacked what she deemed the “amternal” feminists of the US and Europe and sparked a steady stream of responses from feminist philosopher Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The main issues up for debate here were the seeds of the contemporary debates between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. Gilman advocated fiercely for an extensive network of vocations set up to support working moms. She referred to this system as “social motherhood,” where the tasks of raising children were delegated to a broader network of individuals beyond just the mother including specialized child care providers. Here, motherhood would become socialized without compromising what was viewed as the sanctity of the biological mother. “Never once,” she stated, “have I denied the right duty, the joy and pride of every normal woman to be a mother” (Gilman 1913, 221). Key, on the other hand, was skeptical of working mothers and argued that women were their most complete selves when engaged in the “physical and psychic exercise of the function of maternity, because of the conscious desire, by means of this function, to uplift the life of the race as well as her own life” (Key 1913, 138). It was, in Key’s opinion, women’s status as mothers that should elevate them to equal status with men in the political realm. As an ardent suffragist, she felt motherhood should elevate women’s political status, not diminish it. Social motherhood, or “social motherliness,” was for her an extension of the mother role into the social and political realm. Women, sheargued,

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should be educated from birth about how to be mothers to their own children, but also to the race. Outside the immediate needs of mothering her own children, Key called for young women and older women to become spiritual mothers or social mothers. While magazines focused on the differences in these two positions, it is important, especially in terms of the arguments I make in this chapter, to understand the commonalities between these conceptions of motherhood. First, neither Key nor Gilman questioned whether or not “normal” women should want to have their own children. Both make exceptions for women unable to bear children by suggesting they engage even more fully in social motherhood. In Gilman’s case that involved becoming a “specialist in child culture” and for Key a longer term engaged in social service—she advocated that both men and women devote at least a year to social service before becoming parents (Gilman, 221).11 Second, both conceptions, especially Gilman’s, assumed the presence of workers that supported the mother. In Key’s case, keeping the mother out of the workforce necessarily neglected those women who had no choice but to work, and in so doing, according to Key, were not adhering to the “fountainhead of altruistic ethics … which has been women’s particular field of moral action” (Key 1914, 92). Gilman’s conception relied heavily on an extensive network of laborers in order for the mother to be considered a worker. This outsourced labor would then allow her to engage in the work of social improvement and put her on equal footing politically with men. Consequently, both conceptions rested on assumptions of the mother’s status as at least upper-middle class and able to afford that labor. Both philosophers relied on evolutionary models of race and class to bolster their claims. As a result, both touted the ends of their methods to be racial betterment. Key described the position of the “amaternals” as one that equated motherliness as a trait acquired early in evolution. She dismissively quoted one of them as saying that motherliness, “which we have in common with beasts and savages,” needs to be left behind in the evolutionary charge toward racial betterment (Key 1913, 139). Indeed, Gilman believed “we,” as a race, needed to move beyond traditional views of motherhood that tethered women’s work to the home in favor of helping the race progress by joining the workforce of political and social actors. For Gilman, leaving women in a sphere where their motherliness would only affect their immediate family seemed a waste of a worker and a throw-back to other races still trapped further back on the evolutionary chain. For Key, scientific and industrial progress outside

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the home would exert even more pressure on women to maintain the home and family unit as the moral center of society. The key to racial progression for Key involved securing women’s capacity to raise children in an educated and therefore “correct” manner, and teach other women to do the same. In the end, both Key and Gilman’s conceptions assume the mother’s whiteness and securing that whiteness not only as the key to outstripping other races, but also as a moral option only available to what were seen at the time as more evolutionarily developed races. What the debate highlighted was how Progressive Era conceptions of motherhood tied directly to concerns about racial fitness.

Performativity and Security Physical culture’s concern with motherhood, then, participated and forwarded similar ideologies about white supremacy. Physical culture’s defenders had long stressed the maternal ends of physical culture, especially in women’s colleges, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter. Similarly, in the 1880s physician, professor, and physical educator Eliza Mosher, along with many of her colleagues, defended physical training for women, according to Vertinsky, as “the grand route to motherhood” (1990, 146). Several female college physicians claimed “women could study and achieve motherhood … and, with the right kind of physical education, improve their maternal capacity” (1990, 146–7). While their approaches differed, physical culturists and physicians all viewed a strong, but feminine, reproductively capable body as the ultimate end of physical training for white middle-class women. Physical culture for women promised to be fertile terrain in terms of promoting social and biological motherhood as a physical practice. Physical training’s promise, to recall the opening of the 1889 Conference on Physical Training, to change the processes of involuntary internal muscles by regular and repeated movement of external voluntary muscles carried weight for those advocates invested in changing the shape and practice of motherhood, both biological and social. Again, performance provided the alchemical touchstone through which this transformation of white women’s bodies, minds, and souls might occur. First, to prove its legitimacy as an appropriate form of white middle-class femininity, the YWCA needed to stage its ability to provide social maternal skills through physical culture. For example, physical culture exhibitions served as key sites to show the continual practice and subsequent transformation of the bodies

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involved in Abby Mayhew’s classes for potential members and possible donors. Hence, these performances served an aesthetic purpose. Furthermore, the performances were tied directly to the financial viability of the YWCA as an institution. Physical culture’s ability to create and sustain these behaviors and movements as appropriate white femininity rested on the approval of elite donors, governing board members, eager young members, and a paying audience. Second, social motherhood was itself performative. Physical culture was performative in that it asserted and inscribed particular conducts of gender, class, and race through performance on the bodies of performers, and in the minds of its audience. In doing so, physical culture performances advocated for the efficacy of certain kinds of behaviors and movements while purporting to expose and correct the deviancy of others (like the flailing limbs and pedaling fannies). Such assertions and inscriptions, and their acceptance by both performers and audience, provided the foundation for building social motherhood’s viability as a form of governance (of both self and others) at the YWCA. However, the slipperiness of social motherhood’s performativity, what performance scholar Della Pollock suggests, is “the extent to which [performance] consolidates the appearance of a natural or given identity through repetition,” always threatened to reveal white femininity’s own constructedness in performance, revealing its unnaturalness and potential links to the grotesque and excess (1999, 268). This inherent instability was a necessary by-product of social motherhood’s ability to renovate itself according to the shifting nature of the populations it governed and secured, an asset that I’d suggest facilitated its elusiveness in scholarship. Mayhew’s physical culture, as portrayed in Minneapolis YWCA reports, intervened into the urban environment in response to the problem of out-of-place white single women’s bodies in the city. The physical culture classes proposed a means for these women to increase their efficacy as civic workers by giving them a space to stay physically fit, engage in social activities with other women, and be spiritually and morally cared for by other women. Subsequently, not only did Mayhew and the YWCA benefit from an increasing population of members that sustained their financial viability, but the population of white businesswomen in the city would continue to grow and thrive as a result of the YWCA’s capacity to reproduce socially, physically, and spiritually adept white women as urban workers.

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Muscular Christianity for Ladies Physical culture in the YWCA, and in Mayhew’s classes in particular, demonstrated how Christian discourse became entwined with discourses of social service and maternity. While Mayhew used many aspects of Sargent’s system in her gymnasium, her own Christian background and the all-female urban environment in which she worked propelled her to use certain techniques that served as interventions into the models used in colleges and universities. Mayhew felt strongly that physical education could and should be a uniquely Christian endeavor. Forwarding such a view required Mayhew, and other physical directors of the YWCA, to adapt an already circulating discourse of muscular Christianity. Initially, a reaction against what literary scholar Ann Douglas argues was a widely perceived “feminization of the American culture” by trends in sentimentalism, and the increasing power and presence of women in church leadership, muscular Christian discourse would have been a tough sell in the all-female controlled and populated YWCA (1977). By pairing exercise with religion and social welfare, institutions such as the YW and YMCA blurred boundaries between Christian and social service, service to Christ and service to the self and community. More specifically, by working on one’s self, one was in fact working in service to Christ and the community. For example, Protestant clergyman Josiah Strong asserted in 1893, “If the true Christian aim is service, not ecstasy, then that is the most Christian treatment of the body which fits it for the most perfect, the most abounding, the longest-continued service in upbuilding the kingdom of God” (1893, 32). This quote suggested that the “true Christian aim” of the body should be service, not ecstasy, following a doctrine that resisted the desire for earthly pleasures. Additionally, the quote suggested that this fit body, its muscular strength, would be essential for the endurance needed to build the “kingdom of God.” According to Luke 17:20–21, the kingdom of God is not heaven, but rather in and among the people of earth. “Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.’”12 Based on this, the “kingdom of God” could be a communal spiritual realm or the realm of the people of earth. Consequently, the passage quite easily elided spiritual growth with physical growth, but also the spread of Christianity among the people of earth with the physical

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spread of white Christian peoples on earth. Such elisions enabled discursive conflations of Christianity, imperialism, and eugenics on a cultural level, and strength, servitude, and sexual moderation at the level of the individual body. These alignments fit well with circulating ideologies of American democracy and Christian faith, and daily practices of civic and national citizenship. The problem with using muscular Christian discourse and practices at the YWCA was the “muscular” part. If, as sports historian William J. Baker suggests, muscular Christianity began to reimagine Christ not as a “meek-and-mild human figure, a sacrificial lamb strikingly similar to female victims,” but instead in “unmistakably male terms” then its transition to all-female spaces such as the YWCA required a careful negotiation of existing patriarchal power structures in both the church and the gym (2007, 45). While physical directors such as Mayhew readily incorporated muscular Christian values that promoted “health” and “character-building” as aspects of exercise, they were forced into much more delicate territory when confronted with the assumed connections between the muscular and the manly. However, while men worked to attain physical Christ-likeness—where Christ was imagined in muscular terms—women could only work toward spiritual Christ-likeness. Phrases such as “Christ-like character” and “spiritual Christ-likeness” appear in several places in Minneapolis YWCA physical reports where Mayhew attempted to continually assert the “higher” aims of her work. In terms of physicality, Mayhew shifted from the imagery of strength and masculinity present in muscular Christian discourse to the idea of “bodily perfection.” For example, the end of Mayhew’s 1895 annual report attested, “We are striving to make the bodies fit instruments for the mind and fit dwelling places for the Holy Spirit. As we work for the perfection of bodily development we also pray that they may be complete in Christ—our perfect pattern” (“Annual Report of the Physical Department” 1895). Underlying this discursive imagery of active, “striving,” and “fit” women’s bodies and minds, was an assumption that both the physical and spiritual labor was taking place on an unfit body. These bodies could only ever work toward and “pray” for “bodily perfection” without any indication that they might actually achieve the “perfect pattern” because, of course, that pattern was a man. Additionally, the woman’s body is imagined as a home, a “dwelling place,” for an outside spirit, the Holy Ghost. Again, such imagery assumed the a priori emptiness of women’s

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bodies, and reinforced symbolic links to Freudian conceptions of the feminine as lack. Furthermore, this lack operated as what cultural studies scholars Toby Miller and George Yúdice refer to as an “ethical incompleteness” that required intervention from governing mechanisms (2002, 9). Governmentality’s incitement to productivity in the West, they argue, is “premised on instilling a drive towards perfection,” a process that is endlessly deferred, and hence infinitely productive. This process “inscribes a radical indeterminacy in the subject” who continuously turns to “cultural regimens” to compensate for the feeling of lack in comparison to the “more complete entity—the nation” (2002, 15). Put into place in the context of physical culture at the YWCA, the assumed incompleteness of women was a necessary formulation in order for her to be articulated and articulate herself as a modern subject. In Mayhew’s classes, physical culture instilled a simultaneous sense of individual agency while also binding members to the Association, and its spiritual, moral, and physical values, through a feeling of belonging to something more complete and perfect. However, physical training in Mayhew’s gymnasium countered this image of lack by gifting women with “a strength and freedom in her physicality which had been a dream before—and a control of her body so that she uses much less nervous force—and a power to relax—really rest.”13 This need to lessen “nervous force” and enable women to “rest” betrayed a fear of women’s tendency toward the grotesqueness of hysteria, as demonstrated in the first section of this chapter. As noted earlier in this chapter and also the previous chapters, physical culture was often cited as a way to combat these so-called feminine dysfunctions and prevent a grotesque hysteric body. Consequently, Mayhew’s physical culture discourse and techniques operated as a means to abate the moral, physical, and spiritual threat posed by hysteria, and secure women’s mobility from leaking into grotesque flailing hysterics through self-cultivation. Mayhew, furthermore, redirected this abatement of potential hysteria through the hope of bodily emancipation, “a strength and freedom in her physicality which had been a dream before.” In this articulation of physical culture, exercise became linked to the hope of strength and freedom, values that carried moral and social, as well as physical implications. In other words, Mayhew argued for physical culture not only as a means of self-cultivation, but also a means of self-possession and agency. Her

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discourse aligned with emerging liberal governmental structures by articulating physical culture for her students as way to fashion the self. In other words, the promise of freedom embodied in Mayhew’s methods brought with it the necessity of a certain loyalty or at least belief in the overall project of the work: social motherhood. However, the key to the continued productivity of such a discourse and practice lay in the repeated deferment of that strength and freedom, the need to continue to strive for an impossible perfection, a mythic ideal. Through adapted muscular Christian discourse and “classicism as selfculture” embodied in flexible Delsartian techniques, Mayhew promoted and produced a complex and multilayered form of government for women. Her physical culture work sought to combine Christian, social, moral, and gender reform into desirable moral characteristics of service, social motherhood, self-control, and aesthetic grace made realizable through physical practice. However, these modes of self-conduct also carried implicit strategies for creating a performance of white middle-class femininity as an appropriate set of behaviors, movements, and bodies. For example, the secretary for the Kansas City YWCA, Mary Dunn, characterized the girls she was looking for as members of the YWCA in 1895 as follows: “Wanted, young women. What kind? Those to whom the Lord can say, ‘Do this or that for me,’ and who can respond to the hardest command, the carrying out of which will mean endurance, a knowledge of the principles of the conservation of energy and the putting forth of will power through bodily power. It will mean the clear shining of a glowing soul through a transparent medium, instead of the cloudy glass of a dark lantern, an ill-used body” (Qtd. In Putney 2001, 144). This quotation paired symbolic associations between spiritual purity (“glowing soul”) and physical cleanliness (“clear, transparent”) with imagery that associated illness and disease with a “dark lantern” of a body. Consequently, spirituality, health, and purity were inscribed on a “clear shining” and “transparent medium,” while the body of “cloudy glass,” the “dark lantern” is necessarily an “ill-used body,” not indicative of an inner “glowing soul.” As cultural theorist Richard Dyer points out, “white humanity” began to be coded in photography in the early twentieth century through the contrast between “substance and translucence,” the latter “allows the spiritual to be manifest in the material” (Dyer 1997, 115–6). Hence, whiteness and health in this instance became desirable attributes that should be paired with a strong will to serve others— God and the YWCA, and by extension the husband and the city. Bodily

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control, exercised through “power,” but tempered by “energy conservation,” demonstrated spiritual, moral, and racial hygiene, and made “young women” fit to serve the self and others. This will to serve kept women’s work at the YWCA—whether in the gymnasium, the church, the home, or the city—comfortably embedded within the discourse of social motherhood.

Governing Through Self-Control: Mayhew’s Classes Perform Physical culturists like Mayhew aimed to strengthen women’s bodies enough to demonstrate their ability to command and control their movements. Despite the previous newspaper descriptions of chaos in the women’s gym, most descriptions of the Minneapolis YWCA’s public exhibitions endeavored to legitimate the presence of the bodies on stage and the movements they performed. Such accounts effectively argued that these performances demonstrated how physical culture could be used as a form of appropriate performance that increased the health of the performers, while also staging their self-discipline and docility. Performers demonstrated self-control by the degree to which they could make complex and difficult movements appear effortless. The lengthy physical labor and repetition involved in transforming rebelling limbs into a controlled and corrected body was erased through the performativity of Mayhew’s eclectic techniques and the staging of the exercises in exhibitions. I am relying on performativity here in its deconstructive, Derridean sense as an act that “signal[s] absorption” (Parker and Sedgwick 1995, 2). Reporters spectacularized this absorption of training by highlighting the almost magical disappearance of visible signs of the effort involved in physical training, as I mentioned earlier in the chapter. For example, numerous articles referred to the grace, ease, and “picturesqueness” of the student-performers.14 They admiringly remarked on the way this public performance of grace and ease veiled weeks and even years of intense training. “There were no drills requiring ungainly contortion or purely physical strength. While some of the exercises did no doubt imply the use of considerable strength, they had been so carefully practiced that the impression was one of ease and grace,” one reporter remarked, dding that any skeptics of the good of physical culture for women would have surely been converted (ibid.).15 Such descriptions of the bodies of

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the performers as “supple,” “pleasing,” “graceful,” and “attractive” reinforced the verbiage of effortlessness used to describe the movements. Taken together these descriptions demonstrated a naturalization of appropriate feminine behavior in process while also revealing Progressive Era assumptions about the incompatibility of femininity and public displays of physical exertion. By replacing what many in the increasingly consolidated field of medicine saw as an inherently deficient woman’s body with the “natural” ease and grace of the Americanized Delsartian movements, these descriptions promoted women’s physical culture as a mode of appropriate feminine performance that increased women’s control over themselves while simultaneously demonstrating the YWCA’s effective governing of young, unmarried white career women. However, the physical repetition, training, and rehearsal required for the perception of “ease” imparted by these performances were often, through the necessity of advertising the exhibitions, put on display by reporters who witnessed Mayhew’s classes. Mayhew required a strong physical and mental commitment from her physical culture students. Students could not stop by and simply begin practicing Americanized Delsarte or walk over to the arm pulleys and get in a quick triceps workout. Her classes operated over a three-year sequence of theory and practice through a series of lectures from physicians and physical culturists on topics from self-control to correct dress. The first year of courses, much like the Christian discourse Mayhew used to describe her work, operated on an assumption of deficiency in her students’ bodies, teaching “correct poise, control of nervous system, strengthening vital organs, correct breathing, and corrective exercises” (Untitled, undated newspaper article). As such, these exercises operated as what Foucault called “techniques of the self” or “intentional and voluntary acts by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (Foucault 1990, 11). Thus, Mayhew’s system of courses, especially the first year, worked to increase the value of her students’ social motherhood, not only by fostering in them a sense of individual freedom, but as a collective group helping them maintain and perhaps exceed the aesthetic values and criteria toward which they strived. Mayhew’s curriculum moved on to ever-increasing levels of aesthetic and physical complexity. After a year of corrective work, Mayhew then introduced students to her specialty, Americanized Delsarte, as well as

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some Swedish exercises and the horizontal bar. It was not until the third year that students received the full gamut of club swinging, marching, heavy apparatus work (German), and fencing (Untitled, undated newspaper article). A description of one of her classes around 1895 reflected this compartmentalized work, as well as the sense that women’s bodies came into the classes physically deficient. The reporter described a continuous flow of women from a circle of chairs around the main floor into the various exercises. For example, when the marching or “fancy steps” exercises began, certain women sat in the chairs while others left the chairs to join in the activity. Those joiners were most likely the most advanced students, as marching was a third-year activity, a conclusion supported by the reporter’s description of the women’s movement in this particular exercise as “light as a dancer.” In contrast, the reporter described the class of beginners as struggling to get control of “certain sets of muscles,” as the “arms, for instance, want to move always in the same direction.” The beginner students’ confusion became even more extreme when they took up club swinging—exercises with equipment similar to small bowling pins, one held in each hand and then twirled around the body in a similar manner to today’s batons.16 However, the more advanced class of club swingers demonstrated “marvelous control over their rebellious organisms.”17 Such wording positioned Mayhew’s physical culture classes as a central means of managing not just muscles, but an entire “organism,” one with a tendency toward rebellion. The dramatic framing of this internal and external struggle between the moral and physical order provided by Mayhew’s exercises, and the allegedly innate tendency of women’s bodies toward chaos, positioned urban white single women as particular targets for biopolitical interventions through technologies of security. This mechanism of security, Foucault argued, worked at “achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole [population] from internal dangers” (2003, 249). In the case of Mayhew’s physical culture classes for women, her exercises served as a security mechanism against the latent rebelliousness of women’s bodies. Rebelliousness here, as demonstrated through the reporters’ observations of the classes and performances, was positioned as the threat to control and correction. Consequently, at least in the previous descriptions by reporters, physical culture operated as a means of securing women’s bodies—through an eclectic conduct of Christianity, classicism, and service through social motherhood—against

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the Progressive Era dangers of nervous disorders or, worse, hysteria. The “health” demonstrated by the performers further averted any suspicion of underlying sexual dysfunction by encouraging these bodies toward the approved conducts of social and biological motherhood. As one reporter pointed out, the work aimed to “show the true relation of the body to the mind and spirit and to bring the body under the complete control of the higher natures” (Undated, untitled newspaper article).

