‘Embodied Selves’: The rise and development of concern for physical education, active games and recreation for american women, 1776–1865*

Abstract

A contributor to the Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775 encouraged greater acknowledgment of the rights of women even though their duties in life might differ from those of men. Before long the Massachusetts Magazine began a series titled ‘On the Equality of the Sexes’ in which Judith Sargent Murray asserted that it was the limited education, employment and recreation permitted women that enervated the body and debilitated the mind. Charles Brockden Brown did likewise in his 1798 book Alcuin. By 1865 numerous Americans had spoken out in favour of greater opportunities for girls and women and recommended more participation in active games and healthful recreations. Among the more moderate were Emma Willard (who established the Troy Female Seminary), Sarah Josepha Hale (editor of the American Ladies Magazine), and Catharine Beecher (who established the Hartford Seminary and wrote extensively on the topic). British-born Frances Wright and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, both dedicated supporters of ‘woman's rights’, were especially forceful in their arguments in favour of political and other opportunities for women. Fuller would have girls learn to excel in a race, swim, and use every exercise that could impact vigour to their bodies and independence to their minds. Stanton declared in 1850 (much as Mary Wollstonecraft had done in 1792): ‘We cannot say what the woman might be physically, if the girl were allowed all the freedom of the boy, in romping, swimming, climbing, and playing hoop and ball’. Educational, medical, and other journals also took up the topic. Physician William Andrus Alcott condemned ‘errors in the physical education of young women’ in Young Woman's Book of Health (1850) and questioned whether their inferior strength and endurance might not be due to their ‘mis-education’. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to graduate from a proper medical school and author of The Laws of Life, With Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls (1852), was convinced this was so, stating that women no less than men could not live as ‘disembodied spirit’.