From Physical Educators to Mothers of the Dance: Margaret H'Doubler and Martha Hill

Abstract

Margaret H'Doubler and Martha Hill were American physical educators who played pioneering roles in the debate over the place of modern dance in higher education. In establishing the first university degree programme in dance education in the women's physical education department at the University of Wisconsin in 1927, H'Doubler has been credited with challenging the way Americans thought not only about dance and female physicality but also higher education for women. Rivalling the reach and influence of H'Doubler in the promotion of dance education in higher education, however, was Martha Hill, a former student of H'Doubler. In a markedly different approach to the teaching of dance, Hill and her modern dance colleagues at Bennington College reoriented the nature of college dance during the 1930s towards a vocational and professional model, reshaping dance as an arts-based discipline. In my discussion I examine the relative contributions of H'Doubler (who was not a dancer) and Hill (who was a dance performer) to these opposing developments in dance education in the academy during the first half of the twentieth century; trace the rise and fall of dance's importance within women's physical education programmes; and discuss the equivocal nature of H'Doubler and Hill's legacies to feminism and the gendering of the body.