Conclusion: Do as I Say, Not as I Do While the term “social motherhood” came into prominence in 1913, its ideological components had been in place for sometime, especially in physical culture discourse. In a 1911 speech at the YWCA’s National Training School at Columbia University, Mayhew laid out the specifications for an ideal women’s gymnasium. Titled “Returns on Investment in an Ideal Gymnasium,” Mayhew put before her audience detailed and meticulous plans for the equipment and space needs for a women’s gymnasium. While the bulk of the speech clearly contained the layout to pitch to potential donors and sponsors for such buildings, she framed those details in eugenic terms. Calling on her fellow physical directors, she told them to refrain from thinking in small terms. Their work prevented disease and built health, she remarked. That work, she argued, was “necessary and vital to the health of the individual and the race” (Mayhew 1911, 311). To close she again returned to her racial framing, “Above all [physical culture for women] means an increase in racial health. To make the mothers of the race strong and to create such a desire in their hearts for strong and healthy children that they will see to it that the father as well as themselves are healthy, means a better type of man and woman in physique, in mental vigor, in moral force, and in spiritual understanding” (Mayhew 1911, 314). Here, Mayhew depicted physical culture, an endeavor she believed was a uniquely Christian project, as a central force in racial betterment, thus foregrounding the necessity of making women’s bodies better able to manage the physical demands of biological reproduction, but also mental vigor, moral force, and spiritual understanding, all components laid out by Key and Gilman as constitutive of social motherhood.18 Additionally, as a practice, it not only made women’s bodies strong, but also influenced the “soul” by implanting a desire for “better” children and fathers. Mayhew sought to inspire and strengthen bodies at the individual level in order to influence the white race as a whole.

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That said, like Key and Gilman, she also saw it as a liberating activity that pushed the boundaries of appropriate white middle-class conduct at the time. She developed these practices long before her 1911 speech, beginning in 1893 at the Minneapolis YWCA. Interestingly, Mayhew did not choose the path she encouraged her students to take. Mayhew never stopped working and moving. After Minneapolis, she became hostess of a women’s dormitory and head of the Physical Education Department at the University of Wisconsin for fifteen years where she argued for women’s competitive sports and helped nurture what would become one of the first collegiate dance programs in the country. Then, the YWCA national board induced her in 1913 to “start physical education … for the girls and women of China” (Mayhew “A Brief Autobiography”). She helped build and direct the National Normal School of Hygiene and Physical Education in Shanghai until it folded from lack of investment from local girls and women in physical training, a topic for another time and chapter. However, she remained as hostess for the YWCA in Shanghai until 1930 when she returned to the US to teach at the YWCA training facility for physical directors. She never married. The 1940 census lists her as a “companion” to a woman ten years her junior in Spokane. She eventually returned to Minneapolis where she died in 1954. I suppose, if we were to square up her eugenic beliefs, she taught hundreds if not thousands of future mothers of the white race to do as she said, not as she did.

Notes 1. They eventually occupied the building on 11th and Nicollet in 1929 that is still occupied by the YWCA today (see “Summary”). 2. Based on information in the Minneapolis YWCA records, it appears that the YWCA focused on white rural and immigrant women. While there are numerous references to Scandinavian, and German immigrants that the Traveler’s Aid helped, I found no evidence that they reached out to the rather larger African American population (over 1200 in 1895) in the area. This may in part be due to the fact that both African American and Chinese populations in Minneapolis at the time were mostly male (see Taylor 2002, 7; Fuller 2004, 3). 3. Known then as the Northwest as Minnesota marked the far northwestern reach of the frontier until 1889 when North and South Dakota, and Washington became states.

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4. Of the 70 students examined in October 1896, three were barred from classes, for “health reasons” (see “Report of the Physical Committee” 1896). 5. Initial reports in the newspapers reported she was going east for medical training (see “End of the Week Harvest,” C1). However, she ended up working as the first women’s physical director and ladies’ hall director at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 6. For example, Sargent’s summer teacher’s school for women gave free public exhibitions, but more to prove the good physical culture might bring to higher education (see “The Hemenway Gym”). It appears from articles and also Mayhew’s continual use of their gymnasium in the evening—prime class time—that the physical training program at the Minneapolis YMCA was much less organized than Mayhew’s program at the YWCA, focusing more on measurements and allowing members to use the gymnasium without instruction, and they rarely gave exhibitions (see “Building Health,” 5). 7. The YWCA scrapbooks have several drawings from unnamed, undated newspaper articles of Abby Mayhew. She was also in a photo in the Tribune upon her departure. Physical descriptions of Mayhew pop up throughout the executive secretary reminiscences in ways that physical descriptions of other employees do not. She clearly made a physical impression (see “Undated, Unnamed newspaper drawings” and “Miss Abbie Shaw Mayhew,” A3). 8. The costume and the military drill were brought to the US by Ephraim Ellsworth (see Ellsworth 1861). 9. Bakhtin rooted his conceptions of the grotesque in the image of terracotta figurines of “senile pregnant hags” (see Bakhtin 1984, 25). 10. Rima Dumbrow Apple examines the impacts on the ideology of scientific motherhood, laying particular emphasis on its foundation in childrearing techniques (see Apple 2006). 11. In Key’s lengthy The Renaissance of Motherhood, she has an appendix that bullet points what I might call the motherhood curriculum for women before they became mothers. She dedicated the book to noted eugenicist, Havelock Ellis (see Key 1914). 12. “Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (see English Standard Version Bible 2001). 13. Most likely written by Mrs. Charles Gardner, a member of the physical committee, rather than Mayhew. “Annual Report for 1893 and 1894.”

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14. For example, an 1897 article led with the headline “Both Grace and Skill” to describe an exhibition at the Lyceum Theatre where the marching exercises—rapid walking or running in a circle accompanied by music with sometimes intricate variations in step sequences and pacing—“looked very graceful” and “executed intricate figures with ease” (see “The City in Brief” 1897, 5). 15. A similar paradox between the performance and the practice involved in cultivating a sense of ease was noted in an 1895 description of a similar exhibition that the women were heartily applauded “as they did some apparently easy, but really difficult movement.” 16. Mayhew was apparently quite the club swinging phenom and frequently performed solo at YWCA exhibitions, and even at the state YWCA convention (see “Blue Caps Won” and “Talk on Many Topics” 1893, 5). 17. See “Like a Zouave Guard.” However, article mentions that they’ve moved into new quarters at 808 Nicollet indicating the class took place sometime in spring of 1895. 18. Mayhew felt that the YWCA might be the “dawning of a new era,” in which physical education would come to be “classed as a Christian profession.” Qtd. in (Cottrell 1993, 357).

Bibliography “1894 Weekly Schedule,” Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, Tickets, Clippings, and Memorabilia 1893–1999, SWHA. Addams, Jane. 1900. The Modern City and the Municipal Franchise for Women. New York: National American Women Suffrage Association. “Advertisement for November 1892 Meeting,” Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, Tickets, Clippings, and Memorabilia 1893–1999, SWHA. “Annual Report for 1893 and 1894,” Box 7, Physical/Health Education Reports 1893–1907, Exercise Folio, SWHA. “Annual Report of the Physical Department for 1895,” Box 7, Physical/Health Education Reports 1893–1907, Exercise Folio, Social Welfare History Archives (SWHA), Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. Apple, Rima Dumbrow. 2006. Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Baker, William J. 2007. Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. “Blue Caps Won.” 1895. Minneapolis Tribune. April 6.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boydston, Jeanne. 1990. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. “Building Health.” 1896. Minneapolis Tribune. June 17. “The City in Brief: Both Grace and Skill.” 1897. Minneapolis Tribune. May 4. Cottrell, Deborah Lynn. 1993. “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Minds: The Influence of the Srgent School for Physical Education.” Diss. The University of Texas at Austin. Douglas, Ann. 1977. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. New York: Routledge. Ellsworth, Ephraim Elmer. 1861. The Zouave Drill. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers. “End of the Week Harvest.” 1897. Minneapolis Tribune. 9 May. Eng, Ruth. 2003. The Progressive Era’s Health Reform Movement: A Historical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Praeger. English Standard Version Bible. 2001. Wheaton, IL: Crossway. “Fall 1892 Advertisement,” Box 12, Scrapbooks, SWHA. “Fall 1895 Advertisement,” Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, Tickets, Clippings, and Memorabilia 1893–1899, SWHA. “Fee Schedule for 1893,” Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, Tickets, Clippings, and Memorabilia 1893–1999, SWHA. Foucault, Michel. 1978. “Governmentality,” trans. Rosi Braidotti. rev. Colin Gordon. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault. 1991, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Defended”: Lectures at Collège de France, 1975–76, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador Press. Fuller, Sheri Gebert. 2004. Chinese in Minnesota. People of Minnesota Ser. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society. Gardner, Mrs. Charles W. “Testimony of Mrs. Charles W. Gardner” (New York City, 1930), Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891–1976, SWHA. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1913. “Charlotte Gilman’s Reply to Ellen Key.” Current Opinion 54.3 (March): 220–221. Granshaw, Michelle. 2018. “Inventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage.” Paper presented at the Mid America Theatre Conference, Milwaukee, WI Mar, 15–18.

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“The Hemenway Gym: Exhibition by the Pupils of Dr. Sargent’s Summer School,” Folder: F-179: Physical Training—Work in Hemenway Gymnasium—Summer School—“Upon Being a Good Animal,” Clipping File F179F-183, D.A. Sargent, Harvard University Archives. “In Bloomer Costume.” 1894. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895–1898. SWHA. Jackson, Shannon. 1996. Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, HullHouse Domesticity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Jeffery, M. Belle. “Beginnings: The First Twenty-Five Years—Minneapolis YWCA,” Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891—1976, SWHA. Key, Ellen. 1913. “Ellen Key’s Attack on ‘Amaternal’ Feminism.” Current Opinion 54.2 (February): 138–139. Key, Ellen. 1914. The Renaissance of Motherhood, trans. by Anna E.B. Fries. New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press. “Like a Zouave Guard.” Undated Newspaper Article, Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper Clippings 1895–1998, SWHA. Mayhew, Abby Shaw. Undated. “A Brief Autobiography,” Record Group 1, General and History Series V, Biographical Files, Ly-Mc, Box 42, Folder 15, YWCA of the U.S.A. Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Mayhew, Abby Shaw. 1911. “Returns on Investment in an Ideal Gymnasium.” Association Monthly 5 (September): 8. Miller, Toby and George Yúdice. 2002. Cultural Policy. London: Sage. “Miss Abbie Shaw Mayhew.” 1897. Minneapolis Tribune. May 23. Mohl, Raymond A. 1997. “Cultural Pluralism in Immigrant Education: The YWCA’s International Institutes, 1910–1940.” Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City, eds. Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt. New York: New York University Press. Nissenson, George N. 1891. India Rubber. New York: George Nissenson. “Origin and Development of the Young Women’s Christian Association,” Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891–1976, SWHA. Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 1995. “Introduction.” Performance and Performativity, eds. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. New York: Routledge. Patterson, Martha H. 2005. Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Plant, Rebecca Jo. 2010. Mom: The Transformation of Mothering in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Pollock, Della. 1999. Telling Bodies, Performing Birth. Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives Ser, eds. Robin D.G. Kelley and Janice Radway. New York: Columbia University Press. Putney, Clifford. 2001. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “Report of the Physical Committee, October 1896,” Box 7, Exercise Folio, SWHA. “Report of the Physical Department for 1895&6,” Box 7, Physical/Health Education Reports 1893–1907, Exercise Folio, SWHA. “Report of the Physical Director for September 1895” and “Report of the Physical Committee for October 1896,” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893–1907, Exercise Folio, SWHA. Robertson, Nancy Marie. 2007. Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations and the YWCA, 1906–1946. Women in American History Ser. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Rogers, Rebecca. 2005. From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth Century Franc. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Russo, Mary. 1994. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge. “SKIRTS.” Undated Newspaper Article, Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895– 1898. SWHA. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1985. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1993. “Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque (1986).” The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Strong, Josiah. 1893. The New Era, or the Coming Kingdom. New York: The Baker and Taylor Co. “Summary—Rented Quarters and Buildings,” Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891–1976, SWHA. “Talk on Many Topics: Discussion at the State Convention of the YWCA.” 1893. Minneapolis Tribune. 5 November. Taylor, David Vassar. 2002. African American in Minnesota. People of Minnesota Ser. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society. Tickets, Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, Tickets, Clippings, and Memorabilia 1893–1999, SWHA. Undated, Unnamed Newspaper Drawings, Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895– 1898, SWHA. Unnamed Newspaper Clipping from April 16, 1895, Box 12, Scrapbooks, Scrapbook, Newspaper Clippings 1895–1898, SWHA.

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Untitled, Undated Newspaper Article, Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895– 1898, SWHA. Veblen, Thorstein. 1902. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan. Verbrugge, Martha. 1988. Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth Century Boston. New York: Oxford University Press. Vertinsky, Patricia. 1990. The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century. International Studies in the History of Sport Ser. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Wilbor, Elsie. 1893. Delsarte Recitation Book. 2nd ed. New York: Edgar S. Werner. “The Y.W.C.A. Girls”. 1895. Newspaper Article, Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper Clippings 1895–1998, SWHA. April 16. Ywca.org. http://www.ywca.org/site/pp.asp?c=djISI6PIKpG&b=28478. Accessed August 1, 2011.

CHAPTER 5

Racialized Surrogates in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture

On January 23, 2011, 96-year-old physical fitness celebrity Jack LaLanne died of respiratory failure caused by complications from pneumonia. While retrospectives on LaLanne referred to him as a “Fitness Guru,” a “Fitness Legend,” and the “Godfather of Fitness” they also characterized his contributions as novel, spectacularized, and petty (“Jack LaLanne Fitness Guru” 2011; Hayden 2011; Vaidyanathan 2011). Frank Bruni in his article, “The Ripped and the Righteous,” in The New York Times, however, conducted a deeper and much more critical analysis of LaLanne’s impact on conceptions of fitness in the US. It is Jack LaLanne you can thank, or curse, for all the gyms … That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These too, are his doing, at least in part…. For Mr. LaLanne, proper, physical stewardship involved not ascetic denial so much as activity, activity, activity…. To be unfit is to be unfit: a villain of culture indeed. (Bruni 2011)

Bruni suggests LaLanne’s more insidious legacy may be “a potent, and in some cases, immobilizing, strain of contemporary guilt” rooted in the morality of the American Protestant work ethic (ibid.). The timeline linked to Bruni’s article was more ambiguous in its connotative © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2_5

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connections. It underscored LaLanne’s impact by tracing an evolutionary trajectory that began with Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda in all their brightly spandexed glory and ended with exercising presidents, and a flexing Michelle Obama. What was erased in all the retrospectives (even Bruni’s more nuanced analysis of physical fitness as a classed phenomenon) was laid bare in the bodies placed on the timeline: the specificity of physical culture’s address. LaLanne’s show, beginning in the 1950s and stretching into the 1980s, aired in the morning time slot, targeting a demographic primarily comprised of housewives. He was well aware of this audience using his dog, Hap, to attract kids to the show and then saying, “Now go get Mother.” These overt shout-outs to stay-at-home-moms on the Jack LaLanne Show make even more striking the way Bruni’s critical post-mortem of LaLanne’s legacy sublimates physical culture’s hailing of white middle-class maternity into concerns about appearance, self-worth, and morality. The elision of these issues is perhaps most clearly embodied in a popularly circulating clip from one of LaLanne’s shows. The black-and-white clip is from early on in the show’s history, roughly the 1950s. LaLanne, dressed in his iconic blue jumpsuit with “Jack” embroidered across the left side, has just completed a series of exercises on the floor. He grabs a chair, sits in it backward, and addresses the camera directly asking, Have you noticed, I know I notice this all the time, when you’re walking down the street, or perhaps you’re on a streetcar, on the bus, you notice how the people in this great country of ours are so unhappy. You don’t see very many smiling people anymore. People have lost the ability to smile … What’s the matter with the people?

His answer to this question veers into a story about a recent trip he’d taken to South America in one of the “Latin countries” where he took a streetcar ride through one of the “poorer sections.” He mentions the tattered clothes of the people on board and draws attention to one woman in particular. She had - a - she wasn’t dressed very good and her dress was torn and she had this child with her. And she was nursing her child right there on the bus. And you know what she did? She burst out singing! And everybody on the streetcar started to sing. I started to sing right along with them. I didn’t know the words or anything, but I was just humming along. And everybody was smiling, everybody was happy. Here are these people, they

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never had enough money hardly for food. They never knew what it was to have an automobile, or any modern conveniences, a radio, a television, or any of these things, not even enough clothes to wear, but they were happy. That’s the important thing about life, students, is to be happy.

And of course, what will lead us (his students) to happiness? Proper diet and exercise, he says, concluding with the plea, “So, please, let’s get back the way nature intended us to be with a smile on our face and a joy in all the wonderful things that we have in this great land of ours. Let’s appreciate it 24 hours a day. I’m gonna help you help yourself. Come on.”1 What this clip (and its recent appearance on websites concerned with everything from zen martial arts to hypnotism) foregrounds is how physical culture, as a practice targeted at stay-at-home mothers, became tied to universalized conceptions of personal satisfaction and self-worth. LaLanne asserted that if you rehearsed these exercises and routines daily you would be able to better perform the duties of motherhood. Furthermore, the clip’s impact hinged on a physical culture ethic of self-worth and beauty grounded in its differentiation from poverty and racial alterity that is then mapped onto a mythic, “natural” presumably white maternal way of life as the origin of happiness. It provides a discursive example of the physical culture process of habituation; by repeatedly performing physical movements until our muscles perform them “naturally,” physical culture routines can be absorbed by our collective cultural body as a habitus (Bourdieu 1990). I linger on this extended example in order to frame the enduring legacy of what I am calling racialized surrogates in physical culture practice and discourse, especially when it came to exercise for young white women. That is not to say it applies only to women. Sports and physical fitness from the nineteenth century on often position competition, virility, and capacity along racial lines, as I will point out in this chapter and the next. However, as I’ve suggested in previous chapters, Progressive Era physical culture for white women layered its racial concerns along reproductive and maternal lines as well. LaLanne’s implication here that his presumably white housewives need only embrace the romanticized simplicity of poverty and racial otherness in order to obtain happiness already had a decades long history when he narrated his tale in the 1950s. His Progressive Era predecessor, also a fitness guru and media savvy entrepreneur, Bernarr Macfadden (1868–1955) had long before turned

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the mobilization of racialized surrogates—imagery of physically vigorous women from non-white races, especially indigenous women, quickly, efficiently, and easily giving birth—into a trope in his publications in order to persuade his white working class and stay-at-home-mom readers to utilize his methods to attain a fit maternal body. Bernarr Macfadden’s particular brand of physical culture demonstrated the complicated uptake of physical culture as it spread out and circulated through the popular press, visual images, and mass performances. I begin with an extended dive into the definition and framework of surrogation via Joseph Roach (1996). I then move into an analysis of Macfadden’s writings and visual imagery from his magazines, material that contested his own tireless promotion of domestic maternity by layering in connotations of excessive sexuality, white supremacy, and commercial capital. The products and methods advertised in Macfadden’s publications intervened in increasingly intimate ways into women’s lives because the exercises and habits he promoted could all be done in the privacy of women’s homes. The only expert they needed, as all his publications proudly proclaimed, was Macfadden himself, speaking from the pages of his magazines and handbooks. I look to the example of Rose Read, a reader who submitted in response to a call from Macfadden for “patients” in need of transformation. To entice his readers to adopt his methods, Macfadden often relied on racialized surrogates. In his is primary surrogative move he suggested to his women readers that if they engaged in the exercises, diet, and daily habits he promoted, and linked to indigenous cultures, they too could have painless, easy labors just like indigenous women. In a maneuver similar to Sargent’s mimetic invocation of rural and manual labor, Macfadden’s conjuring of indigenous women also positioned them in an imagined and idyllic past, rapidly fading in the myth of the dying race trope spawned by the federal government’s isolation (Trail of Tears, 1831–1877) and mutilation (Wounded Knee, 1890) of indigenous communities. Here, manifest destiny played out by casting white women as the physically vigorous, sexually sound, and morally temperate front line of the battle for white supremacy. The result, I argue, positioned white health in an oppositional relationship to the death, either actual or symbolic, of indigenous women.

