Active Bodies: A History of Women's Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

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 historiographic 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.