Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America by Martha Verbrugge (review)

Active Bodies is an extensive and authoritative survey of women’s physical education in America. It is the sort of book that can only be successfully written by an experienced historian, partly because of the time required to mine dozens of eclectic and partial archives, and partly because an author has to be confident to offer chapters which mix up methodological and chronological approaches, thematic with historio-graphic arguments. Verbrugge gives us group biographies, examinations of particular social and medical themes over several decades, comparative studies and local histories, and still manages to stitch these into a coherent narrative.

While Active Bodies has an obvious appeal to historians of sport, it is also valuable to historians of medicine and the body. The relationship between biomedical science and sport has only recently begun to attract academic attention, and is still dominated by narratives of sporting resistance to scientific control, or by discussions of doping and exploitative training practices. Verbrugge’s work complicates both these accounts, and adds new ones, since “two premises remained constant in American physical education: the centrality of difference and the reliability of scientific knowledge” (9). She argues that from the turn of the twentieth century, Physical Education as a profession moved slightly away from its previously close links with the biological and physical sciences, adopting social sciences and particularly pedagogy and psychology as other sources of professional identity. But within this shift, female educators continued to point to the separate needs of the female body as a justification for their own vocational activity.

This essential tension between difference and equality is a core, and unresolved, dilemma in every one of the book’s chapters, and Verbrugge is meticulous in considering race alongside gender (and to a slightly lesser extent, sexuality); race and gender affect the biographies of the educators and athletes she considers, they affect the physical educational opportunities available to girls and women, and they shape the content and rhetorical representation of physical activities. This does not mean that all the challenges Verbrugge describes are unique to women. At every level of physical education that she considers—from primary school through college and university—educators, athletes, and funders debate the balance between health and performance, and the extent to which limited funds should be targeted at those with the physique and aptitude for high level sports performance, at the expense of more basic “sport for all.” Verbrugge neatly frames this question as a variation on the equality/difference duality, and shows how, although a universal puzzle for sports, it is also clearly affected by questions of gender and race. (High performance sport is not always appropriate for some bodies, and the differential funding of women’s sports is a constant, and ongoing source of contention.)

Of particular interest to medical historians is Verbrugge’s third chapter, “Gym Periods and Monthly Periods, c.1900–1940.” Although some of this chapter has appeared elsewhere, as have parts of several other chapters, it is useful to see it in full and in context. Verbrugge argues that “[b]etween 1900 and 1940 most white teachers described menstruation as a normal, not pathological process” (64) and that they maintained a bio-mechanical, rather than hormonal understanding of reproduction. Consequently, female teachers figured careful training and sports as part of the maintenance of a healthy (and therefore reproductively fit) female body. This was a site where they could explicitly highlight their own expertise: “female physical educators explained the shortcomings of each potential source. Male physical educators were unqualified, the argument ran, because they could not understand the physical dynamics of womanhood, and girls felt uncomfortable discussing their periods with men” (68). While vigorous activity was considered dangerous around the menstrual period, light training was health-giving, and physical educators did not accept “I’m on my period” as an excuse to...