Bernarr Macfadden: Weakling to Strongman Most of what we know of Macfadden’s early life and career come from two self-commissioned biographies written in 1929 in anticipation of

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what he hoped would be a fruitful political career. Macfadden provided the biography authors, Clement Wood and Fulton Oursler, with all of the information (Oursler having served for some time as Macfadden’s chief editor) making both works almost autobiographical, and certainly self-promotional.2 At first glance their narrative of Macfadden’s youth appeared similar, uncannily so at times, to Dudley Allen Sargent’s autobiography. Almost two decades Sargent’s junior, Macfadden was born into poverty and ill health in 1868 in Missouri’s Ozarks. Like Sargent, Macfadden’s father died when he was young and he was soon sent off to a boarding school, where he was apparently virtually starved by the proprietors. Unlike Sargent, whose self-narrated story of his youth showed a physically vigorous, if restless spirit, Macfadden continuously battled ill health and a body that refused to cooperate with his demands, struggling in school, and moving back and forth between various relatives and employers. After his mother died of tuberculosis in 1879 Macfadden left his Illinois relatives to work as a farmer, and a grocer’s assistant. In 1883 he visited a German Turnverein and a circus, vowing to turn himself into something like the physical specimens of manhood he saw working in both environments. Determined to become, of all things, a tightrope walker for the circus, he built a gymnasium in his uncle’s basement (Sargent, of course, wowed audiences when he balanced himself in a rocking chair on the high wire and built his own gymnasium in his uncle’s barn). While strikingly similar at times, the divergent paths taken by these two men were most clearly demonstrated by their participation in the 1893 Columbian Expo in Chicago. Sargent’s installation in the anthropology building showcased two statues that represented the accumulation of thousands of college students’ measurements rendered into stone, accompanied by photographs and charts explaining his medico-scientific methods. Meanwhile, on the Midway a shirtless Macfadden demonstrated a friend’s exercise machine.3 Sargent’s display, housed in a large brick building with arched entrances and embedded among exhibits of everything from a prehistoric mastodon to stelas from Central American pyramids, showcased sculpted statues of “typical” students’ bodies (“Harvard’s Interesting Exhibit” 1893, 11). Sargent’s exhibit highlighted what historian Ann Fabian suggests are the links between science, higher education, and physical culture as an embodiment of the “best that man had thought” (Fabian 1993, 57). Alternately, squeezed in the midst of a

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Ferris wheel, an ostrich farm, and displays of recently colonized peoples, Macfadden exhibited his own body, advertising proof of the effectiveness of someone else’s machine, and, as Fabian suggests, showcased physical culture as “the best that man had looked,” foreshadowing the commercial motive behind much of his future work (ibid.). Though both men’s passion for physical culture was rooted in popular forms like the circus Sargent strove to distinguish himself in medicine and higher education despite his humble roots, while Macfadden’s fierce ownership of his roots, and use of personal experience as a grounds for expertise set him apart as a hero of the white working classes. Additionally, as anthropologist Michaela Di Leonardo and historian Robert Rydell have pointed out, the 1893 Columbian Expo in Chicago served as a microcosm of late nineteenth-century American racial consciousness.4 As Rydell asserts the “Midway provided visitors with ethnological, scientific sanction for the American view of the nonwhite world as barbaric and childlike and gave a scientific basis to the racial blueprint for building a utopia,” embodied by the fair’s “White City” (1984, 67). Physical culture’s presence in both spaces pointed to physicality’s conflicted status within emerging American understandings of race, and in particular whiteness. Macfadden positioned his work as an adamant counter practice to mainstream physical culture practices promoted by the likes of Sargent and Mayhew, emblematic of that early performance on the Midway. He was deeply suspicious of the institutions that both Mayhew and Sargent so devotedly attached themselves to, an attitude that enabled him to direct his women followers away from colleges, universities, and gymnasiums, and back toward the domestic sphere of the home. In his publications, through household chores, and exercises that utilized household objects (chairs, side-tables, beds), Macfadden laid the rhetorical, ideological, and visual foundation for a “strong, vital, splendid” white motherhood gained not through classes or in gymnasiums, but in intimate, private self-training (Macfadden 1930, vii). While Macfadden’s magazine Physical Culture approvingly covered Sargent’s work with both Harvard students and women, Macfadden also roundly criticized the intellectual elitism of higher education, particularly for women, arguing that colleges were more likely to turn out “pig-headed freaks” than “womenly women” (Macfadden 1901a, 225). He similarly criticized both the YM and YWCA for “prudish restrictions” that prevented men

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and women from interacting socially, calling for them to become coeducational institutions (Macfadden 1910). Such examples highlighted Macfadden’s reputation as an equal opportunity offender, often criticizing the very people and programs from which he prodigiously borrowed. As cultural studies scholar Simon During suggests, Macfadden was “defiantly on the side of self-management, as against governmental pastoral agencies and professions” epitomized by physical culture in higher education and social welfare institutions (1997, 829).

Physical Culture: Procreation and Motherhood Through the pages of Physical Culture, as well as its brief sister publications Women’s Physical Development and Beauty and Health, Macfadden, and the magazines’ advertisers and contributors forwarded a bevy of “technologies of the self” aimed at specific governmental ends. Technologies (sometimes translated as “techniques”) of the self, Foucault suggested, permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (1988, 18)

The discourse and imagery in Macfadden’s magazines demonstrated how these technologies coalesced to encourage behaviors, such as sex and maternal strategies, that lay at the heart of a sweeping eugenic project for white supremacy. Adopting techniques at the daily level (walking, drinking milk, stretching) enabled individuals to influence larger behaviors over time (sex and parenting). Macfadden hoped that the end result of these techniques, when practiced on a mass scale by even a fraction of his readership, would be a stronger white race. However, perpetuating this message carried a whole other set of problems. The first was the nuance of Macfadden’s beliefs: white people didn’t need to have more sex with each other, just more reproductive sex; and they didn’t need to have more children just better children. The second premise permeated the Progressive Era’s ambiguity about whiteness: Who was white? What constituted whiteness? How did one become white? These problems were further

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complicated by the uneasy pairing of visual culture with the “techniques of the self” promoted by the discourse of Physical Culture magazine. Macfadden began publishing Physical Culture magazine in 1899, initially using it as a means to circulate his own writings on health as well as his forays into fiction writing, and to advertise his exerciser.5 By the end of the magazine’s first year it began to attract more contributors and an increasingly large pool of advertisers; its clever use of articles, editorials, reader responses, and especially photographs helped propel the subscriber base to 150,000 in about two years.6 While Macfadden wrote much of the material, he also used a regular cadre of writers, some of whom co-authored books with him including Felix Oswald, M.D. in Fasting, Hydropathy, and Exercise, and John Coryell who helped Macfadden write some of his short fiction stories.7 In addition, Macfadden cited other publications in the earliest issues, mainly other newspapers and magazines like Health Journal, and Mother’s Journal, though in later years his wife Mary suggested that Bernarr was militantly against reading anything but his own work (1956, 70). As Physical Culture’s circulation grew, it began to attract more notable writers like Upton Sinclair, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Booker T. Washington (Sinclair 1910a, b; Gilman 1914; Washington 1910).8 However, Physical Culture’s most unique feature, the one that would spawn Macfadden’s future more lucrative publications, was its incorporation of reader feedback. Beyond just the “Question Department” section, Macfadden regularly published readers’ letters of gratitude, their stories of self-transformation (often accompanied by pictures), ran fiction and essay contests, and eventually began publishing confessional articles. It was this innovation, suggests Fabian, that set Macfadden apart by “offer[ring] his readers a hand in the production of the artifacts they so happily consumed, to urge them at every turn to become writers as well as readers, producers as well as consumers” (1993, 52). In other words, Macfadden encouraged his readers toward self-management and allowed them the space to represent themselves as the fruition of that management. Macfadden’s publications served as governmental tools that endowed readers/practitioners with a sense of individual agency—that was rewarded by self-representation in a magazine—and increasing the capacity and scope of physical culture as a governing mechanism reliant on the magazine’s popularity. To return for a moment to Bruni’s memorium to LaLanne that opened this chapter,

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it was obsessively individualistic while simultaneously positioning the individual as responsible to, in this case, “the race.” The dramatic impetus behind the narrativity of self-transformation through self-management found particular currency among the urban white working class, an increasingly diverse and diversified population in terms of nationality and ethnicity. The central message of Macfadden’s publications, Fabian suggests, was that “physical transformation … made all social mobility possible,” a particularly potent message for overworked and abused workers, and a belief echoed in Macfadden’s continual references to his own poor weakling to millionaire strongman story (1993, 52–3).9 As During points out, Physical Culture appealed to those “whose bodies are their main resource—for whom spectacularization and confession testimony across distance provide a means for self-articulation” (1997, 833). That self-articulation also happened in contrast to racial others frequently depicted in the pages of the magazines. Although Macfadden often pointed to the “remarkable muscular development” of these black and brown bodies, their words never made it into the magazines’ pages.10 The stories, confessions, transformations were reserved for white bodies. The symbolism of static, consumed, silent black and brown bodies next to storied, smiling, active white bodies spoke volumes to his white working-class readership. The products, pictures, and narratives in his publications’ pages held the promise of an economic transformation that would result in various forms of physical, mental, and moral improvement, subtle gestures toward the possibility of transitioning to a more privileged class and racial status. Though he primarily addressed the working class, Macfadden did on occasion address upper class readers, suggesting it was never too late to renounce their luxury and vanity (Macfadden 1900). The implicit promise that certain habits—exercising, fasting, and eating vegetables— might make his urban white working-class reader more attractive and healthier, and thus richer and whiter, permeated the discourses and images meant to incite his white women readers toward marriage and motherhood. Hence, sex and maternity in this equation would encourage the upper class reader to be even whiter and incite the “not-quite-white” poor and working classes to become as white as possible.11 As a civilizing and morally driven force, the maternity Macfadden promoted acted as an implicit whitening mechanism, both biologically and socially.

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Culturing the Physical, Taming the Sexual The way Macfadden and other physical culturists differentiated between the “remarkable physical development” of the BIPOC communities that peppered the pages of Physical Culture and his intended white audience. Some existing scholarship in sports history tends to take the “culture” of physical culture as self-evident, rather than an important, contested, and complex dimension of the phenomenon. The adoption of the term physical culture in the mid-nineteenth century by reformers placed the practice alongside a host of other leisure pursuits similarly aimed at self-fashioning and self-improvement through aesthetic engagement. As an aesthetic practice, poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold in the late nineteenth century referred to culture as “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best that has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” (1875, x). Physical culture practices operated through a similar holistic approach, utilizing exercises, daily diet, and bathing routines to improve the body, mind, spirit, and character.12 The emphasis on mind and spirit moved physical culture away from the physical labor that created fine physiques and instead emphasized intent. Physical labor is a requirement, physical culture is a choice. However, engaging in a practice bent on perpetual self-improvement necessarily assumed an incomplete “self.” Hence, as cultural theorist Ian Hunter observes, culture in this form operated as a “device in self-problematization” where people “relate to themselves as aesthetically incomplete beings” who need to engage in and with “culture” in order to be complete (1992, 351–2). At a time when BIPOC communities in the US continued to fight to be considered fully human, their capacity for self-improvement was not even a question for the dominant culture. As I pointed to in Chapter 2 with MacKaye’s drawings, and in Chapter 3 with Sargent’s rhetoric, the incompleteness of BIPOC communities was assumed by the dominant white class and an aspect of racialized peoples “nature” that could not be overcome no matter how much self-culturing work they might practice. As I will explore in the next chapter, many experts felt physical culture was wasted on certain non-white populations such as indigenous women and girls.

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The drive to improve fueled sweeping social reforms, especially in urban areas, where city managers viewed rapid industrialization and urbanization as a necessary social ill because it led to the progression of civilization. Culture, then, became a necessary corrective for metropolitan upper classes and whites in order to differentiate themselves from the working classes and racialized others who lived and worked in close proximity. In this scenario, cultural theorist Tony Bennett suggests culture worked “to combat the shortcomings of civilization by diffusing the higher standards of culture throughout society” (Bennett “Culture” 2005b, 66). Reformers indicted civilization in this context “for its shallowness, coarseness, or incompleteness, when viewed from the higher standards of human wholeness or perfection that the notion of culture increasingly came to represent” (Bennett “Culture” 2005b, 65). Supremely concerned with environment, culture as anti-civilization paradigm worked to transform the spaces of the city into the perfection embodied in classical forms of art, and architecture, to counter the brutality of coal smoke, waste, and tainted food that were the by-products of industrial progress. By opposing culture (a social ideal) and civilization (the polluted reality of urban living), Progressive Era intellectuals perpetuated a classist/racist/sexist project of assimilation and segregation. Utilizing architectural styles to instill the material layout of the city with spiritually inflected morality, city leaders across the country built museums, libraries, and galleries “that beckoned the urban population with the prospect of spiritual and cultural uplift and improvement” (ibid.) As a similarly moralistic force, physical culture in the city averted this threat by “enfolding” practitioners into a form of white middle-class bodily conduct. The white middle-class conduct encouraged by the culture of physical culture pushed practitioners toward products and leisure practices that would lead to the collective improvement of the white urban population. Perceiving culture as a way of life, Bennett argues, provides a “means of dividing societies into separate groups” enabling various forms of colonialism and racism to persist. Culture facilitated a similar process of stratification at the level of the self, where culture, as Bennett asserts in his characterizations of museum exhibits, “served as a template for a process of developmental self-fashioning in which the legacy of earlier layers of development was to be sloughed off in order to update and renovate the self so that it would be able to respond appropriately

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to the imperatives of social evolution” (2005a “Civic Laboratories,” 533). This conception assumes the culturing happens on the consumer or audience side of the equation, as opposed to the exhibit side. For instance, the pictures in Macfadden magazines of indigenous populations as exhibits through which white readers might participate in their own self-fashioning by understanding who they were not, to harken back to Faedra Carpenter’s definition of whiteness. As Bennett points out, social sciences viewed the “primitive” as a kind of “evolutionary ground zero” (ibid.). Consequently, in the case of Physical Culture, readers could measure their progress against that evolutionary ground zero. It was through this conceptualization that white women became a particular problem of culture to themselves and for others. Women, according to numerous scientific experts, were unable to fully develop along the established lines of evolutionary trajectories due to the demands of reproduction upon their bodies and minds. White women were in particular need of improvement for the benefit of the “race.” It was at this juncture, where discourses on the “savage primitive” and the enfeebled white woman met, that the eugenic drive behind many physical culture practices was laid bare. Macfadden and other physical culturists regularly relied on animalistic metaphors in regard to this link between enfeebled whiteness and women’s allegedly savage sexuality. For Bernarr Macfadden, physical culture ensured the proper functioning of the “sex instinct,” an innate drive to reproduce the species (1912, 2444). Routinized bodily management was especially important for women whose sexuality, Macfadden suggested, was akin to a female lion or tiger. These animals’ instincts, he argued, “absolutely dictate the time when she may be approached by the male species, and this is only at the particular period when she is in a condition to conceive,” a mating dance Macfadden felt humans would do well to imitate (1912, 2460). However, for Macfadden sex was only appropriate for procreative purposes, and he encouraged couples to refrain from physical affection outside of procreative sex and to sleep in separate beds. He approvingly cited Dr. T.R. Nicholas who suggested that a woman was so full of passion during ovulation that she “is seldom satisfied with a single sexual act” and therefore may desire multiple sexual encounters (1912, 2464). But, Macfadden and Nicholas argued, man must maintain his will and reserve his “energy” in order to ensure the

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ultimate outcome of sexual intercourse in strong offspring. These arguments discursively linked women’s “sex instinct” to lower animals, a move that also racialized women in a similar way as they did non-white races. In both instances this maneuver also justified white male colonial dominance. Additionally, Macfadden perceived this animalistic behavior in women as innate and necessary, not something to be snuffed out or repressed. Instead, Macfadden asserted, women’s sex instinct should be carefully guided by the ideal man (Macfadden often served as this model) who could help guide women’s sexual instincts toward reproductive ends. It was white women’s “capacity to serve as mothers of civilization” that Robert Rydell, in reference to the border position of the Women’s Building at the 1893 Columbian Expo, suggests prevented them from “slipping into the category of ‘otherness’ reserved for ‘savages,’ and ‘exotics’” (1993, 156–7). In other words, motherhood served as a civilizing force on women’s animalistic sexual impulses. Though reproduction was a central, if not the ultimate, goal of all forms of physical self-cultivation for Macfadden, he directed his parenting advice toward women, not men, from the time of conception, through pregnancy, and well into the first several years of parenthood. Macfadden, like many of his contemporaries, seemed obsessed with the health of white women of childbearing age. Perhaps because of his own mother’s tuberculosis and his Lamarckian belief that his illnesses in youth were the result of that genetic inheritance, Macfadden wrote extensively about preserving maternal energies, strengthening the body for childbirth, and newborn care (long before he began having his own children). By 1905 he began publishing numerous pictures in Physical Culture of what he labeled “physical culture babies.” Additionally, he published profiles of women who raised their babies according to his precepts. He also enforced an intense regimen of diet and exercise for his third wife Mary during her seven pregnancies including a strict vegetarian diet, two hundred knee bends a day, a daily fifteen-mile walk, and in her sixth month a 64-foot dive off a pier into the ocean as a demonstration of her vigorous pregnant womanhood (Macfadden 1956, 15, 17). True to his own beliefs he banned doctors from his wife’s childbed, begrudgingly allowing her a midwife at her insistence (Macfadden 1956, 19).13 For Macfadden the link between the woman’s sexual and maternal conduct lay at the heart of all possibilities for their transformation, and demonstrated the multiple layers of individual behaviors promoted by Physical Culture. According to

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Macfadden, if you exercise, eliminate alcohol and tobacco use, eat vegetables, drink milk, abandon the corset, bathe every day, and massage your scalp you will be a fitter and more attractive person making you more likely and better able to engage in procreative sex, have an uncomplicated pregnancy and labor, and make stronger healthier babies.

Before and After Photographs: Coming into Whiteness Though Macfadden’s discourse provided the basis for his pairing of sexual and maternal conducts, the available conventions of visual culture at the turn of the twentieth century made the communication of this message through magazines a complicated venture. Physical Culture was well known for its images: cartoons, reproductions of famous works of art, and especially photographs of nude and semi-nude men and women. In the magazine’s first year photographs of both Macfadden and strongman Eugen Sandow (Macfadden facing the camera against a black background in bikini briefs, Sandow facing away from the camera, looking over his shoulder, nude) appeared on the cover (April and May 1899). These types of photographs occurred on almost every page of the magazine whether popularly circulating images of famous strongmen or actors, or reader submitted photographs. Macfadden frequently (and often nude) served as the main model for the exercises outlined in various issues. Thus, readers could practice these exercises without necessarily reading the text. While men most often graced the covers—a woman did not appear in this prime location until 1904—drawings and photographs of semi-nude women appeared regularly within the magazine’s pages, demonstrating exercises as well as poses of famous actresses and circus performers.14 Fully nude women were always shown in reproductions of classical statuary or paintings, such as George Frederick Watts’ “Psyche,” and Emile Munier’s “At the Bath” (September 1901b, 276; July 1901a, 152). In almost all cases, including the two listed here, the nudes had no contextual connection to the articles on the same page. For example, the Watts piece is placed at the end of Macfadden’s article “Health Home Cures” and the Munier next to a short column called “The Curative Power of Exercise” by Dr. George H. Taylor. The muscle-bound men, exercising women, and lounging nudes were sandwiched in between two advertising sections at the beginning and end of each issue that contained product promotions and books written by Macfadden and his contributors, but

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eventually expanded to include ads for products such as bicycles, girdles, and punching bags; the services of hypnotists, character readers, and psychics; and more outrageous products like an internal bath, vibrating electric massagers, and whirling spray douches.15 This complex interplay of text and image, editorials, advice, and advertising positioned Physical Culture on the precarious cusp of a rising tide of mass produced cultural commodities, blurring lines between the messages of “buy me” and “be like me” emanating from the magazine’s images.16 To leverage his readers’ identification with the white subjects in his magazine, Macfadden used before and after photographs to document individuals’ deficiencies and demonstrate the effectiveness of his methods, supposedly manifest physically on subjects’ bodies. In other words, Macfadden utilized these images as a way to make “technologies of the self” visible on the body. These subjects—both men and women— were often photographed semi-naked, most often from the waist up, with their before and after measurements sometimes listed below the photos. In one example from Women’s Physical Development in 1901 titled “Our Thin Subject” Macfadden chose a woman from over one hundred applications, he claimed, to demonstrate the effectiveness of his methods, focusing in this particular case on “efforts to add flesh” to the patient (Macfadden April 1901b, 33). The photo accompanying the first article in April showed a nameless, headless naked torso (collar bone down to hips), breasts bared, hands clasped vulnerably in front of her, resting below her waist. Two months later, claiming to have cured her of “insomnia, serious nervous and digestive troubles” and bad kidneys, Macfadden posted two before-and-after photographs, both now showing the woman’s head and face (Macfadden June 1901c, 98). The first set of photographs showed her camisoled and posing (see Fig. 5.1). The second is the same photograph from the previous article, but now only showing her from the waist up, and next to the after photograph, breasts bared again, and from the waist up. While he bemoans that they were not as successful at adding flesh, he notes her physical change, most notably the “brighter and more satisfied expressions and an improved contour of the face; but the most marked improvement will be noted in the general shape and contour of her bust” (June 1901c, 99). He went on to point out that “most any woman can accomplish similar improvement” to her bust by following the advice in the previous issue on resisting exercises. Furthermore, she is named in the second article, “Mrs. Rose Read, of 954 LaFayette Avenue, Brooklyn” (June 1901c, 98). Clearly, Macfadden

