Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Suzanne Shelton, Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 182. 2. Ruth St. Denis, "The Creative Impulse and Education," Denishawn Magazine I, no. 4 (summer 1925): 14-16. 3. The genre term modern dance is used here to refer to the qualities and structures common to works of dance of early to mid-twentieth-century America. Expression, rather than an established vocabulary, was the key to the identity of this genre. Source: Selma Jeanne Cohen, "Genres of Western Theatrical Dance," in International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 3: 130-31. 4. "The dance has suffered too long from the common use made of it as a means of recreation and amusement. Modern civilization has not usually considered it either worthy of serious effort or intellectually profitable. Only recently has progressive education recognized the value of physical education.... as more students with a real scholarly interest enter the field of physical education, they are realizing that its program has too long ignored the relation between body and soul as expressed in regulated rhythm." Margaret H'Doubler, The Dance, and Its Place in Education (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925) 1. 5. St. Denis chides H'Doubler for her remark. "I cannot agree that the stimulus to education by the dance has come, as she says, through a more scholarly interest in physical education," St. Denis writes. "It has come as of old, through the dynamic, creative impulses of the artist." St. Denis, 14. 6. St. Denis, 15. 7. Shelton, 165. 8. Ellen Wiley Todd, The New Woman Revisited: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Todd writes of New Womanhood in this manner in discussing women painters of the early nineteenth century, but many of her comments can be extended to H'Doubler 225 Notes to Pages 5-I I and dance with equal validity. H'Doubler remained a single woman until she was forty-five, she never had children, and she always worked outside the home from her early twenties until well into her sixties. 9. Todd, 8. 10. Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company ofEducated Women: A History ofWomen and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), xvii. Solomon makes a point about the effect of education upon women's life choices at this time. 11. Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots ofModern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), xiv. 12. Todd, 260. 13. H'Doubler recounts with amusement that not only did the dean ofwomen not fire her, but she voiced her own private envy of H'Doubler for freeing herself from the burden of long hair. Mary Alice Brennan, interview with Margaret H'Doubler, 1972. 14. Brennan interview. 15. Mary Hinkson, interview with author. 16. H'Doubler's personal files in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives contain letters from both the Denishawn and Wigman schools of dance in New York (written in 1931 and 1936, respectively) soliciting her graduates as students in their classes. 17. Solomon, 92. 18. St. Denis, 15. 19. Dance: A Creative Art Experience went through five editions from its initial publication in 1940 through its most recent in 1998. More than thirty-six thousand copies of the original edition were sold. 20. Howard Gardner, Frames ofMind, loth ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1983), 205. Gardner identifies control of one's bodily motions and the capacity to handle objects skillfully as Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence. CHAPTER 1. EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY DANCE EDUCATION AND THE FEMALE BODY 1. Mary Lou Remley, "The Wisconsin Idea of Dance: A Decade of Progress, 1917-1926," Wisconsin Magazine ofHistory 58, no. 3 (spring 1975): 183. 2. Margaret H'Doubler, The Dance, and Its Place in Education (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 192 5), 33. 3. H'Doubler's first publication was A Manual ofDancing, a student manual that was out of print when she wrote The Dance, and Its Place in Education. 4. Matthew S. Hughes, Dancingand the Public Schools (Cincinnati: Methodist Book Concern, 1917), 28-29. 5. "The Dance Problem" (1912), "Is Modern Dancing Indecent?" and "The Problem Tango Has Inflicted on the Church." H'Doubler, Dance, and Its Place, 26I. 6. Richard Powers, interview with author. 226 Notes to Pages II-I6 7. Isadora Duncan is the best-known American dancer to have derived, in part, her inspiration for a...