Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800-1870 (review)

Jan Todd. Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800-1870. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1998. ix + 369 pp. Ill. $39.95.

"Purposive exercise," Jan Todd notes, differs from other physical activities, such as casual play or competitive sports: in purposive training, individuals apply highly structured methods to achieve "specific physiological and philosophical goals" (p. 3). American women--both past and present--have embraced purposive exercise, Todd argues, because of its "implicit promise of improved appearance, the quest for better health, and a desire to feel stronger and more competent" (p. 3). Her conviction that physical training can transform and empower women stems from her experiences as a sport historian, physical educator, and former competitive powerlifter.

Although weight training and power walking may be routine today, Todd posits that purposive exercise was controversial in nineteenth-century America. Activities that promoted female strength and substance (both literal and symbolic)--what Todd calls "Majestic Womanhood"--contrasted with the dominant "Cult of True Womanhood," which prescribed frailty and dependence. Todd examines the ways in which the physical regimens and gender ideologies of various exercise systems in the 1800s challenged (or, at times, accommodated) conservative norms of femininity.

During the 1820s, Todd observes, American advocates of female exercise borrowed European systems of gymnastics that were vigorous and, potentially, liberating. In the 1830s and 1840s, however, programs emphasizing grace rather than strength prevailed; systems such as Catharine Beecher's light calisthenics did little to extend women's physical capacities or contest their social subordination. "Majestic Womanhood" resurfaced during the 1850s and 1860s through the efforts of Orson Squire Fowler and other phrenologists, promoters of heavy weightlifting and exercise entrepreneurs such as Dio Lewis. Through popular health books, private gymnasia, and physical education programs in schools and colleges, mid-century systems of purposive exercise invited women to become large, active, and strong. By Todd's assessment, many such regimens were indeed quite strenuous. In theory and practice, she concludes, "Majestic Womanhood" enabled women to build confidence as well as muscle.

This important theme resonates with recent analyses of female physicality. Scholars in women's history, gender studies, and sport sociology have examined the meaning of the female body, as social construct and lived experience, in various cultures and eras. In what ways have women's bodies been sites of subversion and empowerment as well as discipline and control? Although Todd consulted social histories of health, her book does not fully engage current scholarship about female physicality or women's history.

The title and subtitle betray the book's shortcomings. First, which "body beautiful" did purposive exercise define and transform? Todd does not explicitly identify either the model or the audience for "Majestic Womanhood"--presumably, white, middle-class adult females in the urban Northeast. Nor does she explain adequately why physical strength was promoted and accepted as "beautiful" within this social cohort during the mid-1800s. What specific historical conditions gave rise to "Majestic Womanhood," as an ideal and a practice?

The subtitle also draws attention to the role of exercise in women's lives. Uncovering women's motives and activities is no easy job for a social historian. Although Todd located some valuable archival materials, including letters by students at Mount Holyoke College and by a patient of Dio Lewis, her book in large measure does not describe exercise "in the lives of American women," but instead summarizes the didactic writings of health reformers and exercise entrepreneurs. Undoubtedly, these popularizers of fitness hoped that "Majestic Womanhood" would be realized; scholars, however, must be wary of equating prescriptive literature and common experience.

Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful offers detailed and interesting descriptions of nineteenth-century exercise systems, their intellectual genealogies, and their American promoters. It leaves the reader wondering, however, if purposive exercise in...