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255 “The Athletic Woman” Anna de Koven R Born in Chicago to U.S. Senator Charles B. Farwell and Mary E. Smith Farwell, Anna Farwell (1860–1953) married Reginald de Koven in 1884. Reginald became a successful composer of comic operas and a music critic,and the couple socialized in New York’s most elite circles. Anna de Koven distinguished herself with her translations of French fiction, her novels, and biographies, in addition to numerous essays and poems for mainstream periodicals. Even as she cautioned women against forgetting their “natural duties” of homemaking and child rearing, de Koven, an accomplished amateur golfer, advocated physical activity for women. Writing for Cosmopolitan in 1896, she celebrated golf as an ideal sport for the New Woman:“What the bicycle has left undone toward the transformation of the life of American women, the game of golf bids fair to complete.” The article reprinted here was published at a time when Good Housekeeping had been devoting more attention to women’s work outside the home. It was heavily illustrated with photographs of women enjoying a wide range of outdoor activities: flying, riding on horseback, fishing, mountain climbing, golfing, playing tennis, and pumping an automobile tire.1 Good Housekeeping was begun in 1885 by Clark Bryan as “A Family Journal Conducted in the Interests of the Higher Life of the Household”; it offered advice on housekeeping, dressmaking, and home decorating, and published poetry and short stories for primarily a lower middle-class audience. From its beginnings, the magazine solicited a significant portion of its content from readers and prided itself on its connection to them. In 1900 it started the Good Housekeeping Experiment Station (later to become the Testing Institute),which conducted tests on new products and reported the results, and in 1909 it began issuing the Good Good Housekeeping, Aug. 1912. american new woman revisited 256 Housekeeping Seal of Approval to recognize those products in its magazine. By 1911 editor James Eaton Tower had expanded the magazine to 125 pages, lowered its cost $1.25 a year, featured in its pages some of the most popular writers of the day, and offered more and higher-quality colored illustrations. Good Housekeeping’s circulation rose to over 300,000 and was purchased in 1911 by the Hearst interests.2 . . . Athletics and Efficiency of Women Signs are not wanting in the rising generation of American women of a high development of the reasoning faculties and a great efficiency in civic activity. The highest development of the American woman cannot be attained without due regard to the preservation of physical activity, and for that reason the practice of athletics is an essential for all ages. The arguments of physicians and educators in favor of athletics for women were only partially successful until fashion set the stamp of approval. The hoydenish tomboy, who was the despair of the mother of the past generation, is today just the normal girl whose keen love for outdoor sports is the pride of the family. This development in athletics for girls and women has been very rapid the past ten years, and the effect is clearly discernible in the schools and colleges, as well as in the homes. The old-time gymnasiums are now considered too artificial for present needs and are being replaced by outdoor contests and folk dancing. The result naturally is a new type of American girl, new not only physically, but mentally and morally. Dr. Thomas Wood, the physical director of Barnard College, who has had plenty of opportunity to study the effect of this athletic development of women, says that “one of its benefits is to teach self-control. Wholesome play, suitable games, selected gymnastics, though these have no direct utilitarian end,” he explains, “give to young women, as well as to young men, a part of the best preparation for the more serious work of later life. Women, as well as men, need to learn through practical experience the rules of fair play, generous treatment of rivals and opponents, merging self into cooperative effort, concentration of power, and the blending of all energies toward an impersonal goal.” He quoted a woman of experience who had said: “There is no training which girls need so much as that which develops a sense of honor and loyalty to each other, and games will do more to make these living qualities than the ethical system taught in a college curriculum. It takes the finest kind of...

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