This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s–1920s). This book focuses on physical culture – systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert – because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the “universal” ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement’s drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.
Author(s): Shannon L. Walsh
Series: Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
1 Introduction: Exorcising a Forgotten Physical Culture
Why Performance
Defining Physical Culture
Muscular Motherhood
Watching Whiteness
The Drive to Delineate Class
Sites of Exploration
Bibliography
2 Progressive Era Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Whiteness
The European Schools: British, Swedish, and German Physical Training
Delsarte: “Too Rooted in Eternity to Negotiate with History”1
Delsarte’s Drawings
Progressive Era Physical Culture in the US: Governing the Strenuous Life
Eugenics and Whiteness in the Progressive Era
Americanization of the Systems
Americanized Delsarte: Classicism as Self-Culture
Conclusion: Americanized Delsarte Moves
Bibliography
3 Dudley Allen Sargent’s Classed and Classing Fitness: Nature, Science, and Mimetic Exercise
Dudley Allen Sargent: From the Farm to the Big Top to the Ivy League
Back to Nature: Romanticizing a Rural Past
Mimetic Exercises and Class Surrogation
Anthropometry: The Mean and Symmetry
Body-Builders: Producing the Reproducers
Conclusion: Habitus and Performance
Bibliography
4 “These Walls Could Not Contain Me”: Social Motherhood at the YWCA
The YWCA, Physical Culture, and Abby Mayhew
The Marvelous Miss Mayhew
Skirts, Bloomers, and Bicycles
Flailing Limbs and the Grotesque
Social Motherhood and Racial Fitness
Performativity and Security
Muscular Christianity for Ladies
Governing Through Self-Control: Mayhew’s Classes Perform
Conclusion: Do as I Say, Not as I Do
Bibliography
5 Racialized Surrogates in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture
Bernarr Macfadden: Weakling to Strongman
Physical Culture: Procreation and Motherhood
Culturing the Physical, Taming the Sexual
Before and After Photographs: Coming into Whiteness
Childbirth and Surrogates
Conclusion: Racial Reproductivity
Bibliography
6 Exercise for Assimilation: Physical Culture for Indigenous Girls and Women
Scene 1: Education for Extinction
Scene 2: Spectacle for Progressive Ends
Scene 3: Physical Culture by the Community, for the Community
Conclusion: Challenging Whiteness
Bibliography
7 Conclusion: Community Fitness for Social Change?
Bibliography
Index
