Recreating the Body: Women's Physical Education and the Science of Sex Differences in America, 1900-1940

“Gym class.” For many Americans—young and old, male and female—that phrase evokes images of dodge ball, sit-ups, social dance, and, of course, the gym teacher. That everyone’s memories are so vivid speaks to the resonance of physical education in our lives, and in American culture generally. Since the profession’s development in the 1880s, physical educators have played a significant role in shaping how Americans define and pursue “fitness.” For decades—in the gym, on the playing field, and in the locker room, ordinary Americans have learned indelible lessons about their bodies—about their physical assets, potential, and limits.

Of equal importance has been the profession’s “hidden curriculum”—its implicit training in personal values and social interaction. In subtle and overt ways, physical education teaches us about discipline and spontaneity, cooperation and competition, self-esteem and embarrassment. Thus, the overall power of physical education is considerable: through recreation, we learn to re-create both our bodies and our selves.

The lessons of physical education are so compelling precisely because they are located in the body. ¹ There is nothing abstract or ambiguous about gym class; the meaning of any activity is concrete, immediate, and clear. Fitness tests, for instance, require schoolchildren to undertake discrete physical tasks; the results reveal—to teachers and pupils alike—which boys and girls have “normal” and which have “substandard” levels of skill. In equally tangible ways, supervised exercise, competitive games, and other activities in physical education also develop and measure the body’s ability to “perform.”

How do teachers explain their systems for training and evaluating the body? What intellectual assumptions underlie programs in physical education? For more than a century, physical educators in America have rationalized their practices of the body through theories about human movement and health. The fields of anatomy, physiology, and biomechanics, in particular, have long supplied physical educators with data and concepts that seemed especially relevant and authoritative. In the early 1900s, anthropometry and structural models of the body were popular. In later decades, more dynamic paradigms, such as kinesiology, began to dominate the field. ² Together, the practices and theories of physical education create an aura of scientific objectivity. The discipline’s curricula and principles, though, are not neutral. Physical education often reproduces social relations and ideologies; for example, the field inscribes the body with cultural definitions of race, class, and sex.

The gendering of the body occurs at both a material and a conceptual level. Through sex-coded activities, physical education marks and patrols the border between “masculinity” and “femininity.” ³ Boys play football, while girls learn rhythmic gymnastics; schoolboys perform “regular” push-ups as measures of strength, while girls do “modified” push-ups. Similarly, many theories in physical education treat gender as a critical variable in motor development and ability. Contemporary biomechanics, for example, has an androcentric bias; its definitions of “skillful movement” favor the experiences and performance of men over those of women. ⁴

The primary and most durable concept by which physical education has gendered the body is the science of sex differences. Amidst the changing foci, even fashions, of the discipline, the principle of sexual dualism has been notably constant. ⁵ From the late nineteenth century to the present, physical educators have regarded the structure, motions, and abilities of males and females as being markedly and, in many respects, innately different; further, they have claimed that the social and psychological nature of physical activity varies by sex—that is, that males and females have distinct motives and behaviors when they play. To understand the construction and meaning of gendered bodies in physical education, then, scholars would do well to start with the notion of sex differences, because physical educators themselves began there.

This paper examines the science of sex differences in American physical education between 1900 and 1940, the period during which the ideas and institutions of the profession solidified. ⁶ It focuses on the views of white, middle-class women who taught physical education at schools, YWCAs, and...