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Fig. 5.1 Rose Read, first before-and-after photograph. Bernarr Macfadden. 1901. “Our Thin Subject.” Women’s Physical Development 1.3 (June)

intended for the second article to be a reveal of sorts. That said, the fact that she goes from being an unnamed bare-breasted headless torso to a named, married, Brooklynite after several months of Macfadden’s exercises is ripe with symbolic effect. The whitening of Mrs. Rose Read is both actual (visibly different between the before and after shots), symbolic (she becomes a named and faced individual in the after article), and problematic (photographic convention of the time still make her more an object to be observed and therefore “not quite white”). Macfadden’s attempt to utilize photography to show the ways self-management marked itself on Read’s body and character may have been muddied by the contradictory photographic conventions of the time that carried both explicit and implicit symbolic weight with the magazine’s Progressive Era audience. The burgeoning use of photographs to both question and document “truth” added an additional layer of meaning to the contextual mire of Physical Culture’s pictures. Photographs could both upend the status quo by countering long held beliefs showing what could not be seen by the naked eye and reinforce problematic ideologies such as the dehumanizing photographs documenting the alleged smaller craniums of Black people. To many, especially in the scientific community, the photograph provided a way to document nature as scientific reality. As famed inventor of the daguerreotype Louis Daguerre suggested, photography was “a physical process

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which gives [nature] the power to reproduce herself.”17 By the last decades of the nineteenth century biologists, ethnologists, and anthropologists used photographs to document and categorize plants, animals, and human beings—especially criminals, slaves, and global indigenous communities. These ethnographic photographs placed the presumed white viewer in a position dominate, consume, and dehumanize the black, brown, and female bodies in the photographs. However, recent scholars in photography and anthropology—most notably Allan Sekula, Elizabeth Edwards, Christopher Morton, and Deborah Poole—have challenged this dominant disciplinary conception. Instead, Edwards and Morton suggest, photographs operate “as contested sites of encounter and cultural exchange even within asymmetrical power relations” (2009, 4). As Poole points out, the anthropological need to document nature—the will to know it—and the “quest for order” in the late nineteenth century that “made it possible to imagine a utopia of complete transparency also introduced the twin menace of intimacy and contingency” (2005, 164). Edwards and Morton speak of the transparency as “visual excess,” the “random inclusiveness of photographic inscription” (2009, 4). In other words, the intangibles within photographs of people—the facial expression, the staging of an intimate encounter between the subject and the (absent) presence of the photographer, the “infinite recodability” of the image by the viewer—all threatened to disrupt the scientific hierarchies of race, class, and gender that photography was meant to construct and solidify (Edwards and Morton 2009, 4). The documentary and “truth” trope of scientific photography enabled Macfadden to give his practices (and magazine) the appearance of scientific rigor. Rose Read, as a woman in allegedly failing health and reader of the magazine (Macfadden posted a call for “patients” in its pages), provided an apt target for intervention from an “expert” like Macfadden, and the self-management techniques he so vigorously promoted. As a mimetic device, the photograph as mirror-of-nature enabled Macfadden to demonstrate expertise not through degrees and institutional affiliation, but by using it as proof of his expertise. Here, the before-and-after photographs verified the effectiveness of a set of physical practices of both Rose Read’s ability to self-govern and her capacity to be governed effectively by Macfadden. It is noteworthy here that the majority of the beforeand-after photographs of men in Physical Culture were self submitted. While many followed Macfadden’s advice, they did not place themselves under his care in the way that Read did. Photographs proved visible

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improvement on the body through techniques of the self. Additionally, the “after” photograph—Read’s fuller breasts, styled hair, and slight smile—further solidified implicit connections between health, beauty, and happiness. These implicit connections further reinforced Read’s performance of appropriate femininity (her armpits had been shaved), class (she or someone else spent time styling her hair), and whiteness (her skin appears whiter in the after photos). Such promises of transcendence must have resonated deeply with white working-class readers hungry for ways to move beyond the toil of the day-to-day. As theatre scholar Max Schulman points out, early bodybuilders provided a crucial part of working-class identity construction. He points to the popularity of Eugen Sandow as both a performer and regularly pictured bodybuilder whose “body was a defiant example of man’s potential to defend himself against the hostile tide of industry” (2015, 103). Macfadden positioned Read among photos of other working women including circus performers, actresses, women exercising against dressers and chairs, as well as nymphs, goddesses, and marble statues. In that context Read is a worker as a wife, as someone who works on her self who, as her poses suggest, had transformed her character and body to be one step closer to the mythic white ideal femininity embodied in the fantasy feminine figures sprinkled throughout Macfadden’s publications. Regardless of possibly flawed lighting and imprecision of the photograph itself causing her to appear darker in her before picture, Read attained whiteness in more subtle symbolic ways. She connotatively came into personhood through Macfadden’s suggested way of living. The call to individuality, a call at the core of US democratic ideals, is fundamentally rooted in whiteness. As communication studies scholar John T. Warren points out, “whiteness provides the privilege of being seen as individuals” (2001, 103). Read then becomes not only a named subject, but a white subject. Her individuality was made evident not only through the revelation of her identity, but highlighting that identity against a neutral background, wearing a white camisole in one shot, portrait style photograph. Read’s mis-en-scene contrasts sharply with the photographs of non-white women in Macfadden’s publications. For instance, in the same issue in which Read’s nameless torso appears, an article on the ills of civilization has photographs of a mother and her family in Puerto Rico. She is photographed with her naked children in the esplanade in San Juan (Burnes 1901, 29). Not unlike LaLanne’s description of the Latina mother on the bus, this mother is symbolically linked to her

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cultural context as she stands in front of a monument in the city square. Furthermore, she is unnamed, labeled simply “Porto Rican Mother” and later identified as a washwoman. Or from the May 1902 article “Physical Development of Women in the Far East” where three women pose for the camera (Tape 1902). In the first, a dark-skinned woman in a sari sits with her arm draped across a table surrounded by tropical plants. In the second, a barefoot woman in traditional dress stands next to a table covered in fruit. In the third, a barefoot topless woman stands holding a basket wearing a wrapped skirt. The captions read “Wynaad Girl, Low Caste, South Quelia,” “Malay Girl, Island of Java,” and “Dayak Maiden, Borneo,” respectively. The story explains the daily, physically vigorous life of these “children of nature” in romantic terms and concludes by pointing out “Maternity is no burden to such healthy and wholesome bodies, but is accepted as the immemorial and loving part of woman’s destiny in this world, cheerfully born and fulfilled without undue pain, and without other assistance than that of the elder women in the house” (Tape 1902, 69). These women are weighted down by their contexts, “nature,” represented by drooping palms, overflowing fruit, and bare breasts. The narrative marks labor, both daily and in childbirth, as the cheerfully born duty of their lives. They are representatives meant to stand in for the while of their culture, but not individuals. Their rootedness to their culture and their position, like the plants, immobile, and like the fruits, easily consumed. Read by contrast ascends out of her namelessness by embracing the work of Macfadden’s physical culture.18 Finally, Read’s transformation existed within the broader discursive framework of Macfadden’s trademark slogan, “Weakness is a Crime. Don’t Be a Criminal” which centralized the individual’s responsibility for their own physical conditions. Macfadden continually placed the blame for poor physical condition in the laps of his readers. Above the first headless, nameless torso of Rose read he quipped, “every woman who does not possess physical perfection has no one to blame but the ignorance of herself or her advisers” (April 1901b, 33). Such tropes of criminality, especially when given visual form in the starkness of Read’s before photographs, participated in broader attempts in racial science to make visible the signs of criminality, particularly on white bodies. Furthermore, physical culture’s rise to prominence during the beginning of Jim Crow and post-thirteenth amendment also meant that references to criminality like Macfadden’s already had racial undertones. The racialization of criminality was well underway in the US by this time. The visual excess of

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Read’s before photographs, the implication that her physical weaknesses, marked on her body by Macfadden’s disparaging remarks, signaled a possible hidden criminality and compromised her degree of whiteness. Subsequently, Macfadden’s work with the “patient” and her own work on herself brought not only a visible physical improvement, but also a transformation in the attendant implications of criminality and its notquite-whiteness. Through Macfadden’s techniques of the self, Read not only dispensed with her many illnesses, but also shed the criminality associated with those illnesses via Macfadden’s well-known mantra, “Weakness is a Crime.” The outcome, then, was not just a “brightening” of Read’s suspiciously shadowed skin, but a shift to a higher degree of inner whiteness as indicated by her ability to discard her weakness, therefore her crime. Macfadden’s rhetorical strategy, decades prior to LaLanne’s similar practices implicating the weak as what Bruni said were “villains of culture,” placed physical culture on the first wave of eugenic impulses in the US that would crest in 1911–1920. While eugenics certainly solidified many of the racist policies and ideologies circulating in the US in the early twentieth century, the movement’s primary obsession was delineating hierarchies of whiteness. Sociology scholar Matt Wray suggests that this attempt to “discover” degeneracy within the seeming unmarkedness of whiteness culminated in the forced sterilization of “feeble-minded” women whose questionable “sexual histories, reputations, and crimes” lead to the “imposition of coercive policies of reproductive control” (2006, 93). The fact that these women “appeared normal” because they looked white posed a threat, according to eugenicists, because men could easily and unknowingly plant their precious seeds in morally and mentally suspect ground. Read’s photos, viewed through Wray’s arguments, become verifications of her ability to transform, thus suggesting the conditionality of her physical state (and its visual assumptions about her criminality, whiteness, poverty) and dispel any question of the innateness of her criminality. If she can overcome her weakness, she is no longer a criminal.

Childbirth and Surrogates Nowhere was women’s physical state more conditional than during pregnancy and childbirth. Medical texts concerned with women’s reproductive capacity also encouraged middle-class women to adopt rural physical practices. As an example of the intertwining of social and economic fields,

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medical interventions into the processes of reproduction demonstrated similar biopolitical naturalizations as those occurring on a more national level during the Progressive Era. In a similar fashion, the rhetoric of reproduction—present in both manuals for the mother and texts for the doctor—revealed instructions for intervention in order to ensure the natural, therefore appropriate, performance of labor. Midwifery itself and the processes of labor were increasingly becoming institutionalized rather than taking place in the space of the home. With the emergence of gynecology and obstetrics in the medical field, an increasing number of men began to take an interest in midwifery, an area largely populated by women even through the mid-nineteenth century. The subsequent “discovery” and proliferation of information on gynecological diseases, deformities, and dysfunctions enabled the movement of childbirth into lying-in hospitals, institutions that until the last two decades of the nineteenth century had been reserved for poor women and sex workers. All these dramatic changes, I suggest, were propelled forward by a philosophy of “watchful expectancy” during women’s confinement. William Lusk’s The Science and Art of Midwifery (1882), a widely circulated text among physicians at the time, explains this state as follows: It is an old but always good rule not to meddle with the physiological performance of a function; but the rule, when applied to obstetrics, presupposes a thorough familiarity with the physical processes of childbirth and the contingencies to which women in parturition are exposed. There is no sense in reposing a blind, unreasonable confidence in the powers of Nature … [the attendant] should be ready, if needful, to assuage pain, to forestall dangers, and limit the duration of suffering. (1893, 206)

Here, again, mimicking the laissez-faire economic philosophy, the call to ensure natural functions served as an excuse to intervene. Nature, clearly imagined here as embodied in childbirth, must be able to function accordingly for the health and welfare of both child and mother. However, as numerous gynecological texts from the same time suggest, city living—the excesses of the newly rich, the stifling conditions of the middle-class housewife—prevented Nature from ensuring the “normal” performance of childbirth. The midwife/physician, as constructed through this philosophy, was to take his cues from watching the process and, if/when necessary intervening in order to ensure the natural order was maintained.

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Along with this prescription to intervene in order to ensure the natural labor process and practice, many texts also pastoralized rural women’s performance of childbirth. Obstetrician and women’s rights advocate Alice Stockham opened her women’s 1883 handbook Tokology (Greek for “obstetrics”) with a promise that all women who followed her prescriptions which focused mainly on a physically active lifestyle would experience painless childbirth suggesting that the “peasantry” in all countries did not suffer in labor because of their continual physical activity.19 Following a similar argument Lusk suggested that rural neighborhoods were much more conducive to successful labors due to the “abundance of fresh, pure air” which accommodated the birthing woman’s increased consumption of oxygen (1887, 22). Citing a fellow obstetrician, Stockham also advocated for fresh air saying that women who bear children without pain “live much in the open air, take much exercise, and are physically active and healthy to a degree greatly beyond their more civilized sisters” (ibid.). However, Stockham did not advocate for a complete adoption of rural lifestyles. Like Lusk she admired and advocated for the benefits of a “civilized” education, dress, and manner of living. Rather, it was the modest use of the physical practices of rural laborers and the concomitant benefits of these physical movements on urban laboring women that Stockham promoted. The pastoralization of “women’s work” whether in the home or in childbirth as effortless and without pain not only upheld constructions of white femininity’s gentleness, civility, and refinement, but, as historian Jeanne Boydston argues, justified women’s essential position as unpaid laborers (1990). Furthermore, physical culture discourse encouraged women to work on themselves and develop into what Foucault called “entrepreneurs of the self.” The waning years of the nineteenth century saw a global shift toward a collapse of the social and economic spheres that conceived of “human life as economic capital” (Lemke 2011, 108). This conceptualization, Foucault argued, produced humans as “entrepreneurs of the self,” mobile enterprises focused on building and developing innate capacities, and accumulating material wealth and social advantages that would contribute to an individual’s overall feeling of satisfaction with life (Birth 2003a, 226). However, perhaps even more essential to an emerging concept of the entrepreneur of the self were the overall socioeconomic benefits that were the result of such discourse centered on painless labor. Liberal economic concepts rely as heavily on time as they do on wage. As a limited resource, time becomes an

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asset that can be wasted. Consequently, efficiency is measured by the “cost-value of human beings”; maximizing the time and effort spent on rearing, training, and maintaining a human (Bröckling 2011, 250). Hence, key to a biopolitical agenda is “the calculation that motivates people to invest their scarce resources in pursuit of one goal rather than another” (Bröckling et al. 2011, 7). With increasing access to higher education and the careers, Progressive Era middle-class women had a variety of goal options on the table. Meanwhile, eugenicists, politicians, and doctors alike shared a common concern about the century’s declining birthrates and maternal mortality statistics. Thus, convincing women that labor could be painless enabled these now “experts” to suggest that motherhood was a more satisfying choice than, say, a career or life as a single woman. Consequently, in the emerging liberal state in the US, painless labor became an incentive for women to invest in maternity. These eugenic fears of an innate, unseen, and inheritable degeneracy in white appearing women found currency on the bodies of childbearing women in gynecological texts and anthropological field studies. The process of birth itself was laden with visual and discursive connections to the Other. Marked by, in eugenic terms, deviance of ethnic heritage or sexual aberrance, and forced into the spotlight by science, these birthing bodies served as the foundation upon which obstetrics and gynecology were built. For example, the “models” used in medical text illustrations, as well as the first patients upon which doctors tested new methods were most often sex workers and slaves. For most of the century only the very poor, the unwed, and sex workers used hospitals as places to give birth, further entrenching connections between the lower degrees of whiteness, and poverty and sexual depravity (Wertz and Wertz 1989). In another example from medical texts, doctors linked the “maladies” of birth and disease of the reproductive organs, either directly through photographs or indirectly through text, to poor, often immigrant, black, or non-Western bodies. As performance scholar Terri Kapsalis points out in her book Public Privates the father of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, perfected his surgical techniques on the bodies of slave women, making his fame “as indebted to slavery and racism as [it] was to innovation, insight, and persistence, and he has left behind a frightening legacy of medical attitudes toward and treatments of women, particularly women of color” (1997, 31–2). Finally, the proliferation of anthropological field studies, their staging of the fascination with black and brown bodies as “curiosities” in world expos and fairs, led many to detail the “uncivilized”

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birthing practices of indigenous women (Stevenson 1894; “Childbirth” 1900, 184). In an effort to subject these victims of colonial expansion to the dehumanizing gaze of science, and use their mythically painless births as a way to incentivize white middle-class women into physical exercise, anthropologists detailed every aspect of birth in these cultures. Hence, they stitched the grotesqueries of the reproductive organs and birth into a narrative of disease and deviance. Again, gynecology, like eugenic photography, sought to “expose what is normally hidden,” attempting to mark and categorize the visual excess of sexuality (Kapsalis 1997, 7). As an outspoken enemy of the shaming forces of prudery, Macfadden showcased white deviance in order to expose it to the light and truth of his own methods of transformation through self-management. Following his efforts to expose the “truth” of women’s wild, animalistic sexuality in order to guide it toward an appropriate reproductive outcome, Macfadden also promoted white childbirthing practices that embraced the grotesqueness of birth under the auspices of a “natural process,” and referred to the effectiveness of “savage” birth practices. In his 1901 publication The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood: How They are Lost and How They May Be Regained and Developed to the Highest Degree of Attainable Perfection Macfadden positioned himself as a benevolent advocate for women’s health and beauty, adopting attitudes of fierce derision, but also kind understanding for those willing to take his advice to heart. The book contained thirty-seven chapters, seven about the evils of the corset, six about exercise, three about bathing, and one titled “Childbirth Made Painless by Exercise.” Phrenologist Orson Fowler, a frequent contributor, also laid bare the eugenic impulses of Physical Culture and many other Macfadden publications. As a practitioner of the pseudo-science of phrenology, the racist practice of using cranial measurements in order to prove mental superiority in whites, Fowler’s bias here was clear. Macfadden made his central albeit brief argument: The agony usually borne by women in childbirth can in nearly every case, be largely avoided by beginning in the early stages of pregnancy to strengthen all the muscles of the abdominal region. A perfectly normal, strong, and well-sexed woman should have but little pain under such circumstances, and among the savages and vigorous lower classes the truth of this statement is very emphatically proven. (Macfadden Power 1901d, 205)

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In addition, he claimed vigorous exercise would also minimize the size of the pregnancy belly. He did allow that though labor should be “absolutely painless” there would be pain caused by bearing-down, but those pains were “induced merely to force the expulsion of the child” (ibid., 206). What followed, rather than a series of practical pieces of advice, were numerous vignettes and quotes from experts in midwifery and phrenology, and descriptions from both fiction and non-fiction extolling the miraculous births by non-white women, especially indigenous women Of the nine passages, six focus primarily on indigenous women. For example, one story told of a “squaw” traveling with Lewis and Clark stopping a mile behind the party to give birth, passing the party an hour and a half later with the newborn strapped to her back. Another quoted from Dr. Benjamin Rush, a prominent doctor, civic leader, and founder of US psychiatry, claiming indigenous women had shorter labors, enduring them alone in a cabin with no pain, and washing up both themselves and the baby when done, before returning to their work.20 The stories include assertions that “negresses,” the not-quite-white Irish, German farmers, and lower classes were equally blessed with painless births. However, the final passage from Fowler included a statement clearly meant to reassure Macfadden’s presumably white female readers by claiming that even though non-white women’s babies had smaller heads, “consequent on the deficient mentality of both parents,” this was offset by larger shoulders and chest. Thus, the easy labor could not be attributed to smaller (less intelligent) heads, as their shoulders apparently made up for the smaller head size. Again, the implication here reduced all these women’s capacity to a merely physical one. Macfadden’s insistent reliance on stories of indigenous women’s painless births and stories of their physical prowess demonstrated what Renato Rosaldo calls imperialist nostalgia (Rosaldo 1989). Growing up as he did in Missouri and Illinois Macfadden was also referring to his own roots when he mythologized indigenous people. As Rosaldo points out “imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (1989, 108). That yearning, Rosaldo argues, is most often for youth, as in Macfadden’s case, or a time when the ethnographer first encountered the usually non-white subjects of his or her research. Hence, Macfadden not only focused on indigenous communities, symbols of his youth in Missouri as well as his individualistic ethic, but also cited sources written

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decades before the publication of his advice book for women.21 Additionally, by citing the alleged birth experiences of indigenous women Macfadden conjured what indigenous historian Philip Deloria argues was a deep “American ambivalence” toward Native Americans in the late nineteenth century. Caught between the “instinct and freedom” white Americans felt indigenous communities represented, and the need to set up “noble savage” Indians as “oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self,” white Americans viewed indigenous people with a mixture of “desire and repulsion” (Deloria 1998, 3). The desire was often embodied in the myth of the “vanishing primitive,” an idea that Rosaldo argues missionaries, military officers, and ethnographers utilized in order to couch their colonizing actions as benevolent attempts to salvage aspects of the culture before it “disappeared” (1989, 107). Macfadden, on the other hand, ended his nostalgic vignettes by invoking the racism of eugenics and phrenology, by citing the mental deficiency of the women involved in such stories. Furthermore, Fowler’s descriptions did similar work as the photographs in Macfadden’s publications. He described the women by hyper-contextualizing their environments. Additionally, at this point in time in the US indigenous populations were popularly believed to be a “dying race.” Hence, citing their birthing practices was yet another form of salvage ethnography, as attested by numerous pieces in Physical Culture mourning the loss of the “Indian” way of life, and criticizing the “civilizing” of so-called savage races (Rosaldo 1989). Several articles in the magazine’s early years told stories of “natives” in their “natural” environments ruined by the influences of civilization, including cooked food and cotton clothing. Such savior tropes, however, continued to uphold the idea that these “noble savage” races were on the decline. Numerous articles chronicled the physical prowess and healthy lives of US indigenous cultures before the evils of civilizations intruded upon their natural lifestyle. “Why were our Indians in the West a much stronger people a hundred years ago than they are now, and what is the reason for their gradual disappearance?” asked one article in April 1903 (Keating 1903, 264).22 Though accompanying stories all heralded the subjects’ athletic feats, they spoke to the idea indigenous communities were from a past era, an idea cemented by the image’s caption of a group of people outside a teepee that read: “Indian Life in the Open in the Healthy Conditions which Prevailed in Days of Old” (De Rouge 1903, 182). While these descriptions in Macfadden publications pastoralized indigenous practices,

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the perceived threat to the wokring- and middle-class white population from an influx of Irish, Italian, and Southeastern European immigrants was much more imminent. Thus, much of the early twentieth-century eugenics’ rhetoric focused not on ethnicity or even nation, but “degeneracy” and “criminality” as hidden white characteristics, made all the more troublesome because they might not be readily visible. The alchemical process by which white women readers like Read might benefit from such references to these marvelous births involved surrogation. As pointed out in the introduction, Roach’s concept parallels Diamond’s idea of performance as a doing and a thing done in important ways (Diamond 1996). Similarly to Diamond’s exploration of performance, Roach looks to the contradictions in surrogate performance. These performances can signal rebirth and/or death, revolution and/or reentrenchment. It is the contradiction that fuels the perpetuation of performances of surrogation because, as Roach asserts, they make “publicly visible through symbolic action both the tangible existence of social boundaries and, at the same time, the contingency of those boundaries on fictions of identity” (1996, 39). Surrogation occurs, according to Roach, when “actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure …. survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates” (1996, 2). Throughout the book, Roach investigates a range of surrogate performances including funerals, plays, festivals, and legal proceedings. Though surrogation usually leads to replacement, Roach chooses the word to point to the perpetual instability of such replacements. They are never complete. Hence, for example, adamant assertions of whiteness in depictions of women considered to be octaroons in the late nineteenth century restaged and re-presented the blackness they were so keen to erase. In the case of racial surrogates, miming the pre-pregnancy, and prebirth practices of racialized others, especially indigenous women, implicitly questioned the fitness of white motherhood. In this case, indigenous women’s ability to effectively and efficiently give birth became construed as an ability lost by urban white women. That loss is then surrogated as a performative excess, and reinscribed as fit, white maternity. For example, by performing Macfadden’s exercises, white women readers could reclaim the fitness of indigenous women, viewed as part of the white women’s evolutionary past. However, Macfadden’s white women readers “raise the possibility of the replacement of the authors of representations by those

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whom they imagined into existence as their definitive opposites” through this racialized surrogation (1996, 6). Hence, the unseeable, unknowable excess was nonetheless implied in the doingness of the thing (the action of taking a photograph, or a quick painless childbirth, for example). The result of these methods was a paradoxical colonization of indigenous physical practices by white women, but also casting of indigenous women as better reproducers, throwing doubt on the fitness of the white women’s bodies. Imagined as an endlessly productive competition, these acts of reproductive surrogation laid the foundation for an economization of the social. In other words, this discourse imagined reproduction through the lens of a market economy driven by the free play of competing modes of (re)production characterized by the incitement toward efficiency (painless birth), improvement (better white babies), and accumulation (more white babies).

