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3 Women, Physical Activity, Education A Nineteenth-Century Perspective Not one girl in ten had the air and look of good health.... If we neglect the body, the body will have its revenge. And are we not doing this? Are we not throwing our whole educational force upon the brain? Is not a healthy city-born and bred woman getting to be as rare as a black swan? And is it not time to reform this altogether? Is it not time to think something of the casket as well as the jewel? Something of the lantern as well as the light? Editor of the Boston Courier, I858. THE BEGINNINGS OF DANCE IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION ARE nested in a larger period of health reform and in the larger question of why dance education emerged as a part of the physical education curriculum. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw several booming movements of reform, including the Progressivism of the I900S and I9IOS, when general reformist ferment connected with social optimism. All of these general reform movements saw proper personal hygiene as a precondition for social and human progress. This was not a spurious connection. One was an essential foundation for the other, and the belief ran deep that a "pure" individual would lead to a "purer" society. The result was that good hygiene came to be regarded as a moral obligation, and women's bodies were swept up in this growing discourse about the model "fit" American. There were more ominous extensions of this philosophy in the I920S, however, and some reformers saw hygiene and eugenics linked. "They are really both hygiene-one individual hygiene and the other race hygiene," observed Irving Fisher, a professor of political economy at Yale who also revealed a dabbling in the subject of "healthy minds" in his I92I presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association.I Women, Physical Activity, Education Not all of the Progressive health reforms were as clear-minded as the notion of dress reform and the institution of physical activity for women, particularly college women. Among the other health reforms proffered that did not endure were diets emphasizing uric acid, Graham flour, skipping breakfast, "thorough mastication," avoiding excessive amounts of protein, "muscular vegetarianism," and sexual restraint.2 These other reforms, more fads than revolutions in thinking, were short-lived and had limited success in comparison to the fitness crusade. The dance program at the University of Wisconsin might be considered one of its most outstanding and enduring examples. Actually, a change in women's attitudes toward their bodies preceded this larger change in the social status, behavior, and fitness of women. For a long period women agreed with society's belief that their disadvantaged status was justified and that they were "inferior, diseased and poisonous."3 Middle-class nineteenth-century women in America found the medical profession and the clergy the most outspoken dictators of "proper" bodily behavior. American and English doctors established strict sexual codes, maintaining that sex for women was an unenjoyable duty and that those who enjoyed and indulged in it were threatened with cancer and early deaths.4 The result was that women were induced to become passive breeders. The middle-class Victorian male frequented prostitutes for physical pleasure, at the same time lobbying for rigid standards of decency and respectability. As Ronald Pearsall details in his study of Victorian sexuality, the duplicity resulted in convoluted attempts at propriety and invented language to hide anxiety about bodies: The whole subject of sex became forbidden, confused and diffused into the most unlikely areas. The more pressed could see sex in everything: the shape of a grand piano became indecent and its legs were draped to avoid giving offense to tender-minded young ladies. The English language became a minefield; not only, predictably, did breasts become bosom, but legs became limbs or, to point the argument even more powerfully, "unmentionables."5 These verbal prohibitions on even mentioning female body parts hint at what must have been the Victorian woman's daily lived experience of the dangerousness of her body. Although it may have been "the body" that was chastised as sinful, the body has been "notoriously and ubiquitously associated with the female," and intuitively the Victorian woman must have recognized this coding.6 Philosophers from the modern positivists to Descartes and stretching back to Plato have long depicted the body as an enemy of objectivity, as existing in opposition to the mind and as more allied with the...

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