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.
A History of Gymnastics, From Ancient Greece to Tokyo 2020, History
Women's Rights []
Lithography in the Nineteenth Century, Essay, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico : Men
English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century: A Comprehensive Guide with 1,117 Illustrations (Dover Fashion and Costumes): Cunnington, C. Willett: 9780486263236: : Books
22. The New Era THE AMERICAN YAWP
Full article: An Ironic Imbalance: Coaching Opportunities and
Nineteenth–Century Gymnastics for U.S. Women and Incorporations of Buoyancy: Contouring Femininity, Shaping Sex, and Regulating Middle–Class Consumption
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and
Absinthe—The Cocaine of the Nineteenth Century - McFarland
Women: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources (Dover
Gymnastics - Wikipedia
Female students at the Royal Central Gymnastic Institute (1880s)
American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body's Revolt, and the