Apostles of Abstinence: Fasting and Masculinity during the Progressive Era

BY THE TIME CHARLES COURTNEY HASKELL PUBLISHED HIS AMBITIOUSLY TITLED Perfect Health: How To Get It and How To Keep It in 1901, Americans were long acquainted with health reformers. The hygienic regimens of English physicians George Cheyne (1671-1743) and William Lambe (1765-1847), not to mention John Wesley's own Primitive Physick (1747), were widely known well into the nineteenth century. The various therapy systems of later American reformers such as William Alcott, Sylvester Graham, Russell Trall, Elizabeth Blackwell, John Harvey Kellogg, Ellen Gould White, and Horace Fletcher were similarly celebrated, attracting frequent imitators and in some cases achieving considerable popularity. Vegetarianism, hydropathy, exercise, temperance, and pulverizing mastication had been so ardently advocated between the 1830s and the 1890s that desirous (if worn) consumers must have wondered whether the farthest reaches of nonpharmaceutical therapy systems had not been scoured; surely Americans had, by now, heard it all. But, thanks to a fortuitous encounter with physician Edward Hooker Dewey, whose own books excoriated the heavy American breakfast and plied abstinence as a cure-all remedy, Haskell managed to seize upon what he would help make into the greatest fitness craze of the early twentieth century, a practice whose popularity matched, if not surpassed, all previous health regimens: fasting.

Fasting's destiny as somatic therapy could hardly have been foreseen by Christians of earlier eras, for whom the practice worked primarily as a means of spiritual detoxification. Through the long reaches of the Christian tradition, the supposed health benefits of fasting--reduction of fat, rest for the overworked body, even cure of disease--were secondary, its chief role being to strengthen the flesh for the pursuit of sacred ends. Early Christian monastics fasted to curb sexual desire, fortify the soul for battle against sin, and sculpt the body into a visible expression of inward humility and devotion to Christ. Medieval saints fasted, sometimes extravagantly, in order to manifest penitential mourning and seek mystical communion with God. Protestant reformers, riveting their attention on scripture, retained emphasis on fasting while amending its perceived abuses: Martin Luther rejected the prescribed fast days instituted by the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the practice of extreme abstinence that drove some saints to madness and death; yet he taught the rightness of "fast[ing] frequently in order to subdue and control the body." The English Puritans, following John Calvin, austerely practiced fasting as a biblically mandated act of sorrow, humiliation, and contrition; while for Reformed Protestants who emigrated to America, public and private fast days during times of war, witchcraft, illness, and other crises were commonplace. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, fasting as a means of Christian repentance and humiliation had all but vanished among the majority of American Protestants, carried on mostly by upstarts like Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists as well as Catholics and other liturgical traditionalists but increasingly rejected by the more "respectable" mainstream. All that kept fasting from dying out altogether in bourgeois Protestant culture was its rebirth as an instrument for physical rejuvenation and weight loss, functions with which it has continued to be associated throughout the twentieth century. ¹

Oddly enough, in light of the vast scholarly attention directed toward the body and its disciplines over the past two decades, fasting's resurgence at the end of the nineteenth century and its popularity during the Progressive Era have received scant notice. More precisely, while some historians have highlighted fasting in this period, the most influential accounts have been preoccupied with historicizing modern dietary obsessions that disproportionately afflict women and so have been all too ready to interpret food refusal as an exclusively female province. Studies of this kind, notably Joan Jacobs Brumberg's 1988 Fasting Girls, have focused on a series of notorious cases of prolonged abstinence, concentrated among young women in nineteenth-century Britain and America, which later medical historians have interpreted as prefiguring contemporary...