labrys,
études féministes/ estudos feministas
julho/dezembro 2015 - juillet/décembre 2015
Sport, Gender and Society in a Transatlantic Victorian Perspective
Roberta J. Park
Abstract:
This article will attempt to cast some further light on nineteenth and early twentieth-century concepts of sport and gender, specifically in a transatlantic Anglo-American perspective. The focus will be on ‘middle class’ constructs. The word ‘sport’ will be used as an inclusive category term to comprehend a diversity of physical activities which, in the eyes of participants and commentators, were intended to improve one’s physical, mental and/or moral health, as well as those events which range from simple recreational pursuits of a physical nature to highly organized agonistic contests. One other point needs attention. Nineteenth-century Americans were not always very precise in their use of the term ‘British’, often using it when they meant only the English. In general, I have followed the conventions of the nineteenth-century American press.
Key-words: sport, women, middle class,health
Introduction
The title of this article suggests that these phenomena will be considered in a ‘transatlantic’ context. The vector arrow will point westward from Great Britain to the United States. The antecedents of American forms of sports, and the values associated with them, at least initially, came from Great Britain, most especially from England. Nineteenth-century American concepts of proper gender role, especially among the middle and upper classes, also were derived substantially from ‘English’ models. With relatively few exceptions, the predominant sports in America at the end of the nineteenth century had crossed the Atlantic with British immigrants and visitors. Basketball, a game devised by James Naismith for young men in 1891, had become popular with college women in the late 1890s. Baseball, touted as early as 1869 as America’s ‘national game’, had evolved from rounder. Gridiron football, the major intercollegiate sport, had been manufactured by college students and their professional coaches from rugby in the 1880s and 1890s. Tennis, golf, croquet, crew, boxing, track athletics, and field hockey - the last always more popular with American women than with men - had all been introduced from Britain, as had horse-racing in the earlier centuries. Callisthenic exercises and gymnastic programmes, on the other hand, were more likely to trace their antecedents to German and Scandinavian immigrants, although even some forms of these had come by way of England. (Lucas & Smith, 1978; Baker,1982; Roth, 1853; Allen, 1959; Grattan,1859).
The forms which sporting and recreational activities took in the nineteenth century reinforced prevailing concepts of gender. In fact, in the decades following the Civil War (1861-65), organized sport and various forms of vigorous physical activity became major vehicles for defining and acting out male gender roles (Vance, 1975; Honey, 1977; Mangan;1981). This was true whether one participated, watched, discussed, read about or wrote about sport. Sport was forcefully and graphically depicted as the ‘natural’ province of males; hence, sport contributed substantially to establishing and maintaining ideologies about the proper sphere of women.
In the Western world, as several recent commentators have noted, there has been a tendency to describe natural and social phenomena in terms of oppositional characteristics. The world is dichotomized and two opposed terms mutually define each other. Debates about sex and sex roles during the nineteenth century hinged on the ways in which sexual boundaries might become blurred (Jordanova,1980). To be sure, this categorization, and the assumptions which underlay it, was largely a ‘middle class’ construct; but as the middle class increasingly became the arbiters of right conduct, it also affected, in varying degrees, others in the society. There were, of course, large numbers of men and women who did not share the same lived experience and hold the same values. Disraeli had remarked on ‘the Two Cultures’ in 1845 and, as Harrison has pointed out, by the 1890s, most middle class Americans had no idea how ‘the other half’ lived. The sporting scenes depicted in the National Police Gazette after Belfast-born Richard Kyle Fox took over the moribund publication convey quite a different concept of women than did the more cultured press. According to Fox, who was ever prone to exaggeration, there were women playing baseball in the 1870s, and women wrestlers, boxers, balloonists and performing gymnasts. Moreover, frontier farm and ranch women often found it necessary to perform work similar to that of their menfolk, and a few were ranch owners, totally responsible for overseeing enormous herds of cattle. On the frontier, women might fish, hunt, engage in camping and go hiking. Some, like Annie Oakley, became trick-shooting or rodeo stars (Myres, 1982; Smith and Smith, 1972).
As Daniel Walker Howe has pointed out in Victorian America: ‘Using the name of a foreign monarch to describe an aspect of a country’s history implies some relationship between the two countries.’ Indeed, a close connection between Great Britain and the United States existed in the nineteenth century, especially in the period preceding the Civil War. Colonial (that is, eighteenth-century) literary, artistic, political, and legal forms, as well as Colonial sport, reflected their British antecedents. Continued influence was reinforced by a shared language. Until the 1850s a very large percentage of what Americans read was of British origin, and because foreign works were not protected by international copyright laws until 1892, American publishers could, and did, routinely pirate the works of popular authors. Harper’s Monthly Magazine, established in 1850 to appeal to a broad American readership, flatly declared: ‘The magazine will transfer to its pages as rapidly as they may be issued all the continuous tales of Dickens, Bulwer, Croly, Lever, Warren and other distinguished contributors to British periodicals‘. E.L. Godkin’s The Nation, intended by its editor to be an American version of The Spectator, routinely included commentaries on British events well into the twentieth century. Sports-minded Americans before the Civil War era often read more about English sport than they did of their own. Bell’s Life in London and the English Sporting Magazine, for example, served as models for American publishers.
Of all the books available to readers in America in 1857, only Little Dorrit sold more copies than Tom Brown’s School Days. In 1893 Selwin Tait and Sons, New York publishers, surveyed major libraries to determine which books circulated most frequently. A Iist of 170 titles, headed by David Copperfield, included Ivanhoe, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, John Halifax - Gentleman, The Mil/ on the Floss, Tom Brown’s School Days and Kingsley’s Hypatia among the top twenty-five (Mabie, 1894).
