The feminization of physical culture: The introduction of dance into the American university curriculum

My study took as its point of departure the introduction of dance classes into the American university curriculum. The classes I studied were exclusively for women and were initiated in 1917 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I wanted to understand how this art form, only twenty years earlier reviled as an unhealthy and degenerate practice, entered the academy as a respectable subject for women, although not for men. My research methodologies were drawn from cultural history and feminist inquiries into turn-of-the-century female health and exercise practices. I also used studies in material culture as models to help me analyze the Victorian woman through artifacts from the first dance classes.; I traced how this institutionalizing of a performing art served to both legitimize and constrain dance and practices involving women's bodies in education. The data sources and evidence I used included studying photographs, lesson plans, reminiscences of students and faculty, as well as conducting numerous interviews with alumni and perusing archival documents from department and university files.; In conclusion, my research delineated the complex relationships between social reform, education, and the status of dance in American society in the last third of the Nineteenth Century. This first acknowledgment of women's physical bodies in American higher education carried with it a number of implicit beliefs about making the dancing body more about personal expression than physical display. It also initiated a new consideration of the female body in education as an entity where intellectual and spiritual growth were supported rather than undermined by the proper physical training. My conclusions illuminate the frequent mis-perception of the performing arts, and particularly dance, as merely narrow recreational or entertainment activities and show how these initial conceptions of dance had to be addressed and refuted when dance first entered the university. I found patterns, a rationale, and significant links between the complex and multifaceted world of early Twentieth Century culture and the equally complicated culture of American higher education.