Conclusion: Racial Reproductivity Bernarr Macfadden hoped to rescue white women from the ills of an increasingly medicalized birthing process and restore birth as a “natural” process most clearly embodied in the lives of those races perceived as less evolved, but physically healthier. Additionally, by imagining the lifestyle of indigenous communities as disappearing, Macfadden placed white women at the pinnacle of a revival of a “strong, vital, splendid” white race (Macfadden 1930, vii). As English scholar Lisa Grunberger argues, for Macfadden “a strong athletic woman was a sign of a potential mother, an external mark distinguishing her capacity to breed children, deemed of far greater value (for both self and society) than her capacity to throw a football or lead a corporation” (1997, 128). The physical manifestation of that vitality revealed women as simultaneously attractive and fertile, rerouting women’s sexuality into the service of reproduction. In other words, as Grunberger points out, a “strong woman desired sex in order to have children. In this way Macfadden transformed sexual desire into maternal desire, diffusing the fears of female sexuality through this reproductive order” (1997, 129). Maternity tamed sexuality. The threat of the animalistic imagery of women’s sexuality Macfadden conjured gave way to their labor, providing the economic engine that drove white racial supremacy. The monumentalization of white women’s bodies surrogated those miraculous indigenous births.

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However, Macfadden used slightly different visual techniques to demonstrate proof of maternal fitness in photographs. Proof of white maternal fitness surfaced in the proliferation of “physical culture babies” throughout the magazines, but especially Women’s Physical Development and Beauty and Health. The conventions for this technique remained consistent for at least a decade long span beginning around 1900. Narratives in stories such as “A Physical Culture Mother” followed a strikingly similar path, but with some differences. The mother’s prenatal life (accompanied by photographs of a young white woman in the maternity fashions of the time) was recounted in vivid detail, “outdoor life, sports of every sort, rowing, fishing, cycling, archery, indoor gymnastics, long tramps over the hills with her dogs, these in the play-hours; a strenuous business-life in town during the work hours” (Allen 1900, 110). While the mother-to-be scaled her activities back slightly during pregnancy, she had not a “pain, a sign of faintness, morning sickness, or physical discomfort in all the dreaded nine months.” When her time came and she began her labor she “was in her office arranging affairs for the expected absence, did some gardening after her return home, read a novel and retired at midnight, the birth was at three-thirty, and at seven, after a refreshing slumber, she was propped on one elbow, writing letters to her friend” (Allen 1900, 113). Such passages, and there were many, surrogated both the rural and racial past into the strengthening of the white race, so the authors suggest. The manual labor and survival involved in the lives of indigenous mothers was replaced by the leisurely strolls and “play” of the white woman. In the previous example, the indigenous mother paused along a necessary migratory move to birth her child and return to the march. Here, it was the mother’s economic productivity that was paused, but only briefly, for what was almost framed as a dreamlike experience in the early morning. This maneuver compounded growing conceptions of the privatization of social responsibility through individual self-maintenance by suggesting that the true beneficiaries of women’s fitness and the true victims of their lack fitness were their innocent offspring. These performative practices in Macfadden’s physical culture publications unhinge Foucaultian concepts of the exercise of modern sovereignty through racism, in favor of the biopolitics of governmentality. In his 1976 lectures, Foucault asserted that while the power of sovereignty— for example, the divine right of kings—was increasingly on the retreat with the rise of biopower, and the power of death—a right reserved for the king in the past—manifested in State racism, its “basic mechanism of

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power” (Society 2003b, 254). He moved on to suggest that race provides the basis upon which “others” are viewed as “threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population” (ibid.). Consequently, the State can then justify either direct extinction through exercising the right to kill the threats—war, the death penalty, etc.— or by “exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on” (ibid., 256). The ultimate outcome of such tactics and strategies is, according to Foucault, “improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race … but also as a way of regenerating one’s own race” (ibid., 257). Viewed through this Foucaultian lens, the eugenics movement becomes the ultimate manifestation of biopower. As I discuss in more depth in the next chapter, Macfadden’s symbolic replacement of indigenous women with his white women readers mirrored the continued actual elimination of indigenous communities in the US. That said, the visual and performative excess produced by acts of surrogation in Macfadden publications complicated this erasure. Rather than suggesting that indigenous communities be eliminated, Macfadden’s physical culture practices propose that the racialized other—not merely a person or a body, but instead a series of physical movements and characteristics that, nonetheless, indicate particular moral qualities—be something that is put on (Lott 1993; Deloria 1998; McClintock 1995). This sort of cannibalism was prevalent in “discourses of self-mastery” such as physical culture and, as anthropologist and historian Ann Stoler points out, “productive of racial distinctions and clarified notions of ‘whiteness’” (1995, 8). In this imagining governmentality doesn’t strive to eliminate race, but to proliferate it as an incentive to engage in particular forms of practice. For example, rather than simply (re)presenting nonwhite races as lesser beings in need of civilizing by white women readers, Macfadden represented them as thriving, viable competitors to his women readers on the terrain of racial reproduction, persuading white women to reproduce more and better babies. Though physical culture certainly served a colonizing purpose, whether of women’s bodies and/or indigenous communities, the circle of surrogation never completely closed, leaving open possibilities for performing physical culture for different, less eugenic ends.

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Notes 1. Transcription by author. See “Jack LaLanne-Unhappy People.” 2. Three other biographies have been written about Macfadden since the Oursler and Wood biographies. See Hunt (1989), Ernst (1991), Adams (2009). Additionally, Macfadden’s third wife, Mary, wrote an unauthorized biography/memoir of her life with Macfadden after an ugly and grueling divorce process (1956). 3. The friend was Alexander Whitely, who eventually advertised the same exerciser in Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine. See Ernst (1991, 17). 4. See Di Leonardo’s (1998) prologue for a concise summary of the ways in which the Expo performed numerous Progressive Era racial tension. 5. The first volume was principally taken up with his own story The Athlete’s Conquest. See Ernst (1991, 12). 6. The 1901 volumes of Physical Culture listed the readership at the bottom of every cover. 7. John Coryell was listed as an assistant for Macfadden’s “The Strenuous Lover,” and he also wrote articles for the magazine. Oswald, perhaps because of the M.D. at the end of his name, appeared throughout Macfadden’s writings, and was a particularly outspokenly against vaccinations. See Physical Culture 5.2 (May 1901) for advertisements for books written by Oswald and Macfadden. 8. Upton Sinclair was actually a frequent contributor in the first decade of the twentieth century. Booker T. Washington also went through Sargent’ Summer Teacher Training course. 9. Macfadden constantly rearticulated his own sickly youth, and hereditary disadvantage as a way to plug the benefits of his practices. 10. He used these words to refer to a group of Congolese prisoners pictured in Sarvis (1910, 164). 11. I borrow not-quite-white from the title of Matt Wray’s book (2006) on the historical context of whiteness in the US, to whose work I will be returning shortly. 12. For an in-depth exploration of the use and deployment of character in the nineteenth century, and how it applied to physical culture practices see Salazar (2010, 112–56). 13. Macfadden’s story of his wife’s births directly contradicted Mary’s story in her autobiography. He claimed to insist (implying his wife was helpless) on the presence of a midwife at the birth of all of his children. See Macfadden (1930, viii). 14. The use of Physical Culture magazine (in part because of the nude and semi-nude men on its covers) by gay subcultures through the first half and into the second half of the twentieth century is well covered in scholarship including Johnson (2010), Mullins (1992), and Alvarez (2010).

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15. These are just the advertisements from Physical Culture Vol. 5 (Apr.– Sept. 1901) issues. Macfadden must have received complaints, because numerous issues in volume 6 address fake advertisers, and the advertising sections are greatly reduced. However, the main advertiser’s products were then pushed and planted within various “articles” in the magazine’s contents. 16. Physical Culture addressed a broad range of readers, but for a short time Macfadden specifically addressed women in his magazine Women’s Physical Development beginning in 1899, which became Beauty and Health in 1904. While the overall layout of the magazine was generally similar to Physical Culture, the types of images were vastly different. Gone were the images of collapsing femininity, and the nude and semi-nude muscle men. Instead, the women’s magazines were strewn with pictures of women exercising in domestic environments, portraits of famous stage actresses, recipes, and “physical culture” babies. 17. As Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype process often cited as the birth of photography, suggested in 1839, as quoted in Marien (2002, 23). 18. For a different take on the proliferation of BIPOC bodies in the pages of Macfadden publications, see Shannon Fitzpatrick’s work (2014). She argues convincingly that once these publications circulated outside the US their multilayered meanings encouraged readers of many nationalities and races to see themselves in the pages. 19. The book was subsequently revised and reprinted for the next two decades. 20. Another from a missionary claimed a chief’s wife went into labor, walked eleven miles to have the child at her brother’s residence, and walked back the next morning with her baby. 21. Most of the sources he used were written right around the middle of the nineteenth century. 22. The article concluded that the problem lay primarily in the fact that the Native American was forced to “forego his fish and venison in favor of white flour, bacon, tea, sugar, and coffee” and abandon open air tents in favor of “closed huts [which] brought disease” (1903, 266).

Bibliography Adams, Mark. 2009. Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet. New York: Harper Collins. Allen, Mrs. Way. 1900. “A Physical Culture Mother.” Physical Culture 1.3 (December): 110–113.

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Alvarez, Erick. 2010. Muscle Boys: Gay Gym Culture. New York: Haworth Press. Arnold, Matthew. 1875. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan. Bennett, Tony. 2005a. “Civic Laboratories.” Cultural Studies 19.5: 521–547. Bennett, Tony. 2005b. “Culture.” New Keywords: Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, 63–69. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Boydston, Jeanne. 1990. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Bröckling, Ulrich. 2011. “Human Economy, Human Capital: A Critique of Biopolitical Economy.” Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, eds. Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke, 247–268. New York: Routledge. Bröckling, Ulrich, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke, eds. 2011. “Introduction.” Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought Ser. New York: Routledge. Bruni, Frank. 2011. “The Ripped and the Righteous.” The New York Times. January 29. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/weekinreview/30bruni. html. Accessed November 5, 2017. Burnes, Captain Jas. C. 1901. “Life Sacrificed to Prudery.” Women’s Physical Development 2.3 (June): 28–32. Carpenter, Faedra. 2014. Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Ser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. “Childbirth with Savage and Civilized Women.” 1900. Massachusetts Medical Journal 20. Deloria, Philip J. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. De Rouge, Rev. E. 1903. “Our Indians of the West: Part 1.” Physical Culture 9.3 (March): 180–184. Diamond, Elin. 1996. “Introduction.” Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond. New York: Routledge. Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. During, Simon. 1997. “Popular Culture on a Global Scale: A Challenge for Cultural Studies?” Critical Inquiry 23.4 (Summer): 808–833. Edwards, Elizabeth and Christopher Morton, eds. 2009. “Introduction.” Photography, Anthropology, and History: Expanding the Frame. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Ernst, Robert. 1991. Weakness Is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

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Fabian, Ann. 1993. “Making a Commodity of Truth: Speculations on the Career of Bernarr Macfadden.” American Literary History 5.1 (Spring): 51–76. Fitzpatrick, Shannon. 2014. “Physical Culture’s World of Bodies: Transnational Participatory Pastiche and the Body Politics of America’s Globalized Mass Culture.” Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, eds. Emily S. Rosenberg and Shannon Fitzpatrick, 83– 108. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Hugh Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003a. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–9, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Masey. New York: Picador Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003b. “Society Must Defended”: Lectures at Collège de France, 1975–76, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador Press. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1914. “If I Were a Man.” Physical Culture 32 (1914): 31–34. Grunberger, Lisa. 1997. “Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture: Muscles, Morals and the Millennium.” Diss., The University of Chicago, UMI, Madison. “Harvard’s Interesting Exhibit at the World’s Fair.” 1893. New York Times. May 22. Hayden, Eric. 2011. “Remembering Fitness Legend Jack LaLanne.” The Atlantic. January 24. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2011/ 01/remembering-fitness-legend-jack-lalanne/342541/. Accessed July 18, 2020. Hunt, William R. 1989. Body Love: The Amazing Career of Bernarr Macfadden. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press. Hunter, Ian. 1992. “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 347–372. New York: Routledge. “Jack LaLanne Fitness Guru Dies at 96: Learn 10 of His Habits.” 2011. The Daily Beast. January 24. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jack-lalanne-fitnessguru-dies-at-96-learn-10-of-his-habits. Accessed July 18, 2020. “Jack LaLanne-Unhappy People.” 2011. Youtube. 1 January. Accessed July 18, 2020. Johnson, David K. 2010. “Physique Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture.” Journal of Social History 43.4 (July): 867–892. Kapsalis, Terri. 1997. Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keating, Gerald. 1903. “Our Indians in the West Part 2.” Physical Culture 9.4 (April): 263–266.

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Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. Biopolitics, Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century Ser, trans. Eric Frederick Trump. New York: New York University Press. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Race and American Culture Ser. New York: Oxford University Press. Lusk, William Thompson. 1893. The Science and Art of Midwifery. Rev. ed. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Macfadden, Bernarr. 1900. “Editorial.” Women’s Physical Development 1.1 (October): 25–28. Macfadden, Bernarr. 1901a. “Editorial.” Women’s Physical Development 1.5 (February): 225. Macfadden, Bernarr. 1901b. “Our Thin Subject.” Women’s Physical Development 2.1 (April): 33. Macfadden, Bernarr. 1901c. “Our Thin Subject.” Women’s Physical Development 2.3 (June): 98–99. Macfadden, Bernarr. 1901d. The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood: How They Are Lost and How They May Be Regained and Developed to the Highest Degree of Attainable Perfection. New York: Physical Culture Publishing Company. Macfadden, Bernarr. 1910. “Is Separation of the Sexes Advisable?” Physical Culture 23.3 (March): 229–234. Macfadden, Bernarr. 1912. MacFadden’s Encyclopedia of Physical Culture. 1st ed., Vol. 5. New York City: Physical Culture Publishing Company. Macfadden, Bernarr. 1930. Preparing for Motherhood: A Guide for the Expectant Mother to Her Care and Training. New York: Macfadden Book Co. Macfadden, Mary. 1956. Dumb-Bells and Carrot Strips: The Story of Bernarr Macfadden. London: Victor Gollancz. Marien, Mary Warner. 2002. Photography: A Cultural History. London: Laurence King. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Mullins, Greg. 1992. “Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of Disavowal in Physical Culture.” Discourse 15.1 (Fall): 27–48. Oursler, Fulton. 1929. The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden. New York: Lewis Copeland Company. Physical Culture. 1899a. 1.2 (April). Physical Culture. 1899b. 1.3 (May). Physical Culture. 1901a. 5.4 (July). Physical Culture. 1901b. 5.6 (September). Poole, Deborah. 2005. “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 59–79. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. The Social Foundation of Aesthetic Forms Ser, ed. Jonathan Arac. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations: Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory 26 (Spring): 107–122. Rydell, Robert. 1984. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rydell, Robert. 1993. The World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Salazar, James B. 2010. Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America. New York: New York University Press. Sarvis, Guy Walter. 1910. “Vegetarianism in Central Africa.” Physical Culture 23.2: 162–166. Schulman, Max. 2015. “Beaten, Battered, and Brawny: American Variety Entertainers and the Working Class Body.” Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor, eds. Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth, 95–108. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Sinclair, Upton, 1910a. “Prince Hagen: A Phantasy.” Physical Culture 23.1 (January): 62–70. Sinclair, Upton, 1910b. “The Raw Food Table.” Physical Culture 23.1 (January): 33–36. Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. 1894. “The Sia.” The Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1889–1890. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Stockham, Alice Bunker. 1887. Tokology: A Book for Every Woman. Rev. ed. Chicago: Sanitary Publishing Company. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. The Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tape, F.H. 1902. “Physical Development of Women in the Far East.” Women’s Physical Development 4.2 (May): 67–69. Vaidyanathan, Rajini. 2011. “‘Godfather of Fitness’ Jack LaLanne’s legacy.” BBC News. January 25. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-12272311. Accessed July 18, 2020. Warren, John T. 2001. “Doing Whiteness: On the Performative Dimensions of Race in the Classroom.” Communication Education 50.2 (April): 91–108. Washington, Booker T. 1910. “Keeping Tuskegee Students in Physical Repair.” Physical Culture 23.3 (March): 221–225. Wertz, Richard W. and Dorothy C. Wertz. 1989. Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America. Expanded ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. London: Oxford University Press. Wood, Clement. 1929. Bernarr Macfadden: A Study in Success. New York: Lewis Copeland Company. Wray, Matt. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Exercise for Assimilation: Physical Culture for Indigenous Girls and Women

Wars are no longer waged in the name of the sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. (Foucault 1976, 137) One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. (Foucault 1976, 138)

These two quotes from Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1 have been playing over and over in my mind recently as I grapple with the way that scenes of gut-wrenching brutality play out alongside scenes of soul quenching humanity. In the midst of what seems to me to be the new norm of paradoxicality of our US culture, Foucault’s quotes haunt my privileged outrage with reminders of biopower’s long history of bedazzled massacres. In this last section of History of Sexuality, Foucault introduced his idea of biopower in order to describe how governments/regimes/states beginning in the seventeenth century began to shift their operations of power to target individual bodies and populations as bodies. In other words, rather than wielding their divine right to kill or spare their subjects, modern governors wage battles on other populations in order to protect their own subjects from harm.1 The evolution © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2_6