Hughes’ stories were instrumental in establishing sport in the school story genre, which developed in America in the 1880s and 1890s. Frank Merriwell’s and Ralph Barbour’s young heroes shared a number of physical and moral virtues with Tom Brown at both Rugby and Oxford. American versions of manuals such as The Boys’ Own Book: A Complete Encyclopedia of All the Diversions, Athletic, Scientific and Recreational were available, and a London edition of Cassel’s Complete Book of Sports and Pastimes included sections on LaCrosse and Baseball, undoubtedly to increase its attractiveness in North America. Several New England elite preparatory schools such as, for example, Worcester Academy, Groton and St. Paul’s, were patterned after English public schools and imported much of their game-playing ethos from them (Messenger, 1981; Evans; 1972; Barbour, 1900)
.During the nineteenth century American concepts of manliness changed. So, too, did the concept of the ideal woman. Anthony Rotundo has recently described this major shift in middle-class ideals of manhood from a standard ‘ ... rooted in the life of the community and qualities of a man’s soul to a standard of manhood based on individual achievement and the male body’(Rotundo, 1983). These new values could be seen, in part, in the rapid rise of interest in intercollegiate athletics, the out-of-door movement, and the anthropometry craze of the 1880s and 1890s. They could also be seen in growing anxieties about masturbation, impotence, illness, and a feebleness in the American (read middle-class Anglo-Saxon American) race. Among the prominent features of the ‘reorientation of American culture’ in the 1890s was an‘ ... urge to be young, masculine and adventurous’. It was also in the 1890s that the concept of the ‘New Woman’ emerged and that college and upper-class women, in particular, began to engage in organized sporting activities (Rosenberg,1978; Young, 1872; Spencer, 1871).
Many women in Colonial America had owned and run taverns; some were printers; and a few had been carpenters and blacksmiths. Even among families which were quite well off, Colonial women were expected to balance femininity with a certain amount of robustness. For reasons which are still not entirely clear- but which certainly seem to be related to more routinized work patterns, a growing materialism and competitiveness, and a perceived need among the rising entrepreneurial class to define and legitimate its status - ideas about woman’s proper sphere began to change in the early 1800s. Her range of activity and influence was increasingly confined to the home at the same time that her body was encased in whalebone corsets and layers of clothing which covered her from throat to floor. By the middle years of the nineteenth century the tradition that women had useful work to perform had given way to newer ideals of grace and ornament, at least for those families which could afford such life styles. The leisured woman, unsullied by toil, well but modestly dressed, became a visual symbol of the success of the household, giving status to its male head (Higham, 1972). Mary Kelley has provided a perceptive portrait of the type of life which was open to middle-class women in the United States in her study of best-selling American ‘literary domestics’, those female writers whose enormously popular, saccharine novels made them well-known public figures, even though their private lives may have been circumscribed by convention:
"That any of these nineteenth century [literary] women carne to have this semblance of male status was a strange development indeed. Women were isolated from and generally denied participation in their country’s public life [...] Unlike a male, a female’s person was to be shielded from public scrutiny. Neither her ego nor her intellect was cultivated for future public vocation [...] Even her exercise of moral, social, or personal influence was to be indirect, subtle, and symbolic. Her voice was to be soft, subdued, and soothing. In essence, hers was to remain an invisible presence." (Kelley, 1984:111-12)
Middle-class Victorian concepts of woman were remarkably similar on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of the reason for this may be accounted for by the fact that both countries were experiencing similar technological changes. Similarities in ideas concerning women were also perpetuated by a continued contact between the two countries. British novels about women were popular in America. Authors like Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell served as models for the American ‘literary domestics’, whose novels greatly outsold those of their male contemporaries, leading Nathanial Hawthorne to fulminate: ‘America is now wholly given over to a d----d lot of scribbling women .... ‘American ideas also sometimes flowed eastward; three different dramatizations of Mrs E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, for example, played simultaneously in London in the 1850s. (Hart,1950)
However, it is doubtful that American values had anything like the same impact on British culture. Middle-class Americans were also familiar with much of the British health reform literature, and they expressed their own concerns in a wide assortment of journals and periodicals. Vegetarians, Grahamites, hydropathists, phrenologists and advocates of exercise systems bombarded the public with their ideas. An anxiety that Americans were physically inferior to their English contemporaries, apparent in literary, educational, religious and popular journals prior to the Civil War, became even more evident in the 1870s (Walters, 1978; Park, 1977; Higginson;1861). By the 1890s, however, Americans were asserting that they were the world’s foremost nation, and that they were physically and technologically, if not intellectually and morally, superior to everyone. Sport - male sport - was frequently used in an effort to establish this presumption of superiority.
The messages were often highly contradictory, with the same journal first proclaiming that a new and better breed of men was being developed in the land of boundless opportunity, then lamenting that an overabundance of work and a singleminded dedication to getting ahead was weakening the American race. In general, the tendency was to repeatedly assume that English girls and women were physically superior to American women. Graham’s Journal of Health and Longevity, for example, declared: ‘ [...] English girls, it is well known, walk five or six miles with ease. They do not reason, as our girls do, that to be pretty and "interesting", they must be livid, pale and consumptive ....’ (‘Exercise of Females’, The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity II (Aug. 1838: 254). The Massachusetts Teacher in 1856 proclaimed:
"It is [...] a palpable fact, that the girlhood of our countrywomen does not have those advantages for full development of the physical nature which English customs have long since established. The English girl spends one half of her waking hours in physical amusements .... She rides, walks, drives, rows upon the water, runs, dances, plays, sings, jumps the rope, throws the ball, hurls the quoit, draws the bow, keeps up the shuttlecock ... ’"Out of Door Amusements’, Massachusetts Teacher XII (1856: 564).
