Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction: Exorcising a Forgotten Physical Culture

   • Shannon L. Walsh

   Pages 1-18

3. Progressive Era Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Whiteness

   • Shannon L. Walsh

   Pages 19-55

4. Dudley Allen Sargent’s Classed and Classing Fitness: Nature, Science, and Mimetic Exercise

   • Shannon L. Walsh

   Pages 57-89

5. “These Walls Could Not Contain Me”: Social Motherhood at the YWCA

   • Shannon L. Walsh

   Pages 91-129

6. Racialized Surrogates in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture

   • Shannon L. Walsh

   Pages 131-166

7. Exercise for Assimilation: Physical Culture for Indigenous Girls and Women

   • Shannon L. Walsh

   Pages 167-187

8. Conclusion: Community Fitness for Social Change?

   • Shannon L. Walsh

   Pages 189-195

9. Back Matter

   Pages 197-202

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This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s–1920s). This book focuses on physical culture – systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert – because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the “universal” ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement’s drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

• Physical fitness
• Dance
• Feminism
• New Woman
• Eugenics
• Race
• Jim Crow
• Kinesiology

• School of Theatre, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA

  Shannon L. Walsh

Shannon L. Walsh is Associate Professor of Theatre History at Louisiana State University, USA. She has published in Theatre Annual and Theatre Journal. She also edited Sporting Performance: Politics in Play (2020).

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