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of these kinds of biopower led us to the wars and genocides of the twentieth century, atrocities committed in order to protect a certain way of life. That “way of life” is dispersed as preferable and normal through institutions and disciplines within that culture. As we contemplate how we got here (as of the moment of this writing in the midst of a pandemic and cultural uprising in 2020) which I hear daily on my newsfeeds, from my students, and colleagues, I think it’s important that we consider not just how massacres have become vital. I think it’s especially important to consider not just the massacres that happen in one event, like say the between 200 and 300 Lakota men, women, and children massacred by US troops in 1890 at Wounded Knee, but the steady drip of killings that occur over years through biopolitical institutions like slavery, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and government-run boarding schools for indigenous children in the Progressive Era. It is much more difficult to maintain attention and outrage to the slow, steady drip of injustice inflicted through institutions built on the premise of disallowing life for one population in order to protect a way of living for another population, especially when one benefits from the arrangement. This chapter takes up this point of fostering or disallowing life in order to suggest that once physical culture became a more concrete and consolidated practice in the US after the 1889 Conference on Physical Training at MIT, the whiteness of physical culture became increasingly fixed as an outcome and an assumption. In other words, not only did much physical culture discourse assume the whiteness of its practitioners, but it also worked to manufacture whiteness as a behavioral outcome of its practice, as suggested by the previous chapter, while simultaneously touting the alleged egalitarian aims of such practices. This chapter asks how these philosophies bent on creating superior white bodies shifted when deployed (or prevented from being deployed) within indigenous populations. The three sites that occupy this chapter are intertwined in the chronological history of both the YWCA and the history of physical culture programs for groups. I look at three sites across a span of about 50 years in order to demonstrate the way that discourse, practice, and programming shifted over time. While these programs began driven by colonial impulses and later eugenic impulses, they were ultimately refashioned and redeployed by women in indigenous communities in order to affect community change. What these sites show is how the means of disseminating physical culture practices might be redirected toward different ends. What surfaces in the

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analysis of this material is a relegation of the physical strength and wellbeing of indigenous women to the background. The consequences of this color line in physical culture and sports for women continue to reverberate in our culture today. Yet, the disruptive redeployment of these methods for different ends, particularly in terms of community building, demonstrates how the white supremacist roots of physical culture might be troubled, a topic I turn to in the conclusion. One of the most revealing sites to look for answers is again the YWCA in part because they emphasized the physical aspect of their mission from the beginning. The object statements for the white YWCAs in the late nineteenth century placed physical well-being first: “The object of this Association shall be the physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual condition of young women” (“Constitution” 1894). It was that aspect of its identity that shifted or became controversial outside of contexts involving white women members. Another reason the YWCA provides insight into this question is because it was one of the first social welfare organizations to advocate for work beyond simply Christian proseltyzing with non-white groups. The History section of the YWCA’s current website highlights the organization as being “at the forefront of most critical social movements for more than 160 years—from women’s empowerment and civil rights, to affordable housing and pay equity, to violence prevention and health care.” Its timeline marks the opening of the first African American association in 1889 in Dayton, Ohio and the first YWCA for women in 1890 (“History”). As I will show in this chapter, much of this work assumed white managed, white lead, white driven work. In other words, while the YWCA was eager to engage with girls and women, it was only willing to do so from the same benevolent white paternalist (or in this case maternalist) stance as its brother the YMCA. The result was a series of missteps and failures in terms of philosophy, but also physical culture, that highlighted how women’s physical culture in the US was really built by, for, about, and near white middle-class women. I’d like to frame this chapter through three scenes. Scene 1: In 1883, a Presbyterian missionary in charge of the Odanah Mission School in Wisconsin on an Ojibwe reservation expressed deep concern about the lack of engagement from his male pupils and their families. Writing home to a friend he suggested, “The girls will need training more than the boys and they will wield a greater influence in the future. If we get the girls we get the race.” What followed were many rather unsuccessful attempts to incorporate physical culture into the schooling at government-run

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Native schools. Scene 2: In the summer of 1904 at the Model Indian School on the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, eleven young women from the Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian Boarding School prepared their costumes for the evening performance. They opened their section of the exhibition probably dressed in their flowing white gowns as several of the young women played a short orchestral concert. After short interval acts by the school’s comedian, they returned wearing bloomers and blouses for barbell exercises and club swinging routines. They then changed into buckskin dresses made for them specifically for the World’s Fair and performed as a chorus and through pantomime the Famine section of The Song of Hiawatha. As the concert concluded with more music, the young women changed once again into their basketball uniforms, with and F and S embroidered into the collars, and moved out onto the plaza for an exhibition game. Hundreds gathered to watch the women designated as the World Basketball Champions after they had routed several high school and college women’s teams. Scene 3: After spending several years as a YWCA physical director at the Haskell Institute for girls and women, Ella Deloria, a Native bilingual writer and anthropologist raised on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, sat down in 1923 to write an impassioned and frustrated plea for organized and regular physical culture for girls and women in all government-run Native boarding schools. Despite the lurking mythic figure of the physically virile Indian woman, Deloria decried the crowded schools, lack of health care, and discounting of the mental wellbeing of the school’s charges. Physical culture, she suggested, could be the key to physical and moral uplift that would “carry over into the life of the race” (Deloria 1924, 68). I choose these three scenes because combined they tell the story of physical culture for indigenous women and girls in the US at a time when physical culturists mobilized their physical superiority to incite young white women to engage in physical culture. First, these sites demonstrate one of the central arguments in this book that physical culture in the Progressive Era played a key role in the universalization of whiteness. At these sites and others, whiteness worked to appear to foster life in one arena, in order to disallow it in another. At these sites that “disallowal” meant actual deaths at these schools, but also the social death of reservation communities. Second, that physical culture circulated as a spectacular popular performance form with its own conventions and production

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design, and could, therefore, be easily and readily replicated, as seen at the Model Indian School. Consequently, at least in this particular case, one could mount a physical culture exhibition without necessarily having an actual physical culture class that the performance represented. Ultimately, the lack of sustained physical culture programs combined with the curriculum in the government schools actually created an environment for the successful redeployment of physical culture within Native communities driven largely by indigenous women physical directors even on a sporadic basis. The failure of white colonial physical culture signaled the beginning community-driven physical culture, a model I speak to in the conclusion.

Scene 1: Education for Extinction …..is the name of historian David Wallace Adams’ book where he argues that government-run boarding schools at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century were essentially the final battlefield in the so-called Indian Wars (1995). Beginning in 1877, the federal government began appropriating funds to support off-reservation boarding schools for indigenous youth. Two years later General Richard Henry Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania (Adams 56). In 1892 at a conference on charities and correctional facilities, Pratt spoke to the necessity of compulsory education for Indians infamously stating, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” (Pratt 1892, 46). During the round up, children as young as three were forced from their homes, across great distances into school environments bent on their assimilation and the erasure of their tribal culture. Strict policies erased all exterior traces of tribal connection; employees cut boys’ hair, issued students new clothes, and forbade using tribal languages (Child 1998, 30–1). Women students were forced to wear heavy bloomers, high boots, chaste collars, and corsets as late as 1914, long after the corset had gone out of favor elsewhere (Vuˇckovi´c 2008, 70). In 1898, the US government began enforcing compulsory school attendance for indigenous children. The influx of students meant increased funding, but also included quotas that encouraged over-crowding and led to disease. Historian Brenda Child

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suggests that at one point, nearly half the boarding school population was stricken with trachoma, a contagious and painful eye disease. Sick children were sometimes sent home leading to outbreaks on reservations (Child 1998, 57–8).2 It’s clear that most schools were in a constant health crisis and what superintendents called physical culture was required in order to keep the students healthy enough. Despite the YWCA’s emphasis on physical aims in its late nineteenthcentury constitutions, the YWCA programs that took root in these schools beginning in 1889 did not include physical culture. The YWCA constitution at Pierre Indian Industrial School in 1909 aimed to develop “Christian character in its intentions, and the prosecution of active Christian work particularly among the young women of the institution” (“YWCA Constitution” 1909). Even by 1930, the overarching purpose of the work of the YWCA was “associating Indian girls and women with each other and with other girls and women in fellowship for the development of personality in accord with a Christian character ideal” (“Work of the National Y.W.C.A.” 1930). The four pronged approach from the white YWCAs of improving the “physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual condition” of girls and women gave way to a focus on the spiritual and social. The physical focus disappeared completely. Native women’s bodies and selves occupied a heavily contested space in the racial ideologies of the US social imaginary in the Progressive Era. The drive to educate indigenous communities reflected not just a colonial impulse to conquer both their bodies and souls, but also a shift in white perceptions of the Indian. Early efforts to “educate” tribes resulted in reservation missionaries at a loss for why their mission schools, which concentrated on teaching boys and men, were having little effect on the conversion of the community as a whole. “The girls will need the training more than the boys and they will wield a greater influence in the future. If we get the girls, we get the race,” remarked Isaac Baird a missionary at the Odanah mission in Wisconsin (Qtd. in Devens 1992, 3). Such statements placed much faith in Native women’s influence in their tribal communities as purveyors of white Christian culture.3 Assertions like these also marked the beginning of a shift by the dominant white culture from seeing indigenous communities as violent to perceiving them as successfully pacified, a shift solidified by the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. As it dawned on US colonizers that indigenous populations had been effectively conquered, but also not eradicated, an intermediate ideology

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of pacification intervened. As scholar Philip Deloria points out, “pacification rearticulated the vanishing-Indian ideology of the mid-nineteenth century, which erased white acts of dispossession and generously mourned the fact that Indians were disappearing naturally” suggesting instead “Indians might not vanish, but they would become invisible, as the very characteristic that defined them—the potential for violence—was eradicated” (2004, 50). Kill the Indian to save the man. The primary mechanism for this transition was government-run boarding schools for indigenous youth. The schools’ emphases on soul and mind changing work over physical cultivation appeared throughout reports. In the report from 1901 by William M. Peterson from the Pine Ridge Institute he suggested, “What we want is to keep the body in such condition that the brain can do its best work … Let us, then, as teachers keep in mind that our aim is a sound body that a sound mind may inhabit it” (1901, 99). Similarly, in the 1900 report in a section about “The Field Matron”—white middleclass women hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to oversee conversion of the students—Mrs. Lida W. Quimby spoke about the matron’s purpose The matron goes out to her work strong in here faith that education will cure all ills of a degenerate race, but experience teaches that neither education nor culture regenerates a man. The soul must be awakened, the desire must be created, and education, will power, and physical health are but helps in the work. (1900, 468)

Her words reflected the hypocrisy of the self-congratulatory rhetoric of much government-based work with tribes that stressed how the government would save the Indian through education while demeaning the race in the same breath. Again, similar to MacKaye, Sargent, and Macfadden, educators widely perpetuated a belief that education could only take students of color and other ethnicities so far. Their “nature” prevented the kinds of transformations promised to white students. Native students in these off-reservation boarding schools were not only being converted by the government to Christianity they were also being inculcated in white culture, a maneuver viewed as key by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in order to secure tribal buy-in on assimilation policies. Furthermore, as a field matron, Quimby served as a benevolent maternal assimilator. As white women ascended to civic-housekeeping positions within cities, the Bureau of Indian Affairs mobilized this new moral force to their benefit. The

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Bureau of Indian Affairs deployed field matrons into reservation communities from 1890 to 1938 to teach mostly indigenous women how to run their households and communities according to white Western precepts. As historian Jane E. Simonsen suggests, field matrons instructed indigenous women “in the ways of white women” (2002, 90). The emphasis that Beard placed on influencing indigenous women solidified into official government policy. In addition, students’ involvement in physical culture was clearly seen as instrumental to their docility and submission. Boarding school directors, teachers, and superintendents imported many exercises from white schools and gymnasiums into their schools. They, of course, assumed that physical culture did not exist within the various tribes previously. Traditional tribal games and exercises were banned in the schools. The physical culture programs, however, were by no means as systematic nor as scaffolded as the programs meant for white women and girls. Physical education in the government-run “Indian schools” was spotty at best. Schools rarely hired physical directors and thus relied on their regular teachers to include physical culture as part of the regular curriculum. For instance, in all the Reports of the Superintendent of Indian Schools between 1898 and 1904, a publication based on an annual conference, physical culture received little more than a passing mention. At a roundtable for teachers in 1898 participants resolved that, “five to ten minutes every session should be given to breathing exercises, and systematic drill, during which the windows should be open” (“Teacher’s Section” 1898, 34). Similarly, Peterson’s report from 1901 stressed the need for breathing exercises and added the need for exercises to correct “stoop shoulder” saying, “We should give the pupils such exercises as will strengthen the muscles of the shoulders and back, so that they may be able to hold themselves erect and without any sense of fatigue” (1901, 99). Consequently, when the YWCA began work in these schools, they dropped several of their core principles from their mission. Their muscular Christian mission to enhance the “physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual condition of young women” transformed with its entrance into the Indian schools in 1892 to develop “Christian character in its intentions, and the prosecution of active Christian work particularly among the young women of the institution” (“Constitution” 1894; “YWCA Constitution” 1909). The physical, social, and intellectual pursuits of the white associations were dropped completely in the Indian school missions.

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Government-run indigenous boarding schools desperately needed the healthy benefits physical culture seemed to promise. Native girls and women were denied the reproductive legibility afforded their white peers because their service, if conceived of in muscular Christian terms, was as service workers to white families. For example, an anonymous piece in a section of the Minneapolis Tribune in 1885 called, “A Quiet Week” reported on the opening of a women’s gymnasium in Boston, an event novel enough at that time to garner raised eyebrows. The author debated the merits of physical culture for women saying, “Of course the broom and washtub might furnish the same development; but it would be a sad day for our native and imported help when all the mistresses and their daughters should take to doing their own work for the cultivation of correct physical proportions” (“A Quiet Week” 1885, 11). Physical culture relied on white middle-class leisure time and money, and lower-class servitude to thrive. Indigenous boarding schools relied not only on the women and girls’ labor to help maintain schools, but pitched their laboring bodies as docile servants in white homes and businesses. For example, in an odd but completely coincidental similarity to Mayhew’s Outing Clubs, Richard Pratt created the Outing Program at the Carlisle Indian School where students spent their summers living with and working for white families (Trennert 1983). In a world and workforce transformed by technology, it seemed the boarding school curriculum was training students to live and work in a previous century. The sad reality was that most children in the schools were malnourished and tight budgets meant little medical care. The early years of Westernized education for Native women and girls bear some similarities and striking differences from their white counterparts. The emphasis on domesticity, nurturing, and hygiene are similar. However, as demonstrated above, the focus on the physical seemed a merely practical avenue to industry and domesticity. Physical culture would increase their value as service workers. Furthermore, the stated aims and desires for physical culture for indigenous women and girls rarely went beyond the superficial level, occasional marching and drills. The dearth of actual physical culture programming did not prevent Indian Affairs advocates from demanding performances of physical culture by indigenous girls on the largest stage given to them to make their plea for more public support: the 1904 World’s Fair.

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Scene 2: Spectacle for Progressive Ends On an unseasonably warm afternoon in October 1904 in St. Louis during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, fairgoers packed into an assembly hall in the Model Indian School, positioned high on a hill in Forest Park, to see young girls going through a series of Delsarte poses with scarves and umbrellas, followed by young women performing club swinging and barbell exercises (Parezo and Fowler 2007, 151). Later that evening, a huge crowd, held back by fair security, gathered on the plaza outside the school to watch the second in what was to be a three game basketball series between the Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian School women’s team and the reigning regional champion Missouri All-Stars (Peavy and Smith 2008 “Leaving,” 243). The Fort Shaw squad played numerous exhibition games on their trip down from Montana, including touring to Belleville, Missouri with the fair’s Indian Band, and, according to Belleville’s local paper, several “strange people from other Fair attractions” (“Belleville Awaits” 1904, 16). After the games, the basketball players would don traditional dress and play their musical instruments for the crowd. Consequently, spectators for the first game were somewhat surprised when the “dusky maidens” trounced their local team 24-2 (“Indian Girls Expert” 1904, 10; “Indian Girls Win” 1904, 12). The outcome of the second game that October evening on the fairgrounds had a similar outcome with the All-Stars losing again 17-6 (“Indian Girls Champions” 1904). After such thorough routes, the All-Stars conceded and never played the third game. At first glance, this performance has much in common with the descriptions of the performance given by Abby Mayhew’s classes and the Minneapolis YWCA. Both demonstrated the widespread practice of physical culture for women at the turn of the century. Both also highlighted the simultaneous spectacularity and docility of women’s bodies in physical culture performances in front of Progressive Era audiences. Both also challenged that audience’s expectations of femininity and race; surprised delight that Mayhew’s middle-class white students could exercise with such “ease and grace,” and shock that a team of five indigenous women from Montana could best the white urban team from St. Louis. On a deeper level, both were also performances of whiteness, however the meaning and message about that whiteness differed dramatically. Ultimately, while the means seemed similar, both performances exemplified different ends. While, as I argued in chapter four, the performances at

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the YWCA demonstrated how physical culture shaped white middle-class women to be fit vessels for healthy babies, the performances at the World’s Fair demonstrated how physical culture shaped indigenous women’s souls in order to transform their bodies into a subservient, assimilable class. The ultimate outcome of physical culture performances like these was a racially bifurcated system of physical culture and athletics. White middle-class women, according to physical culturists, needed to engage in physical culture and avoid strenuous, competitive athletics in order to build and serve the nuclear family and support the economic system of white male wage earners through their invisible and unpaid labor. Indigenous women, according to their overseers in the boarding schools, needed physical culture to demonstrate their usefulness and submissiveness for their white audiences. The athletes and performers themselves, however, perturbed these ideologies in a variety of ways. Up to this point, I’ve really constructed physical culture for women and girls as purely a performance of an unfulfilled promise of assimilation. The physical culture performances at the fair communicated to the audience that these young women and girls had assimilated by adopting and deploying the docile and disciplined practices that white girls and women had been showcasing through physical culture performances. Organizers hoped that making an argument for the assimilability of indigenous peoples through the Model Indian School would help convince the majority white fair-going public that Indians were worth saving. For the Model Indian School’s organizer S.M. McGowan, the hoped-for economic boon of such a performance would be a public investment in and visibility for the government schools. At the same time the practices within these schools contributed to the poor physical health of the students. In addition, the habits and behaviors they made the students practice prevented both their assimilation within the dominant white culture and their reincorporation into their tribal communities. As a result, their failure to adequately perform whiteness allowed officials to shrug and shake their heads about the inability of Native cultures to be “good enough” to perform up to the white standard. They simultaneously facilitated the detachment from their tribal communities. It’s important to contextualize the Fort Shaw basketball team’s performance beyond the novelty with which it is usually mentioned. Nationally, this performance came at a time of transition in terms of the ways the government and popular culture positioned the Indian. As historian Philip Deloria suggests, the dominant white culture saw Indians less as violent,

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characteristic of representations from earlier in the nineteenth century, and increasingly perceived them as successfully pacified. This shift can also be traced in performance, particularly in the waning popularity of the Wild West shows and their reenactments of Indian battles. Instead, as happened at the Model Indian School, Geronimo, the Apache warrior, occupied his own booth where, at age 74, he would make bows and arrows for fairgoers and sign photographs of himself, the ultimate symbol of the defeat and pacification of all the tribes. The Model Indian School at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known at the St. Louis World’s Fair, served to stage this transformation right in front of the white spectators’ eyes. The school itself, as anthropologists Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler point out, sat at the intersection of two men’s conceptions of race at the time. For William McGee, the director of the Anthropology exhibit at the fair and deemed by a local newspaper as “the overlord of the savage world” booths like Geronimo’s served as proof to the natural superiority of the white race (Parezo and Fowler 2007). The more representations of people as relics of the past, the more the mostly white fairgoers saw their own present and future reflected in the arts and science exhibits, and the invisibilization of whiteness in progress. However, S.M. McGowan, the superintendent for the Model Indian School, saw his students as a crucial alternative narrative to that tale of racial progress and extinction; assimilation and saalvation were possible. These opposing viewpoints played out in various performances throughout the geography of the fair. The event that encapsulated McGee’s views on racial hierarchies and progress was Anthropology Days, or race Olympics. William McGee, head of the anthropology department under which the Model Indian School fell, believed the survival of Native peoples rest in their ability to adapt and assimilate into modernity. McGowan, on the other hand, who was in charge of the Indian School itself, saw it as an opportunity to showcase the work in education happening in the government-run schools. Throughout the exhibits, McGee hoped to create opportunities for spectators to view all these races (including their own whiteness) comparatively to see the truth of human advancement for themselves. To accomplish this task, he collaborated with the department of Physical Culture, which was hosting the Olympic Games as part of the fair. To create further spectacle, the two departments staged Anthropology Days where participants from the ethnological exhibits would compete against one another in various athletic events. What actually happened was a day