Hours at Home discussed ‘National Characteristics’ claiming that the American educational system, the most open in the world, had fallen far short ‘ ... of the public schools of England, which have clone so much toward making England the power that she is. An English lad is a trained boxer, a cricketer, an oarsman, and so learns muscular control and mastery ...‘ (‘The Englishman As A Natural Curiosity’, Lippincott’s Magazine II (Oct. 1868), 441-7). Lippincott’s Magazine in 1868 found that the great schools and universities of England provided ‘[ ..]. a training toward true manliness ... a tone of honor, liberality without prodigality[ ..]. and a superb physical development which produces a type of manly and accomplished gentlemen such as are found, as a class, nowhere else’ (‘National Characteristics’, Hours at Home I (Oct. 1865:. 544-8).
Comments such as these appeared frequently in literary journals and some educational journals, while the popular press was more intent on portraying a more rugged ‘Yankee’ demeanour in sports. Few Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were as constant and impassioned spokesmen for the cause of ‘manly exercise’ as was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, aptly called America’s prophet of ‘muscular Christianity’. ln 1862 Higginson discussed the advantages of gymnastic exercises and the relative poor health of American girls, finding that England "[...] furnish[ed] the representative types of vigorous womanhood"(Higginson; 1862).
Catharine Beecher’s extremely popular Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families (1856), a work which had a considerable impact on education for women as well as on ideas regarding physical education, informed its readers: ‘ln this nation it is rare to see a married woman of thirty or forty, especially _in the more wealthy classes, who retains the fullness of person and the freshness of complexion that mark good health. But in England, almost all women are in full perfection of womanhood at that period of life. While vast numbers of British girls and women might have cause to dispute the contentions of American commentators, what is of consequence is that many Americans believed that British men and women were healthier, more physically active, more prone to take out-of-door exercise, and, it was feared, superior beings. Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Martineau, Lyell, Matthew Arnold, Spencer, Huxley, Kingsley, Hughes and Kipling were but a few of the many British and other European visitors who made one or more tours of the United States in the nineteenth century. Most foreign observers were convinced that American men paid their women an exaggerated chivalry, and suggested that perhaps it was to compensate for ‘[ ...]the fact that the female was not [really] granted equality ...’ in a nation which boasted of being egalitarian. Most doubted that American women deserved the elevated status accorded them. They also found objectionable the American fascination with youth and the tendency to early marriage.
By the 1880s, however, a new message began to be heard. In his popular and well-received The American Commonwealth (1888), James Bryce concluded that America’s progress owed much to the contributions of its women, and David Macrae found on his visit in 1898 that the women seemed stronger and better developed than he had observed 30 years earlier. Kipling, who married one, found American women superior to their English counterparts in their ability to think and talk; and almost everyone was convinced that American women were superior to American men. 1t must be remembered, however, that the types of women with whom foreign visitors carne into contact were almost certainly not as representative as the men. In general, they were the better educated, wealthier women, and likely to possess at least a few of the social graces which could make a cultured visitor feel that some semblance of civilization had finally come to this barbarous country (Rapson, 1971).
Prior to the 1860s, organized sport was embryonic in America. Cricket teams were forever forming and disbanding, baseball was an evolving game, and college sports were desultory affairs frowned upon by faculty and administrators. The Harvard-Yale Regatta of 1852 marked the nation’s first ‘official’ intercollegiate athletic contest. Even such rudimentary forms of sport for women would have been unthinkable, given prevailing Victorian standards. Callisthenic exercise and simple recreations, however, were another matter. A spate of periodicals, of which the Journal of Health and Longevity was one example, urged dietary reform, callisthenic exercises, the ‘water cure’, out-of-door amusements and physical education for girls and women, as well as for boys and men. Dr. R.T. Trall’s The Illustrated Family Gymnasium, published in New York in 1857, for example, contained numerous diagrams taken from Walker’s Manly Exercises (1834), and included a variety of callisthenic and vocal exercises for girls. The benefits of healthful exercise in the formation of pro per female character, and as preparation for the important duties of motherhood, were frequently stressed. The majority of the advice literature was similar to that offered by Margaret Coxe (1842) in Young Lady’s Companion: women needed proper physical education because it was their Christian duty to raise physically healthy and morally sound children. A few women’s rights advocates, however, urged physical education as a means to emancipation and self-fulfilment.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton related that her life-long crusade for ‘women’s rights’ was given added impetus when she and Lucretia Mott were refused seats on the main floor at the 1840 London World Anti-Slavery Convention. Of all the pre-Civil War female women’s rights advocates, Stanton was most convinced that vigorous physical activity and a stronger and healthier body were vital to the advancement of women. Writing for The Lily, a newspaper founded by Amelia Bloomer and dedicated to women’s issues, Stanton rejected ‘man’s claim to physical superiority’, stating: ‘We cannot say what the woman might be physically, if the girl were allowed all the freedom of the boy, in romping, swimming, climbing and playing ball [...] ‘ Such hoydenish activities could help women to become intelligent and self-reliant. It was for this reason, far more than because healthy women would be better mothers, that Stanton continually insisted that girls and women should have improved physical education. Dress reform, admission to schools which could prepare them for law, medicine and divinity (the ‘male professions’), and an adequate ‘physical education’ were central issues in the pre-Civil War women’s rights movement. Several ladies began to wear a slightly shortened skirt and pantaloons, ultimately referred to as ‘bloomers’, after Mrs Bloomer whose paper pressed the dress reform issue. This costume was repeatedly criticized in the male-dominated general press, which pictured those who wore it smoking cigars, entering saloons and abandoning their childrearing duties. In the end, even Stanton gave it up, agreeing that the antagonism which dress reform aroused was impeding other efforts. The costume did come to be accepted, however, as appropriate for women to wear when they took exercises in the gymnasium, and it was clearly advocated in the early 1860s in Dio Lewis’ popular book New Gymnastics.
