From 1830 to 1870, texts promoting gymnastics sought to prevent and cure gynecological and alimentary disorders among U.S. women by strengthening their abdominal muscles, fostering wide waists and convex abdomens, lifting and toning their (floating) uteri, raising their digestive organs, and purifying their blood. Gymnastics discourses thus encouraged participants to incorporate anatomical characteristics associated with the Venus de’ Medici and to become healthy, buoyant women who were robust, substantial, and relatively weightless. This article shows how those texts sought to reform corseted women by enabling them to materially (re)contour and (re)constitute themselves as social subjects—as healthy, true women who had retained important attributes of republican motherhood. Not only does this study identify the particular improved and fortified species of true womanhood that gymnastics endorsed, but it also reintroduces the materialization of (gendered and sexed) subjectivity into the history of sport.
The Bicycle and the Ride to Modern America - The New York Times
We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century
Historic Women in Cycling Pioneers Who Paved the Way for Women
English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century: A
GYMNASTICS, 19th CENTURY by Granger
U.S. History, The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900, Urbanization and Its Challenges
1964: Women's Gymnastics at the Tokyo Olympics – Gymnastics History
[Bogin, Ruth, Loewenberg, Bert J.] on . *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their
Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings
Diets and exercise in Victorian-era Detroit
Nineteenth–Century Gymnastics for U.S. Women and Incorporations of Buoyancy: Contouring Femininity, Shaping Sex, and Regulating Middle–Class Consumption
Slaves to Fashion: A Brief History and Analysis of Women's Fashion in America - Bellatory
Team USA's Olympic Gymnastics Uniforms Through the Years: PHOTOS
Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's