Beyond Gym Teachers: Women Who Advocated Female Physical Education in Spain, 1850-1923

Abstract

In order to analyse the origins of women’s physical education in Spain, it is crucial to examine the contributions made by predominantly female doctors and teachers to women’s physical education in the second half of the nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth century. Their contributions within Spanish society of the time, especially in relation to the feminism that was beginning to emerge and the hygiene movement that was gradually becoming established socially, reveals that advocacy of female physical education served as a means of demanding rights and promoting a model of womanhood that, in some cases, defied the traditional roles of mother and wife. The different strategies of feminist resistance and subversion that sought women’s emancipation went hand in hand with the development of physical education.