The Civil War marks an important watershed in American history. The agonizing dislocations of the sectional strife had forced the nation to grow from ‘infancy’ to ‘adulthood’ - or at least to ‘adolescence’. In the last three decades of the century industry and technology developed rapidly, affecting the entire nation. The move to medium sized towns and large cities, which had begun as a trickle in the 1850s reached major proportions by the late 1870s, creating as Robert Wiebe has maintained in The Search for Order, a revolution in values and the creation of a new middle class whose ambition was to "[ ..] fulfil its destiny through bureaucratic means". The populations of the rampantly growing cities were swollen by hordes of immigrants, now much more from central and southern Europe than from Britain, Germany, or Scandinavia. Attitudes regarding what constituted the ideal man changed, as did attitudes concerning the ideal woman. By the 1890s, among the better educated in particular, Victorian womanly virtues were being challenged by those of ‘the New Woman’; there was much ambivalence, however, even among those who subscribed to more equity for women. Characteristics which this ‘New Woman’ embodied included independent spirit and athletic zeal: ‘She rode a bicycle, played tennis or golf, showed six inches of stocking beneath her skirts, and loosened her corsets.’ The New Woman wanted ‘[ ..] to belong to the human race, not the ladies’ aid society to the human race’ (Rosenberg, 1982).
For women to have increased opportunities in sport, attitudes toward the female sex and toward sport, in general, had to change. Two articles which appeared at the end of the decade of the 1860s reflect newly emerging American attitudes toward leisure and sport. ln 1867 the New Englander reported:"The number and variety of the papers on the subject of Amusements which have [recently] appeared "[...] indicate that this theme is one which demands a new discussion, if not a change of position." The Nation flatly stated in 1869: ‘The taste for athletic sports in America is not over fifteen years old. It is only within the last ten or twelve years that it can be said to have found a firm foothold in the colleges." Numerous historians have now documented the rapid rise of organized sport in the later decades of the 1800s. During the nineteenth century numerous British sportsmen and sports teams visited the United States routinely demonstrating their athletic superiority well into the 1880s. Earlier visits usually received cordial treatment in the press. Harper’s Weekly for 15 October 1859, for example, discussed a series of cricket matches between an Eleven of All-England and a United States Twenty-two, noting that the superiority of the English was to be expected as in America:
"[...]the importance of athletic exercises is only beginning to be understood. Men of thirty can remember well that, when they were at school, proficiency in the athletic games of the play-ground was regarded rather as a drawback... Bank clerks, young merchants, mercantile aspirants, ali seemed to think time devoted to manly exercise wasted[ ..]". (Harper’s Weekly, 15 October 1859).
However, the author concluded: ‘Another twenty years, and no doubt our people will be as devoted to athletic exercises as the English. The results on the American frame will surprise physiologists.’ By the last decades of the century Americans, indeed, had taken to athletic sports with a vengeance, converting most of them into models which were highly visible, business-like, professional, and thoroughly infused with pragmatic Yankee values. This tendency was criticized in the British press and also by numerous Americans who preferred what might be called an idealized interpretation of ‘muscular Christianity’ and English schoolboy sport. The conflict between the two views became intense in the 1890s and early 1900s, especially in intercollegiate athletics and with regard to the programmes like those conducted by the Amateur Athletic Union. In 1854 Theodore Parker, New England Unitarian minister, had declared:"America was settled by two very different classes of men, one animated by moral and religious motives, coming to realize an idea; the other animated by only commercial ideas [...]".
There was a certain aptness, albeit exaggeration, to Parker’s remark- one which was increasingly reflected in American attitudes concerning vigorous exercise, physical education, sport, and ultimately, intercollegiate athletics. Foreign commentators from de Tocqueville onwards had remarked about the materialistic bent of American society, and Americans themselves had often noted their countrymen’s preoccupation with getting ahead. The framers of the Constitution had endeavoured to eliminate two dominant features of European tradition - a state religion and a hereditary aristocracy. Ali free-born men in Colonial America were to be ensured certain inalienable rights. (It is doubtful that the intent was to extend the same rights to women, however.) Although all men might be possessed of certain basic inalienable rights, it was clear that they were not all equally endowed with the same aptitudes. Jefferson had argued in the late eighteenth century that the most able individuals must be permitted to rise to positions of leadership if the nation was to survive. A Natural Aristocracy based upon talent and ability, rather than some artificial distinction of rank or class, was to be encouraged. It was not too great a step from the concept of a Natural Aristrocracy to the belief in the Self-Made Man which gained widespread popularity in the 1820s. The reality, of course, fell far short of the ideal (it was easier, for example, to be ‘self-made’ if one were Protestant and Anglo-Saxon), yet in a country which was rich with natural resources and where land was either free or inexpensive, one could move into the unsettled stretches of the Ohio Valley and the Far West. Grit and hard work could help one advance!