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of confusion and disinterestedness on the part of most of the participants, some of whom had never used some of the necessary props before, like a javelin or a tug-of-war rope. Many others, perplexed by the seriousness with which the organizers took such feats, went through the motions of the games with little effort or care. Despite what appeared to be a failed event, McGee insisted the participants’ lackluster performances proved them to be less civilized than their white counterparts. Consequently, McGee saw little real-world meaning in the Model Indian School. He had serious doubts about the government’s ability and capacity to educate Native people. He did, however, find the pupils to be a convenient middle step in the racial progression toward the white civilization staged in the arts and sciences buildings (Brownell 2008). Anthropology Days further complicated the racial hierarchies within which the Model Indian School sat. McGowan, on the other hand, saw the Model Indian School as an important corrective to what he believed to be the stereotypical and exploitative depictions of Indians on the Pike, this fair’s version of the midway where all the concessions, rides, games, and ethnological exhibits were located. “At the outset,” said McGowan in a report to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, his “office set its face strongly against any exhibit which, with spectacular shows of dances, sham battles, etc., would resemble a Wild West show…such shows are a detriment to the individual Indians who take part in them, retard Indian civilization generally, are inconsistent with the announced policy of the Department, and chiefly gratify idle curiosity and pander to a desire for sensationalism” (1904, 54). To contrast what he called these “primitive portrayals” McGowan brought 150 pupils to live on the fairgrounds in a Model Indian School. Students engaged in activities that they would have (supposedly) in their government boarding schools including a furniture manufacturing and printmaking for the boys, and a working kitchen, dining room and laundry attended by the girl students. Again, the emphasis here highlighted the industrial and domestic capacities of indigenous students. They also staged a typical school day in mock classrooms—governmentrun schools all had students half days at academics and the other half day at industry. In the evenings the pupils would entertain fairgoers with singing and instrumental performances, recitations, and physical culture performances. For McGowan the 150 students from government-run boarding schools across the West provided the best argument he could muster for the public to continue supporting these schools as public

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opinion was quite divided on whether or not these schools did any good at all. Despite McGowan’s claims that the Fort Shaw girls and their team were representative of work in the schools, they were something of an anomaly. From my research, Fort Shaw was one of two government-run boarding schools that employed a physical director, and the only one with a woman physical director at the time. Furthermore, she was not a white transplant like the field matrons. Josephine Langley, a Piegan from Montana’s Blackfeet Reservation, went to school at Fort Shaw before spending a year at the Carlisle Indian School with Pratt and the only other established physical culture program. She returned to Fort Shaw bringing both basketball and organized physical culture classes. Her team, comprised of young women from four different tribes, quickly became a local novelty in Montana. The superintendent of Fort Shaw, Fred Campbell, saw in the team a potential to garner not only more public support for the school, but also a way to raise money for the school. The team toured Montana and played scrimmages against other college teams, whom they soundly whallopped, in the years leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair (Peavy and Smith Full-Court 2008). In an effort to cover the team’s travel expenses, Campbell booked them to do exhibitions all along the route to St. Louis. The articles leading up to the 1904 Fort Shaw basketball series demonstrated excitement at the novelty of the performance. One article from the Anaconda Standard in Montana remarked with surprise how the women were receiving more attention for their basketball playing skills than for their music. As such, the author spends most of the article focusing on the women’s musical skills that will “show the gaping multitudes that the government is doing something worthwhile for its wards up in Montana” (“Fort Shaw at the Fair” 1904, 6). The reporter then lists the women’s names (Genie Butch, Belle Johnson, Nettie Wirth, Minnie Burton, Emma Rose Sansaver, Josephine Langley, Delia Gebeau) along with “a splendid collection of beadwork, lace collars and handkerchiefs and children’s dresses and jackets” as Fort Shaw’s contributions to the fair (Ibid.). Media coverage leading up to both their first and second games was widespread, but once they trounced their main opponent at the fair, the Missouri All-Stars, for the second time, coverage ceased. The St. Louis Dispatch did not even print a follow-up article after hyping up the second game prior to its being played. Similarly, the team is left out of all the summaries and retrospectives of the fair. They were neither the image of the aging nostalgic,

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defeated warrior embodied in Geronimo, nor the docile and disciplined student workers seen in the Model Indian School. It seemed as though those directing their performance recognized this dissonance and chose to then cast them as every possible representation available: disciplined and controlled physical culture pupils, graceful and angelic elocutionists, noble and tragic savages, and ruthless, dominant opponents on the court. The excess of representational possibilities resulted in a seeming inability on the part of fair organizers to know where on the carefully curated racial hierarchy to place them, and instead opted to erase them entirely. Despite the displays of allegedly representative examples of physical culture from government-run boarding schools for indigenous students, the performance at the fair clearly neither produced more physical culture programs in the schools nor the hoped for massive public support and funding that would follow. The Fort Shaw School closed six years later due to low attendance. All boarding schools continued to be overcrowded and disease stricken, not to mention rife with student suicides and repeated escapes. The painful irony of Baird’s statement from a half century earlier is that the boarding schools broke the very lines of kinship, especially among women, that the missionaries and government had hoped to capitalize on in their conversion conquest. As historian Carol Devens points out, both missionary and government schools took girls away during a time most crucial to their fostering by women elders. Many young women returned to their reservations after schooling as strangers to the very communities superintendents and teachers hoped they could influence. In the face of these tensions, many women turned to white husbands, as several of the women from the Fort Shaw team did. Others, like Minnie Burton, a Shoshone, returned to her home on the Idaho Lemhi Reservation and actively erased her time in the boarding schools. For Minnie this meant forgetting the basketball team and her experience at the fair in order to reconnect with her family and community (Peavy and Smith Full-Court Quest 2008).

Scene 3: Physical Culture by the Community, for the Community Fifteen years after the spectacular performance at the World’s Fair, anthropologist and Lakota Ella Deloria saw in physical culture a tonic to repair her community destroyed by the assimilationist practices of the boarding schools. Deloria saw in physical culture, then, not a spectacle to be sold

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to curry public favor for the, by then, failed Indian boarding school system, but instead as a way to repair and solidify female kinship bonds. For Deloria, the government and missionaries had focused so thoroughly on the spiritual that the social life of communities on reservations had collapsed. Recreation would begin to teach “young people to enjoy each other’s company” in healthy, sustainable ways and bring strategic knowledge about how to adapt and survive the ravages wrought by white industrialized culture to their mothers and grandmothers (Deloria 1924, 68). The headmaster of the Haskell Institute for Native Americans in Kansas requested Deloria serve as physical director for a fledgling program put together by the school’s staff. At the behest of both the staff and the National Board of the YWCA, she published an argument for the work in 1924 in The Southern Workman. Deloria opened with an overview of the poor state of physical health of most indigenous women and girls despite the common assumption that Native women were naturally strong. She followed this overview with a sharp critique not only of the underfunded and overcrowded conditions in the government-run schools, but also a more subtle critique of the way reservations were affecting girls’ mental and physical health overall. While Deloria’s rhetoric echoed much of the rhetoric used a few decades earlier by the YWCA and others in advocating for physical culture for white girls and women in public schools and colleges, the ends differed dramatically. If Mayhew argued the ultimate outcome of physical culture for women lay in making “the mothers of the race strong,” the good of physical culture for Native girls and women seemed to lay in the pupil’s ability to take those practices home to improve the overall health and cleanliness of her mothers and grandmothers. Making physical culture an “integral part of the mental and spiritual training of Indian girls,” Deloria argued, “would carry over into the life of the race,” but not through reproduction, rather through the dissemination of the practices through the family networks within the reservation (1924, 68). As Deloria implored the Indian girl needed physical culture “not only to improve herself, but also to take back home to her people the principles of building and conserving health” (1924, 64). At no point are her future children or her position as a future “mother of the race” mentioned in Deloria’s piece. Despite Deloria’s plea, there is no evidence that physical culture ever became part of the YWCA mission in the Indian schools. Instead, the Bureau of Indian Affairs seems to have effectively ended those efforts.

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The YWCA’s history of their work within the government-run schools suggests Deloria’s ideas “met strong resistance” from the Bureau of Indian Affairs who “as a rule believe a woman’s work is in the home, and if she needs more exercise she can do more housework” (“A Brief History”). This philosophy was reflected in most government sponsored school curriculum at the time. As Deloria explains, indigenous girls spent half the day in “academics” which included classes mainly in domestic arts, and the other half of the day as housekeepers for the facility itself. What’s important to note here is the refusal by the government to fund these programs for women and girls in the schools. Sports programs for boys and young men thrived in these schools, and in some cases dominated college sports for some time. These young women and girls also certainly may have been practicing physical culture and engaging in sports on their own terms, as it appears Josephine Langley did at Fort Shaw for a brief time. However, physical culture for white women in colleges and universities had been mandatory since at least the 1890s and seen as a crucial component of upping white births rates and reducing maternal and infant mortality rates. So while the schools and the rhetoric of folks such as McGowan seemed to express empathy and passion for fostering the life of girls and women, the practices employed by the schools and their government overseers ultimately failed. Instead, the schools splintered social and communal networks and, as Deloria argued, restricted access to a practice that might lend some sense of autonomy, social connection, and strength to reservation communities; a disallowal and disavowal of the life of girls and women.

Conclusion: Challenging Whiteness At least that’s the story from the government and institutional side. The story from the Haskell students is quite different. As race, gender, and sexuality scholar Beth Eby points out in her recent dissertation, indigenous students redeployed many of the teachings provided by the government-run schools. The result, Eby argues, is that the “Native women who attended Haskell embodied multiple, and at times competing, femininities as a means to assert their indigenous sovereignty and subtlely resist colonial expectations surrounding Native womanhood” (2019, 11). Part of that resistance came through the embrace of teachers, like Deloria, who students viewed as advocates and allies because of their indigenous identity. As Eby goes on to show, Deloria inspired many

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Native women students to follow her path and become physical directors at other schools, despite their brief time with her in the physical culture classes. Consequently, while white administrators viewed physical culture as yet another technique of assimilation, “the students saw as opportunities to create new inter-and-intra-tribal relationships and assert their Native positionalities in a space where such actions were otherwise forbidden” (Eby 2019, 11). The result of programs like Deloria’s, Eby suggests, was a robust and revivified sporting and physical culture among these government schools that lives on today in places like Haskell which remains devoted to indigenous students. To conclude, I’d like to point to the way in which these physical culture programs, which attempted to individualize indigenous students and erase their connection to their tribal communities, failed. That failure, taking Eby’s arguments into account, meant a redeployment of sports and physical culture to solidify community bonds. Returning to Deloria’s essay, that revivification of community was also her hope for the ends of physical education as well. Deloria warned of the neglect of the social life for Native girls and women. Physical culture, she argued, would help care for the social side of their lives through “community recreation.” “The young people can learn to enjoy each other’s company in the right way,” she suggested. “In this way life on the reservations would be socially improved and the girls would learn how to have a good time in a clean, wholesome way,” she concluded (1924, 68). Accompanying her essay were several pictures of her students (see Fig. 6.1). The photograph provides such a sharp contrast to the images from the Model Indian School that exoticized indigenous individuals or the images that tied them to their service as industrial or domestic workers. Additionally, it contrasts with the images from Macfadden’s magazines that sought to individualize white women readers and mystify physical transformations through before-and-after photographs. On the other hand, the photograph also contrasts with the images of exoticized non-white women, weighed down by their environments and props such as fruit and plants. Instead, we see smiling young indigenous women in gym uniforms, some of them appearing to embrace one another, in the outdoors. They provide a strong statement of support to Deloria’s call for physical culture to support the social life of indigenous girls and women.

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Fig. 6.1 Girls in Ella Deloria’s physical culture class at the Haskell Institute, 1922. Ella Deloria. 1924. “Health Education for Indian Girls.” Southern Workman 53: 67

Notes 1. Biopower, he suggested, evolved through the use of two basic forms of power over life, anatomo-politics—regulating and managing individual bodies—and biopolitics—regulating and managing populations. He later called the act of governing individuals in order to influence populations governmentality. 2. Child also says that many sick children were not sent home in an effort to maintain quotas. She also suggests schools often enrolled new students who were already very sick. 3. Unfortunately few female students ended up exercising much influence in their communities at all after they graduated. Many struggled to relearn their native languages and connect with cultural conventions that had been successfully suppressed. See Child (1998) and Adams (1995).

Bibliography Adams, David Wallace. 1995. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. “Belleville Awaits Indians.” 1904. St. Louis Post Dispatch. July 26.

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“A Brief History of the YWCA’s Work with Indian Women.” Folder 2: Assoc. Const. of YWCAs in Schools 1892–1922, Subseries C. Interracial/Racial Justice Work (General-Reference Materials, Series IV. Constituent Groups, Record Group 6. Program, YWCA of the USA Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Brownell, Susan, ed. 2008. The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Child, Brenda J. 1998. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900– 1940. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. “Constitution of the Young Women’s Association in Cities and Towns.” 1894. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: International Committee of the YWCA. Deloria, Ella. 1924. “Health Education for Indian Girls.” Southern Workman 53: 63–68. Deloria, Philip J. 2004. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Devens, Carol. 1992. “‘If We Get the Girls, We Get the Race’: Missionary Education of Native American Girls.” Journal of World History 3.2 (Fall): 219–237. Eby, Beth. 2019. “Building Bodies, (Un)Making Empire: Gender, Sport, and Colonialism in the United States, 1880–1930. Dissertation University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Fort Shaw at the Fair.” 1904. Anaconda Standard. June 20. Foucault. Michel. 1976. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. “History.” ywca.org. https://www.ywca.org/about/history/. Accessed June 1, 2018. “Indian Girls Champions.” 1904. Anaconda Standard. October 12. “Indian Girls Expert Basket Ball Players.” 1904. San Francisco Call. June 7. “Indian Girls Win Basketball Game.” 1904. St. Louis Post Dispatch. September 4. McGowan, William. 1904. “The Indian Exhibits at the St. Louis Exposition.” Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, 51–56. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Parezo, Nancy J., and Don D. Fowler. 2007. “The Model Indian School.” Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, eds. Nancy J. Parezo and Don. D. Fowler. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Peavy, Linda, and Ursula Smith. 2008. Full-Court Quest: The Girls from the Fort Shaw Indian School, Basketball Champions of the World. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

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Peavy, Linda, and Ursula Smith. 2008. “‘Leav[ing] the White[s]…Far Behind Them’: The Girls Fort Shaw (Montana) Indian School Basketball Champions of the 1904 World’s Fair.” The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism, ed. Susan Brownell, 243–277. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Peterson, William M. 1901. “Physical Culture.” Report of the Superintendent of Indian Schools, 98–99. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Pratt, Richard Henry. 1892. “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites.” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections at the Nineteenth Annual Session, ed. Isabel C. Barrows, 45–58. Denver, CO. June 23–29. “A Quiet Week.” 1885. Minneapolis Tribune. March 22. Quimby, Lida W. 1900. “The Field Matron’s Work.” Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1900: Indian Affairs Report of the Commissioner and Appendixes, 468–470. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Simonsen, Jane E. 2002. “‘Object Lessons’: Domesticity and Display in Native American Assimilation. American Studies 43.1 (Spring): 75–99. Stracqualursi, Veronica. 2018. “Trump: NFL Players Who Don’t Stand During the National Anthem Maybe ‘Shouldn’t Be in the Country.’” CNN.com. May 24. https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/24/politics/trump-nfl-nationalanthem/index.html. Accessed May 24, 2018. “Teacher’s Section.” 1898. Report of the Superintendent of Indian Schools, 34–35. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Trennert, Robert A. 1983. “From Carlisle to Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of the Indian Outing System, 1878–1930.” Pacific Historical Review 52.3 (August): 267–291. Vuˇckovi´c, Myriam. 2008. Voices from Haskell: Indian Students Between Two Worlds, 1884–1928. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. “Work of the National Y.W.C.A.” 1930. Folder 1, Subseries C. Interracial/Racial Justice, Work. General-Reference Materials, Series IV. Constituent Groups, Record Group 6. Program, YWCA of the USA Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. “YWCA Constitution for the Pierre Indian Industrial School.” 1909. Folder 2: Assoc. Const. of YWCAs in Schools 1892–1922, Subseries C. Interracial/Racial Justice Work. General-Reference Materials, Series IV. Constituent Groups, Record Group 6. Program, YWCA of the USA Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Community Fitness for Social Change?

I think social issues, systematic oppression, etc. are inextricably linked to the well-being of individuals. “Fitness” that doesn’t concern itself with these issues is incomplete. (Akinwale 2018)

Former competitive CrossFitter, mother, and lifestyle and fitness coach Elisabeth Akinwale posted this comment on her Instagram as a follow-up to an image of a poster saying, “Sanctuary for Our People. Your black lives matter. Immigrants, we have no walls. Women, your bodies are your own. Queer/Non-conforming/Trans people, you are seen and loved. Individuals with disabilities, you makes us stronger [also translated into ASL]. Muslims, you are honored here. Young people, your voice is powerful. You are safe here. You belong.” Some Instagram posters knew which gym it was posted at, others inquired where they could find the gym. The gym, though, was not revealed. Akinwale, one of only a handful of Black women CrossFit athletes, regularly posts about racial justice and injustice on her Instagram which is full of images like pregnant Serena Williams, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde interspersed with videos and images of her workouts and family. Like her Instagram, Akinwale’s statement blends working to better her body with working to better her community and the world. These statements, both Akinwale’s and the poster, offer a stark contrast to the sites, examples, and arguments about physical culture in the US © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2_7

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presented throughout most of this book. I began with a white supremacist gym in Nashville, a gym that is now part of a growing network of white alt right-based gyms across the country. The second chapter certainly promised the possibility of social change through European fitness systems like the Swedish school which sought to uplift and transform even the poorest members of the culture, to Jahn’s German school which promised a community that worked out together in the Turnplatz in order to go out and change the political climate of the country. The Americanization of these systems, however, shifted away from community building toward a strict individualism and swapped leftist political alignments for white nationalist nostalgia. Chapter 3 demonstrated how the lower-class association with strength and athleticism became co-opted by elite higher education institutions to remake manual labor mimetically into white upper-class leisure. Chapter 4 stressed the way women’s physical culture provided a healthy mixture of feminist empowerment and mobility with a domestic duty to the race to recreate young white business women as social mothers to the race. Chapter 5 looked at how the promise of the popularization of physical culture became redirected into a populist fantasia of sex positive, white supremacist, hyper commercial fervor of empty promises. Chapter 6 explained how, even when physical culture was deployed for indigenous women and girls, it failed as a tool of colonization, in part because it was built to inculcate and solidify whiteness. As such, physical culture by, for, about, and near communities of color almost always acted (and still acts) as resistance to whiteness. Can the white supremacist roots of physical culture be challenged and changed? What might a physical fitness practice that concerns itself with, as Akinwale suggests, social issues and systematic oppression look like and feel like? How might we unperform the eugenic legacies of US physical culture? In this conclusion, I want to suggest that community fitness program, that have recently jettisoned from CrossFit the brand, might be a practice that holds the potential to challenge the history and practice of physical culture and education in the US. Here’s a hyper-masculinized training regimen developed by former soldiers, police officers, and EMTs that promotes co-ed classes and is resoundingly endorsed by women. In addition, it emphasizes not necessarily external change in your body over time (though some practitioners certainly do that), but instead what your body is capable of in the moment and how continued practice changes the way your body works. It is uninstitutionalized. As a result, individual owners

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can make it what they want. That independence was in part CrossFit’s undoing. Finally, it’s a practice that celebrates the last person to finish. It relies on and touts its capacity to create bonds in the box (jargon for CrossFit gym) when the real world prevents connection. At this time, in our history, I find this promise perhaps the most compelling. It is a practice of radical presence. Why end with high intensity interval training (HIIT)? As I considered the many contemporary correlates to the exercise regimes laid out in previous chapters, I discarded many possibly more fitting modern fitness trends. Yoga seemed the most likely candidate. It bears a resemblance to both Delsarte, in its embrace of honing the body in order to achieve a higher, more enlightened perspective. It is also a highly gendered practice, popular for its tendency to create trim, lithe, flowy feminine bodies. Also, while yoga does require an amazing amount of strength and flexibility and sometimes sweat, the control of body and breath are paramount. It has links to whiteness and cultural appropriation. However, yoga doesn’t really exist in a performance form. Instead, I chose HIIT and CrossFit primarily because it privileges performance, both in private practice and as public spectacle. It also privileges performance over appearance, in sharp contrast to many women’s fitness regimes over the past century. That said, CrossFit is in the midst of collapse and redefinition thanks to multiple misfires from its founder and former CEO Greg Glassman. On June 6, Glassman tweeted “It’s Floyd-19” in response to a health company’s suggestion that racism and discrimination were public health crises similar to COVID-19. The tweet also referred to the brutal murder on May 25, 2020, of George Floyd by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes and was caught in video. The incident led to nationwide protests against not only police brutality against Black people, but white supremacist policies, structures, and ideologies. Hours before his tweet, on a call with CrossFit affiliate gym owners in response to a Minneapolis owner’s inquiry about why CrossFit had not made a statement about Floyd’s murder, Glassman responded, “We’re not mourning for George Floyd. I don’t think we or any of my staff are. Can you tell me why we should mourn him?” (Duffy 2020). The backlash was swift and fierce. Within days, Reebok cut ties with CrossFit as did several high profile CrossFit Games athletes and at least 200 gyms disaffiliated (Togoh 2020). The next day Glassman stepped down as CEO and retired. But the damage had already been done.

