| Throughout the antibellum era, two competing ideals struggled to control the course of women's purposive exercise. Jean Jacques Rousseau's philosophical heirs argued that women were physiologically different from men and therefore required non-vigorous, distinctly feminine exercises. British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft's descendants argued that women had as much right to physical strength, muscularity, and robust health as men did. In examining the course of this debate in the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, several important conclusions have been reached. First, a much more diverse spectrum of women's exercise existed in the antebellum era than is currently described in modern historical texts. Second, several exercise systems had significant links to an ideal of womanhood--called in this text Majestic Womanhood--which directly competed with the prevailing constructs of the ideology of True Womanhood articulated by historian Barbara Welter. Third, purposive training mattered in the lives of American women. It influenced them physically, intellectually, and emotionally and, in many instances, empowered them to step beyond the confines of their separate sphere of domestic duty and involve themselves in the world outside their homes.; Although many didactic books, magazine articles, and self-proclaimed experts contributed to the dialogue on women's exercise in the antebellum era, several major physical education figures stand out: Sarah Pierce, Mary Lyon, William Bentley Fowle, Catharine Beecher, David P. Butler and Dio Lewis. Also important to the debate, however, was the phrenologist Orson S. Fowler, who used the tenets of his popular pseudo-science to argue for the development of a new vision of American womanhood. Based on his belief that bigger bodies meant better brains, Fowler urged women to become larger and stronger through the pursuit of vigorous exercise. Women's rights advocate Dio Lewis adopted Fowler's message and used it to promote his own ideological agenda for women and his exercise system, called the New Gymnastics. |