By the 1850s the belief that hard work, more than talent, provided the surest means for determining a man’s success had gained prominence. In his prize-winning study of the work ethic in industrial America, Daniel T. Rodgers has described how a new world of mills, factories, massed wage earners, machinery and sub-divided labour changed both the nature of the work which Americans did and their ideas about work. Hours of employment decreased and there was more ‘free’ time. Increasingly this leisure was turned to activities which were as arduous as work and were carried out at the frenetic pace of the market-place: "The doctrine of the industrious life pervaded churches and children’s storybooks, editorial columns and the stump rhetoric of politics [...] Theodore Roosevelt caught its tenor in his thundering insistence that only the strenuous life was worth living [...]" Action, in business, in daily life, and in leisure pursuits had become an American preoccupation by the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Both social scientists and historians have drawn attention to various relationships which developed between business, concepts of work, and the dominant forms of sport which arose in the late Victorian period. Gelber (1983) for example, recently examined the ‘ ... relationships between nineteenth century business society and baseball, and the bachelor subculture of which baseball was such an important part’. Analysing arguments which favour the compensatory theory of sports and arguments which support the congruence theory of sport, Gelber (1983) concluded that baseball was popular because underneath such superficial differences as the pastoral-appearing parks in which it was played and the Jack of clock-defined playing periods, baseball had a deep correspondence with men’s everyday work experiences. The Metropolitan declared in 1883 that men took the same "[...] delight in exercising the physical and mental powers [...] over a game of baseball [...]" as a "[...] workman takes in laying bricks handsomely[...]" A similar observation was made by the coach of the Harvard University football team to the president of the University of California in 1906 when Berkeley was about to abandon gridiron football and take up English rugby. Harvard’s Reid was convinced that rugby would never appeal to the American boy because it lacked precision and science.
It is only recently that we have begun to understand that sports are cultural artefacts, and as such they are very likely to reflect the dominant social systems and salient values of the cultures in which they exist. Games are filled with symbolism and, as extended performative systems, they can sometimes become fairly elaborate statements about cultures. This is powerfully illustrated by anthropological works such as Clifford Geertz’s highly influential paper on the Balinese cockfight. More recently, John MacAloon has built upon Victor Turner’s rich insights concerning ‘social dramas’ and Erving Goffman’s work on the ‘framing of experience’ and analysed the origins of the modern Olympic Games. MacAloon’s work forces us to recognize that these types of cultural performances are constituted of far more than the athletic contest, which is usually embedded in ritual, festival, and even spectacle frames. This is especially the case in highly elaborated forms such as the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, the World Cup, or the American intercollegiate football rivalries. These types of multi-layered performances were on the ascendency in the late nineteenth century.
In The End of American Innocence Henry May depicted pre-First World War American society as a triptych. On the left were the advocates of progress whose dispositions were embodied in men like Theodore Roosevelt. These were men such as those who had built great steel companies, oil monopolies and financial empires - those who saw the United States replacing Great Britain as the international power broker. They were the types of men whom novelist Frank Norris portrayed in his novel A Man’s Woman: "[...] great, strong, harsh, brutal men-men with purpose who let nothing, nothing stand in their way’. Here, too, were the ambitious, energetic social reformers, men like Jacob Riis and Lester Ward," [...] ruthless in their zeal for human advancement". On the right, and smaller, panel, were the ‘custodians’ of a culture which was largely founded in Anglo-Saxon traditions and values: men like Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot, who revered America but found it mortifying that in their games Americans were morally inferior to the English. The present and the future, May concluded, belonged to those on the left. This was as true for athletics as it was for politics, business, industry and a whole range of other endeavours.
In late April 1898 the United States had declared war with Spain over the issue of Cuban independence. The ‘Splendid Little War’ was over all too soon for those who, like Roosevelt, revelled in the cult of the ‘strenuous life’. What war could not provide, perhaps sports could. This litany issued from the pages of an astonishing assortment of journals and periodicals. Of all the sports, football became the most martial, and within the college ranks, the most popular. It was touted as the game which exemplified all the qualities of the best of American manhood. It was also the game which most encapsulated, in multi pie layers of performative frames, the salient features of American society.
By the 1890s America had clearly become desirous of assuming the position of the leading sporting nation in the world. In 1894 W.H. Grenfell reported the results of the first international intercollegiate track meeting - between Oxford and Yale - in the Fortnightly Review. Although they had lost the match 31/2 events to SV2 events, the Yale team members were praised for their deportment, and the author asserted that the visitors had done a great deal to "[...] draw two great portions of the Anglo-Saxon race closer together [...]". Most Americans, however, were not very disposed to place comradeship or common ancestral origins above victory in athletics. American athletes were victorious over the London Athletic Club at the Penn Relays in 1895, and did not hesitate to proclaim their superiority. Of these contests, the satirical London Weekly Sun declared: "Rule Britannia" is but the last despairing wail of a played out race.
We are no longer athletically or nautically supreme; indeed we are very small beer.’ In the same year Lord Dunraven refused to race his Valkyrie II against Defender because of a dispute with American yachting officials. In a panegyric to American athletics in 1901, James E. Sullivan, President of the Amateur Athletic Union, boasted that although in 1875 all the holders of amateur records in running and walking events had been Englishmen, Irishmen, or Scotsmen, Americans now held nine-tenths of the records. Moreover, Sullivan noted, Americans had won nearly all the significant prizes at the 1900 Olympic Games. He neglected to point out, however, that outside of the admittedly important track and field competitions, Americans had won only one third-place medal, that in ‘game shooting’, at these Games. Victory was sweet, but it was most sweet when the nation that had given the world ‘sport’ was the one, which the Yankees defeated.