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As I argue elsewhere, CrossFit is full of contradictions (Walsh 2020). Its origin story narrates Glassman’s training of police and former athletes. Multiple journalists and scholars have gone into “boxes” (CrossFit lingo for gym) expecting one environment, and finding something quite different. For example, communication studies scholar Victoria Kerry, who went in to prove the hypermasculinity of a box called “the Cave” in New Zealand, struggles between an “objective” critique of the overly masculine signage in her box and the way she, as a member of that box, actually feels when she engages in the work. Kinesiology scholar Bobbi Knapp comes to a much more ambiguous conclusion for a box in the Midwest as she, like many other scholars, goes into her case study clearly forecasting that she expected to be critical of CrossFit and ended up struggling with what she actually felt as a member of that box which was a strong sense of belonging. Because community is a central principle of CrossFit, many boxes attract niche practitioners. Some boxes cater to Black, LGBTQ, and/or women athletes. Part of the dynamism of CrossFit affiliates is the loose structure involved in branding. Glassman began CrossFit as a challenge to more corporatized gyms. The result was a fairly low bar for affiliation. The bow owner must have a Level 1 Certificate (two days of training) and pay $3000 annually (“How to Affiliate”). The result is many, many affiliates (15,000 worldwide) all focused on specific communities and customized to their needs. If you don’t like the vibe at a particular box, there is likely another one within a short distance. For instance, I have more than 17 CrossFit boxes within ten miles of my house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Those ties to community, the way the practice inspires communal engagement, create a loyal group of followers. The practice itself creates community both within individual boxes and across the brand as a whole. Workouts-of-the-Day (WODs) are done as a group and almost always involve cheering from others as well as from the coach. Each member’s numbers (how quickly they completed and/or how many reps the completed) for the WODs are posted on a white board for all to see. CrossFit.com allows members to also share their numbers across their platform. In addition, owners often host weekly meet-ups for all members. These practices aren’t necessarily a part of affiliation, but rather part of CrossFit culture. As someone who gets nervous about working out in front of others, I found this environment incredibly comfortable. It felt like theatre to me. Others I know say it feels a bit like church. These bonds made the events of June and the collapse of CrossFit both painful, and after some time, actually easy. Many affiliates said that

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CrossFit was nothing more than a brand and that they had long before established their own community-driven fitness practice. Many CrossFit boxes that disaffiliated renamed themselves with the word “community” somewhere in their new title. My own box renamed itself Recalibrated Strength and Conditioning. Others defaulted to “performance” in their title, as another box near me did, changing from Red Stick CrossFit to Red Stick Health + Performance. This shift towards the words “community” and “performance” are telling. CrossFit’s practice, its doingness is what contributed to its undoing as a cohesive brand. In order to get at the doing I want to get at my own experience with the practice. For the first time in the six months that I’ve been doing a CrossFit bootcamp, we were assigned a mimetic exercise as part of our WOD. The Farmer’s Carry involves carrying two kettle bells for a predetermined distance. In my case, we had to carry the kettle bells around the parking lot, roughly the equivalent of 100 meters. As the instructor explained, “It’s like farmers who have to carry buckets of water and grain from the well or the field back to the farm.” As I looked at our WOD, which also involved Russian kettle bell swings, burpees, and broad jumps, I thought, “Sweet! The Farmer’s Carry will be the easiest part. I just have to walk around the parking lot.” It was an AMRAP, which meant we had to do As Many Rounds As Possible in 20 minutes. I breathed a sigh of relief at what appeared to be a relatively okay WOD. Not one that was going to leave me breathless on the floor. The first time around the parking lot with my heavier kettle bells (25 pounds each) was tough enough that I decided to take the lighter kettle bells (15 pounds each) the next time. Halfway through the second loop, my arms seized up and I had to put the kettlebells down, shake out my arms, and continue on my way, then put them down once again further on. I was really frustrated. I’m literally just holding onto some weights and walking a short distance. How can this be so hard? It’s not even like we are imitating wood chopping or hay pitching, we’re pretending to carry flipping buckets of water. My frustration subsided a bit as I watched other members of my group, most of whom have been doing this much longer than me, also have to stop and drop their weights halfway through the loop. By the end, even my athlete of a husband who I’m pretty sure started out with the 75-pound kettlebells had down shifted to the 15 pound kettle bells. It was brutal. This exercise really brought home for me both Diamond’s conception of performance as a doing and a thing done, Roach’s surrogation, and Bourdieu’s habitus. Ultimately, I will never look at that labor the

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same way again. The exercise produced a profound cognitive dissonance between my assumption about the muscular effort involved in something like carrying heavy loads back and forth, and the reality of that exercise’s toll on my body. I walked away feeling humbled and in awe of rural labor, not superior to it. I wondered, because of my research, about all the activities our bodies have forgotten, but that we continue to perpetuate despite our forgetfulness. I thought about all the bodies and practices my body surrogated in that moment. My hope that somehow this mimetic labor might lead to my own bodily transformation. I marveled at the way history, the doneness of performance, the forgotten labor, manifests itself when we least expect it, in a workout, a photograph, a kneeling. Finally, I thrilled again to find that performance, the doing, the carrying, the corporeality of moving around the parking lot, the feel of the soles of my shoes catching on the rough pavement, my inability to wipe the sweat streaming down my face, opened an entirely new landscape of thinking about mimetic exercise that I would not have found otherwise. It was CrossFit’s doingness that led its practitioners to imagine a landscape without that name. Akinwale, a former CrossFitter, had already shifted the focus of her work even though it relies on aspects of CrossFit. Her gym and her fitness system is called 13th Flow Performance System. While the physical location of the gym is in Southside Chicago, she and her partner offer online training as well. In the wake of Floyd’s murder and in the middle of a pandemic she took to Instagram, reaffirming that she is “focused on the work I’m doing in my local community and building a space where Black people (and anyone else who wants to) can get excellent training in an environment that supports overall wellbeing” (Akinwale June 2, 2020a). After Glassman’s comments and resignation she wrote an open letter to “Black Folks in CrossFit” where she addressed her complicated relationship with the practice. In the end, she concluded, “At a certain point you stop asking for a seat at the table and you build your own…. My choice has been to create the space I needed because I believe others need it too” (Akinwale June 4, 2020b). That social aspect, which she highlights in the quote that began this conclusion, was stamped out in the Americanization of physical culture systems. The emphasis on individualism enabled that push toward governmentality, governing populations as a group of individuals rather than people who make up a community. What Akinwale, and many others, demonstrate in this moment of rupture in our culture is a way we might unperform the eugenic legacies of US physical culture.

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Bibliography Akinwale, Elisabeth. 2018. (eakinwale), January 21. “Sanctuary for Our People…” [Instagram post]. Accessed March 31, 2018. Akinwale, Elisabeth. 2020a. (eakinwale), June 2. [Instagram post]. Accessed June 22, 2020. Akinwale, Elisabeth. 2020b. (eakinwale), June 4. [Instagram post]. Accessed June 22, 2020. Duffy, Clare. 2020. “Days Before Resigning, CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman Told Gym Owners He Doesn’t Mourn George Floyd.” CNN.com. June 10. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/business/greg-glassman-zoom-call/ index.html. Accessed June 22, 2020. “How to Affiliate.” CrossFit.com. https://www.crossfit.com/affiliate/how-to. Accessed June 22, 2020. Kerry, Victoria. 2016. “The Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity in the Semiotic Landscape of a CrossFit ‘Cave’.” Visual Communication 16.2: 209–237. Knapp, Bobbi. 2015. “Rx’d and Shirtless: An Examination of Gender in a CrossFit Box.” Women in Sport and Physical Activity 23: 42–53. Togoh, Isabel. 2020. “Reebok and Athletes Cut Ties with Crossfit Over Founder Greg Glassman’s George Floyd Tweet.” Forbes.com. June 8. https://www.for bes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2020/06/08/reebok-and-athletes-cut-ties-withcrossfit-over-founder-greg-glassmans-george-floyd-tweet/#1f9e6fb4c830. Accessed July 22, 2020. Walsh, Shannon L. 2020. “Fit and Fierce: (En)Countering CrossFit.” Sporting Performances: Politics in Play, ed. Shannon L. Walsh. London: Routledge.

Index

A acting, 21, 27, 29, 42, 43, 50 Adams, David Wallace, 171 Addams, Jane, 110, 111 aesthetic gymnastics. See Americanized Delsarte Ahmed, Sara, 11 Akinwale, Elisabeth, 189, 190, 194 Alcott, Louisa May, 109 American Alliance of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (AAHPERD), 51 American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education (AAAPE), 73 Americanized Delsarte, 4, 13, 19–21, 28, 36, 41–45, 47–51, 59, 97, 99, 100, 102, 108, 118, 120, 176, 191 Amherst College, 61, 73 Anderson, William G., 21, 39, 42 Anthropology Days, 178, 179 anthropometry, 61, 72

anti-theatrical, 20, 41 Arnaud, Angélique, 26 Arnold, Matthew, 140 Austin, J.L., 16

B Baird, Isaac, 172, 181 Baker, William J., 23, 116 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 107, 108, 124 Barrows, Isabel, 36 basketball, 91, 97, 170, 176, 180, 181 Battle Creek Sanitarium, 82 Battle of the Schools, 26, 39 Beauty and Health (magazine), 137, 159, 162 Beecher, Catharine, 38, 61, 78 before-and-after photographs, 145–147 Bennett, Tony, 48, 141, 142 bicycle, 98, 103, 104, 145 bicycling, 91, 104, 105

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2

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198

INDEX

biopolitics, 5, 10, 121, 151, 153, 159, 168, 185 biopower, 11, 32, 159, 167 Black, 2, 3, 10, 12 Blackfeet Reservation, 180 Boston Normal School for Gymnastics (BNSG), 36, 38 Boston School of Expression, 41 Boston University’s College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College, 57 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 84, 93, 193 Boydston, Jeanne, 109, 152 British athletics, 21–23, 26, 37 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 48 Bruni, Frank, 131, 132, 138, 150 Buffalo Industrial Gym, 73 Burton, Minnie, 181 Butler, Judith, 6

C calisthenics. See Swedish gymnastics Campbell, Fred, 180 Carlisle Indian School, 171, 180 carnivalesque, 105, 107 Carpenter, Faedra, 2, 142 Chadbourne, Katibel, 97 Charcot, Jean Martin, 107 Child, Brenda, 171 civic housekeeping, 110, 111 Coates, Ta’Nehisi, 11 Colburn, Bertha Louise, 71 Columbian Exposition, 135, 136, 143 Comstock, Anthony, 51 1889 Conference on Physical Training, 38, 40, 42, 44, 113, 168 Coryell, John, 138, 161 CrossFit, 1, 15, 189–194 Crow, Jim, 8, 9, 11, 35, 46 Curry, Samuel Silas, 41, 42, 48, 51

D Daguerre, Louis, 146, 162 de Coubertin, Pierre, 40 Delaumosne, Abbé, 26 Deloria, Ella, 170, 173, 181–184 Delsarte, François, 21, 26–30, 43, 72, 74 Delsarte, Gustave, 26 Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, 50 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 16, 119 Devens, Carol, 172, 181 Diamond, Elin, 5, 6, 59, 72, 157, 193 Di Leonardo, Michaela, 136, 161 Divine Trinity, 28, 29 Douglas, Ann, 115 Duncan, Isadora, 49 Dunn, Mary, 118 Durant, Henry, 96 Durant, Pauline Adeline, 96 During, Simon, 137, 139 Dyer, Richard, 118 E Eby, Beth, 183, 184 Edison, Thomas, 19 Edwards, Elizabeth, 147 Ellis, Havelock, 124 elocution, 21, 42–44 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 63, 65, 75 entrepreneur of the self, 152 Eugenicists, 12 eugenics, 1, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19, 32–34, 45, 49, 58–60, 66–68, 75, 80, 82, 83, 85, 137, 142, 150, 153, 154, 156, 157, 160 The Evangel , 98 F Fabian, Ann, 135, 136, 138, 139

INDEX

Floyd, George, 191, 194 Follen, Charles, 61 Fonda, Jane, 132 Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian School, 170, 176, 180, 181, 183 Foucault, Michel, 5, 10, 32, 65, 108, 120, 121, 137, 152, 159, 160 Fowler, Don D., 176, 178 Fowler, Orson Squire, 154–156 Freud, Sigmund, 117 Fried, Michael, 15

G Galton, Francis, 66, 85 Geddes, Patrick, 79 Géraldy, Marie, 27 German gymnastics, 21–26, 36, 38–40, 43, 97, 121, 190 Geronimo, 178, 181 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 111–113, 122, 123, 138 Giraudet, Alfred, 26 Glassman, Greg, 15, 191, 192, 194 Gorn, Elliott J., 34 governmentality, 5, 15, 16, 32, 40, 108, 117, 159, 160, 185 Granshaw, Michelle, 105 grotesque, 92, 107, 114, 117, 124 Grunberger, Lisa, 158 gynecology, 151, 153

H habitus, 20, 84, 133 Hall, G. Stanley, 79, 85, 86 Hargreaves, Jennifer, 9 Harris, William T., 37 Hartwell, Edward, 38 Harvard Annex (Radcliffe College), 59, 64

199

Harvard University, 21, 38, 40, 57, 59, 61, 62, 73, 81, 86 Haskell Institute for Native Americans, 170, 182, 183 Hemenway, Mary, 36 Henderson, Edwin Bancroft, 58 high intensity interval training (HIIT), 191 Hill, Lucille, 44, 96 Hitchcock, Edward, 61, 73 Homans, Amy, 36 Home Gymnastics According to the Ling , 22 Horsman, Reginald, 35 Horton, Carol, 35 Hughes, Thomas, 23 Hunter, Ian, 140 Hutchinson, John, 38

I Idaho Lemhi Reservation, 181 indigenous, 3, 10, 12, 14 individualism, 1, 4, 13

J Jackson, Shannon, 6, 94, 110 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 21, 24–26, 37, 190 Jannarone, Kimberly, 24, 25 Jeffery, M. Belle, 95 Jenai, Lauren, 15

K Kapsalis, Terry, 153, 154 Kellogg, John, 82 Kerry, Victoria, 192 Key, Ellen, 111–113, 122–124 kinesiology, 20 Kingsley, Charles, 23 Knapp, Bobbi, 192

200

INDEX

L LaLanne, Jack, 131–133, 138, 148, 150 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 66, 143 Langley, Josephine, 180, 183 Lee, Mabel, 38 Lemyng, Sky, 2 Lewis, Dio, 38, 61, 78 Ling, Per Henrik, 21, 22, 23, 26, 39, 51. See also Swedish gymnastics Little Women, 109 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 63 Lorde, Audre, 11 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 170, 176, 178 Lusk, William, 151, 152 M MacAloon, John J., 31, 38 Macfadden, Bernarr, 3, 4, 14, 19, 40, 49, 51, 71, 131, 133–140, 142–150, 154–162, 184 Macfadden, Mary, 138, 143, 161 MacKaye, Steele, 4, 21, 27–29, 41–51, 59, 72, 74, 83 Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions, 19 manifest destiny, 35, 134 Marshall, Beatrice, 19, 21 Mayhew, Abby Shaw, 4, 13, 14, 91–100, 102–104, 107–109, 114–122, 124, 125, 136, 175, 176, 182 McGee, William, 178, 179 McGowan, S.M., 177–180, 183 McKesson, DeRay, 2 medical gymnastics. See Swedish gymnastics Mendel, Gregor, 66 #metoo movement, 20 Milder, Robert, 63 Miller, Toby, 117

mimetic exercise, 13, 57, 59, 64, 67, 70–74, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86 Model Indian School, 14, 170, 171, 176–179, 181, 184 modern dance, 21, 44, 50 Morgan, Anna, 43 Morton, Christopher, 147 Mosher, Eliza, 113 Mount Holyoke College, 78 Munier, Emile, 144 muscular Christianity, 13, 23, 38–40, 108, 115, 116, 118 Muybridge, Eadweard, 104 N nationalism, 22–24, 26, 33, 40, 48 National Normal School of Hygiene and Physical Education, Shanghai, 123 Newkirk II, Vann R., 11 New Woman, 14, 109, 110 O Obama, Michelle, 132 Odanah Mission School, 169 Olympic Games, 178 1936 Olympic Games, 25 Omi, Michael, 49 Operation Werewolf, 2 Oswald, Felix M.D., 138, 161 Oursler, Fulton, 135, 161 Outing Clubs, 91, 98, 103, 107 P Painter, Nell Irvin, 11 palaestra, 24 Parezo, Nancy J., 176, 178 Parker, Andrew, 15, 93 pastoralism, 63 Patterson, Martha, 109 performative, 114

INDEX

performativity, 6, 7, 11, 15, 20, 93, 113, 114, 119 Peterson, William, 173 phrenology, 83, 154 Physical Culture (magazine), 3, 131, 136–140, 142–147, 154, 156, 161, 162 physical education, 20, 36, 37, 39, 44, 51, 57, 60, 61, 71, 83–86, 96, 113, 115, 125 Pierre Indian Industrial School, 172 Pine Ridge Institute, 173 playground movement, 32, 39, 94 Pollock, Della, 114 Poole, Deborah, 147 Porte, Alain, 27, 43, 50, 51 Posse, Nils, 39 Pratt, Richard Henry, 171, 180 Preston, Carrie, 49 professional managerial class, 61, 67 Progressive Era, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12–14, 19, 21, 31–35, 45, 48, 58, 61–63, 65, 71, 76, 78–80, 92, 108, 109, 113, 120, 122, 133, 137, 141, 146, 151, 153, 161, 170, 172, 176

Q Quimby, Lida W., 173

R The Races of Europe, 22 race suicide, 83 racialized surrogates, 133, 134 Rational recreation, 8 Read, Rose, 134, 145–150 Reebok, 191 Rhoden, William C., 37 Rice, Elmer, 37, 38 Ripley, William, 22, 46

201

Roach, Joseph, 6, 7, 70, 71, 134, 157, 193 Rogers, Rebecca, 109 Roosevelt, Theodore (Teddy), 31, 33, 51 Rosaldo, Renato, 68 Roth, M., 24 Rush, Dr. Benjamin, 155 Russo, Mary, 107 Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa, 27, 42, 51 Rydell, Robert, 136, 143 S salvage ethnography, 68 Sandow, Eugen, 31, 49, 100, 144, 148 Sargent, Dudley Allen, 4, 13, 14, 21, 25, 40, 42, 44, 57–62, 64–68, 70–86, 91, 93, 96, 97, 115, 124, 134–136, 161 Schulman, Max, 148 scientific motherhood, 110, 124 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 15, 93 Sekula, Allan, 35, 147 self-culture, 31, 42, 47–49, 118 settlement movement, 32, 94 Shaver, Claude, 28, 42, 50 Shawn, Ted, 49, 50 Simmons, Richard, 132 Simonsen, Jane E., 174 Sims, J. Marion, 153 Sinclair, Upton, 138, 161 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 109 social Darwinism, 63, 65, 83 social motherhood, 14, 93, 108, 110–112, 114, 118–122 social welfare, 3, 21, 32, 94, 111, 115 Spencer, Herbert, 79, 86 sports management, 20 Stallybrass, Peter, 107 Standing Rock Indian Reservation, 170

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INDEX

statue posing, 44, 47–49, 100 St. Denis, Ruth, 49, 50 Stebbins, Genevieve, 42, 43, 51 St. Louis World’s Fair, 14, 178 Stockham, Alice, 152 Stoler, Ann, 160 strenuous life, 31, 33, 40, 51 Strong, Josiah, 115 surrogation, 7, 13, 68, 70, 74, 84, 134, 157, 158, 160 Swedish gymnastics, 21–24, 26, 31, 36, 38, 39, 43–45, 51, 97, 121, 190 T techniques of the self, 138, 148, 150 technologies of the self, 137, 145. See also techniques of the self theatre, 19–21, 42, 44 Thoreau, Henry David, 63, 75 Todd, Jan, 78 Tom Brown’s Schooldays , 23 Trail of Tears, 134 Traveler’s Aid, 123 Treloar, Albert, 19, 100 Turner, Anita, 58 turnplatz, 24, 25, 61, 190 Turnverein, 24, 25, 38, 39, 135 U University of Wisconsin, 123, 124 V Veblen, Thorstein, 104 Vengeance Strength Kvlt, 1, 2 Venters, Scott, 25 Vertinsky, Patricia, 9, 104, 113 W Walker, Julia, 42 Warren, John T., 148

Washington, Booker T., 82, 138, 161 Waters, Chris, 8 Watson, Nick, 23 Watts, George Frederick, 144 Weir, Lorna, 80, 86 Weismann, August, 66 Wellesley College, 44, 73, 81, 96 White, Allon, 107 white supremacy, 9–11, 83, 92, 93, 134, 137 Wide, Anders, 22–24 Wilbor, Elsie, 43, 51 Wild West Show, 179 Williamson, Mary, 14 Williams, Serena, 189 Winant, Howard, 49 Winterer, Caroline, 47, 48 Women’s Physical Development (magazine), 137, 145, 159, 162 Wood, Clement, 135, 161 Wounded Knee Massacre, 168, 172 Wray, Matt, 150, 161 Y Yale University, 21, 39 YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), 8, 32, 38, 94, 98, 99, 115, 124, 136, 169 yoga, 191 Yúdice, George, 117 YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association), 4, 8, 13, 32, 38, 44, 58, 85, 91–99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 113–120, 122–125, 136, 168–170, 172, 174, 177, 182 Boston, 96 Kansas City, 118 Minneapolis, 98, 176 Z Zarnowski, Frank, 37