In 1895 American college crews had begun to attend the Henley Regatta. Bent upon demonstrating their rowing superiority, they had followed practices similar to those which most American crews used at home. Charles Courtney, the professional coach from Cornell University, was criticized by the British for holding work-like training regimens and keeping his athletes away from other competitors. Things had become so bad by 1901, following the visit of a University of Pennsylvania crew, that the stewards served notice that henceforth American crews wishing to compete at Henley would have to leave their salaried instructors at home. In reporting on the different attitudes of the two countries toward athletics, and the British assertion that American teams were only likely to venture abroad if they were sure of victory (a reaction to the 1904 Harvard/Yale-Oxford/Cambridge track meet), Ralph D. Paine, a regular contributor to Casper Whitney’s elite Outdoor Magazine, observed: ‘Our army of professional coaches and trainers, and the almost incredible cost of intercollegiate sport, have helped to feed the suspicions of the British onlooker.’ The Quarterly Review in 1904 discussed a growing professional tendency in Britain and expressed alarm that American Rhodes scholars were likely to pollute university sport with their single-minded attitudes toward winning:
"A subtle influence from abroad will shortly be felt in one of these ancient strongholds of fair-play[...] Mr Eugene L. Lehmann of New York City, who graduated from Yale in 1902, was chosen as a Rhodes scholar for Oxford at the age of twenty-two[...] Already American athletes have proved their value as Oxford undergraduates at the Queen’s Club meeting. It is not unlikely that several of the Rhodes scholars will be first-rate athletes too[...] Shall we have to congratulate an English Cambridge on standing unaided in the encounter, or to discount her rival’s victories by the fact of alien assistance? "(Harper’s Weekly for 15 October 1859)
Crew, track, baseball and gridiron football were then, and still are, the major American intercollegiate sports. Although each had its devoted followers, no sport was as popular as football. Few universities or colleges in the late nineteenth century, no matter how small, failed to have a team. Each institution also quickly established an arch rival, an attempt at emulation of the Harvard-Yale rivalry, which in its turn was patterned after an American conception of the Oxford-Cambridge athletic rivalry. Alumni returned to their campuses each year for the annual renewal of the football feud - or, perhaps, the regatta, if the college had a crew. It became widely believed that a victory for alma mater would be rewarded by financial offerings, in the form of alumni donations to the college, from the now satisfied members of the extended family. At institutions with prestigious athletic teams, income from football could sometimes support the entire athletic programme and physical education classes in these early years. lt is a matter of record that gate receipts in the late 1800s and early 1900s were often quite substantial.
These ‘big games’ rapidly became elaborate ramified cultural performances. For several days prior to the event frenetic activities were held at the campuses of the two protagonists. At rallies the student body was exhorted to assist its team’s efforts to defeat the enemy on the day of the battle. On the day of the contest songs, school colours, cheering sections, mascots, banners and a host of other devices helped to intensify the cultural messages which were being enacted on the playing field. The contest itself incorporated a number of salient turn-of-century American values, two of the most important being an assumption of equality and a celebration of rank. While it was assumed that both teams started off even and that the codified playing rules set the conditions whereby a fundamental equality would be ensured, it was also clear that effort, ability and teamwork usually enabled one to prevail. Egalitarianism spoke to the ideals upon which the country had been founded, while effort and achievement echoed the Jeffersonian ideal of a Natural Aristocracy. (The Jacksonian Self-Made Man incorporated both.) The teamwork needed to prevail in games such as football also clearly reflected the commercial, competitive dictates of the new corporate-industrial arder. There could also be muted statements that one must have a modicum of ‘luck’, a message which also formed the core of the Horatio Alger success stories which were popular at the end of the century.
Football also literally ‘embodied’ another concept which had increasingly troubled many Americans ever since Spencer’s Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical (1862) and Darwin’s books, especially the Descent of Man (1871), had engendered a host of evolutionary controversies. The movement which carne to be known as ‘Social Darwinism’ has now received considerable attention from social scientists and historians on both sides of the Atlantic. Many contemporary tendencies were caught up in and expounded under the rubric of evolutionary and hereditarian theories. The concepts of ‘struggle’ and ‘survival of the most fit’ articulated well with already existing notions of competition, merited success, and deserved failure. Commentators increasingly began to draw parallels between the college athlete and the type of man most likelyto ensure the future success of the nation. In 1879 Lloyd S. Bryce’s article ‘A Plea for Sport’ appeared in the North American Review. Borrowing from Darwinian biological theory - and using this to buttress his own notions of how societies should be ordered- Bryce sought to show why it was necessary for every educational establishment in the United States to provide ample out-of-door facilities where the youth of the nation might acquire not only ‘ ... muscular vigor, but the manly virtues of truth, honor and fair play’. In an accompanying argument which smacked of elitism, he advocated healthful exercise for both those destined to lead society and for the urban poor. The former needed physical, intellectual and moral vigour in order to lead. The latter were to learn through games that what a man achieves is a result of industry and self-control and thereby become reconciled to their lot.
Increasingly varsity athletes were depicted as men who possessed those qualities which the American nation most needed: leadership; executive power; perseverance; determination; courage; virility. Arms akimbo, in the battledress of sport, they were living portrayals of captains of industry or of Commodore Dewey in Manila Harbor. At the same time, however, athletes were expected to develop ‘a faithful obedience to authority’. In December 1892 the Chicago Graphic declared: ‘Football is typical of all that is heroic in American sport.’ The Saturday Evening Post, three months after the short-lived Spanish-American War, asserted: ‘The capacity to take hard knocks which belongs to a successful football player is usually associated with the qualities that would enable a man to lead a charge up San Juan Hill ....’ The jingoism was unmistakable. While a Rough Rider was not identical to a member of the immortal ‘Light Brigade’, each was infused with physical stamina, virile masculinity and manly courage - or so the ideology proclaimed. Each soldier was doing good work for his country, just as the athlete was doing ‘good work’ for his school. Young, strong, courageous, competent, the athlete was the idealized hope of the future: imperialistically, economically, socially, and biologically. ln an age which believed in the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the athlete was the image of the ideal sire. It is more than chance that many who advocated vigorous athletics were also active in early twentieth-century eugenics movements.
Many of the more important features of evolutionary and hereditarian theorizing were also caught up in the anthropometry movement which developed on both sides of the Atlantic. Francis Galton’s growth studies had a substantial influence on American anthropometricists and his Hereditary Genius (1879) greatly influenced the eugenics movement. Galton and Charles Roberts were made Honorary Members of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education shortly after that organization was founded in 1885. The field of physical education saw itself as one of the most important of the age for studying and solving problems of great value to the human race, and it has always had a strong reformist orientation. Edward L. Hitchcock, the first president of the AAAPE, had begun to collect anthropometric measures of male students at Amherst College in the 1860s. ln his 1887 annual address before the AAAPE, Hitchcock declared that educators needed information about the proper and normal proportions of the body so that they might ‘ ... develop the most perfect type of man and woman in body, soul and spirit’ At the 1890 AAAPE convention Luther Halsey Gulick, medical doctor, physical educator, YMCA leader, and future officer of the Playground Association of America, insisted that the profession of physical education offered a fundamental means for building the nation "‘[...] as it works to develop a superior race".
No American physical educator in the late 1800s was as ardent an anthropometrist as Dudley Allen Sargent, M.D., Director of the Hemenway Gymnasium at Harvard University. Between 1887 and 1889 Sargent published a three-part series in Scribner’s Magazine on the physical development of the ‘typical man’, ‘women’, and ‘the athlete’ . The anthropometric movement was preoccupied with ideal forms, statistical abstractions derived from scores of measurements of the length and girth of various body segments of thousands of individuals. Based on these, an individual was judged to be deficient in certain attributes, and in the case of students, required to engage in gymnastic programmes devised to correct whatever measurements were deemed inferior. Athletes, of course, constituted a separate - and elevated - group, with special subcategories rapidly developed for each of the various sports. A man was now defined not only by what he accomplished; he was also given identity and status on the basis of his morphology. Similar measurements, but an absence of such stringent judgments concerning structure and form, were also applied to women students. Both maleness and ‘manliness’ were defined, in substantial measure, by late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury middle-class Americans in terms of bodily form and vigorous action, especially in athletic sports and out-of-door pursuits; and because maleness defined what was important, it also provided the background against which ‘female’ was to be defined and judged.
Higher education and athletic sport were both instrumental in the transformation of American concepts regarding the feminine ideal in the late 1800s. Traditional values associated with the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ continued to exist alongside the emerging model of the ‘New Woman’, to be sure. Tensions between the two were often quite apparent. The belief that women and men were entirely dissimilar – a belief which had gained ascendancy in Victorian Britain and America - was challenged by the notion that women might be quite like men in all save the reproductive function. Increasingly after 1890, the debate focused upon where the division between sex roles should be made, not whether or not there should be any division.
Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio had admitted 30 women students in 1833, but it was not until 1865 when Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York opened that higher education began to become accessible to American women. From the beginning Vassar students were required to engage in callisthenic exercises. By 1877 they were permitted to substitute boating, gardening, walking, or croquet, a diversion which had been imported from Britain in the 1860s and had enjoyed a flurry of interest among young middle-class Americans. When Henry Durant opened Wellesley College near Boston in 1874, callisthenics and sports were a required part of the curriculum. Not able to find equipment for the new game of tennis, Durant sent to England for rackets and nets. Wellesley established academic standards comparable with those at Harvard, and served as a model for many of the other small elite eastern women’s colleges which were founded in the late 1800s. Wellesley College also became the most influential and prestigious institution for training women college directors and instructors of physical education after 1909 when it merged with the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics.
When women began to enter higher education a great deal of concern was expressed that intellectual study would result in breaking down their physical health. The required programmes of callisthenic exercises and simple forms of recreational activities were intended to permit them to become strong enough to withstand the rigours of ‘brain work’. Many American men, and not a few women, were convinced that higher education would masculinize females and make them unfit mothers, thereby threatening the well-being of the nation. ln 1872 Edward Clarke, M.D., a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, was invited to address the New England Woman’s Club. To his listeners’ surprise and dismay, Dr Clarke declared that a woman’s unique physiology limited her capacity for education. Clarke subsequently presented his views in two works: Sex in Education; Ora Fair Chance for the Girls (1873); and The Building of a Brain (1874). Drawing selectively from Darwin, Spencer, Alexander Bain and Henry Maudsley, Clarke invoked the conservation of energy theory to insist that ‘the muscles and the brain cannot function in the best way at the same moment’. Intellectual work would interfere with women’s reproductive function.
In the late 1800s most Americans, even most feminists, accepted the evolutionists’ belief that men and women differed in their physiology and psychology. Not so Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had already spent the majority of her 66 years as one of the nation’s most outspoken women’s rights leaders. In 1882 Stanton declared in the widely circulated North American Review:
"[...] a girl’s impulses seem to be ever in conflict with custom ... .Woman is now in the transition period from the old to the new ... all girls are not satisfied with the amusements society has to offer ... [ and] statistics show that girls taking a college course are more healthy than those who lead listless lives [...]".
It would be necessary, however, for women to demonstrate that academic work did not either break their health or make them unfit mothers before Victorian assumptions about female inferiority could be modified. Slowly it was realized that those college women who did marry produced healthy children. Many college-educated women remained single, however, finding a career plus marriage an impossible burden, or because they preferred the personal freedom which a career offered. Statistics did show, however, that college-educated families had fewer children, and this fuelled the arguments of those who opposed higher education for women.
The state universities of the Mid- and Far West, and a few private institutions like the University of Chicago, had admitted women in the 1870s and 1880s in order to bolster enrolments. Those women who were admitted soon demonstrated that they could deal with academic work far better than it had been believed. Although the majority trained for teaching and similar service-orientated fields, many did exceptionally well in mathematics, chemistry and other scientific studies. The state universities and many of the private and denominational colleges rapidly developed departments of physical education whose responsibility it was to oversee the health of women students and provide for them a programme of callisthenic and gymnastic exercises. Initially sports were extracurricular activities, but by the 1890s these, too, were increasingly brought under the auspices of directors of gymnasia. Whereas before 1900 most of the directors at state universities were men - usually medical doctors - by the early 1900s many colleges and universities had begun to establish separate departments of physical education for women.
The Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (BNSG) which became the Department of Hygiene and Physical Education, Wellesley College, in 1909 is the prototype for American women’s college physical education and sport. The BNSG was founded in 1889 through the benefaction of Mary Hemenway, a Boston philanthropist, and the persistent efforts of Amy Morris Homans, who had directed many of Hemenway’s projects since 1877. Its programme was modelled after that of Stockholm’s Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics. Homans served as director of the BNSG, then Department of Hygiene and Physical Education, Wellesley College for 40 years. Early in her career she embarked on a successful mission of placing her graduates in positions as directors of programmes in colleges and universities across the United States, thereby ensuring the dissemination and perpetuation of the BNSG/Wellesley College ideology. Homans called in professors from Harvard and doctors from the Harvard Medical School to instruct the students. Swedish gymnastics formed the core of the activity curriculum, but by the 1890s swimming, games, dancing, basketball, boating, tennis and athletics were also included. Field hockey was added in the early 1900s. On the walls of the Wellesley gymnasium were placards inscribed with the words: ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low; an Excellent thing in woman’. These lines from King Lear admirably convey the Homans’ philosophy. Although her graduates might be accomplished in gymnastic activities and sports, sound business women, and able administrators, they were never to forget that they were first and foremost Ladies.
American female collegiate physical education directors present an interesting and still not well-explored group. In order to succeed, they had to possess the same types of attributes as successful businessmen. Their stock in trade was games and callisthenics, the former, in particular, deemed to be substantially the province of males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were often among the few women on a college or university faculty which might include many men who were hostile to the idea of higher education for women. How were they able to succeed? In part, because they invoked either the Victorian feminine ideal or the Image of the New Woman, whichever the situation called for - and they learned to do this with consummate skill. Additionally, they endlessly insisted that only women, creatures who shared the same physiology, could know what was best for college girls. In coeducational institutions, the women’s physical education department was usually a bastion which males were not encouraged to enter: an enclave within the broader campus much as the Victorian home had been a sheltered refuge in a competitive and male-dominated society. In the smaller sex-segregated women’s colleges and within these separate departments of physical education, female directors usually ruled with iron fortitude.
It is somewhat more difficult to discern direct connections between Britain and the United States for women’s sports than it is for men’s sports in the late nineteenth century. For one thing far less was written about this by contemporaries. Also, historians to date have not provided extensive investigations and analyses, from which meaningful generalizations might be derived, of individual schools, clubs or sporting organizations which involved women in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some eastern girls’ preparatory schools had English principals, and British women were sometimes engaged to teach games at various of the eastern women’s colleges. Middle- and upper-class Americans also continued to read about British customs, both in the popular and in the more specialized sports-orientated press. In the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s a kind of ‘Anglo-mania’ existed among Americans who were aspiring to establish themselves as a socially superior group and much of the literature which the group prepared for and about itself reflects at least a superficial interest in things ‘British’.
During the 1880s, as wealthy and ‘comfortable’ Americans sought ways to define and legitimize their elevated status in society, they created a variety of social clubs which were equipped with facilities for various sports, especially tennis and golf. Membership in elite ‘country clubs’ was seen to be a visible symbol of achieved success. An article which appeared in The Fortnightly Review in 1894 entitled ‘The American Sportswoman’, conveyed with some accuracy the nature and extent of country club and athletic club sport for women which existed in the United States. Most country clubs, hunt clubs, tennis clubs and other sporting clubs had a ladies’ department or affiliated memberships.72 Beginning in 1887, a Ladies’ National Tennis Championship was held each year at Philadelphia. Marion Jones, who lost the 1898 tournament to Juliette Atkinson, spent part of 1900 in England, returning with renewed enthusiasm for the game, thanks to her experiences with British women’s tennis. Riding, in Hunt Clubs emulating the best British clubs, was considered de rigueur ‘among girls of the highest circles’. Golf was taken up by the fashionable set at Newport in the 1890s. In 1895 the first women’s championship was held at the Meadowbrook Hunt Club under the auspices of the United States Golf Association. The Book of Sport, published in 1901 as a tribute to upper-class American sportsmen and sportswomen, contains innumerable references to upper-class English sport, and is patterned after similar British publications.
Introduced into the United States from Britain in the early 1870s, bicycling had become a craze for all who could afford a machine by the 1890s. Women who could afford bicycles joined clubs, and in a few instances, formed their own. Because cycling became one of the principal types of outing for the middle classes-shopkeepers, tradesmen, mechanics, and clerks - upper-class women, if they cycled at all, did not do so in public. The cycle required women to wear special clothing so that the skirt would not catch in the gears or wheels. Much has been said by historians about the role which sporting attire and games performed in the emancipation of women from traditional Victorian constraints. This was also the feeling of contemporaries. ln 1896 Sophia Foster Richardson, a graduate of Vassar College, addressed the Association of Collegiate Alumnae on ‘Tendencies in Athletics for Girls in Colleges and Universities’. College women, Richardson pointed out, were now boating, doing gymnasium work, and playing tennis and basketball, all to their physical, intellectual, and moral betterment. American women had finally begun to learn the advantages of those out-of-door games which had traditionally been part of the English girl’s education: ‘At college [the English girl] plays hockey or hand polo, cricket, fives; and the games with which we are more familiar, for at least two hours a day ...’, Richardson maintained. ‘Every American who studies at Cambridge adopts the work of her English friends, and ever afterward looks with compassion on the mistakes of her countrywomen.’
There is some evidence that women played field hockey at Goucher College as early as 1897; however, Miss Constance M.K. Applebee is credited with introducing the game to the United States at the 1901 Harvard Summer School for teachers, using ice hockey sticks and an indoor baseball for equipment. For seven decades ‘the Apple’ was the revered, and feared, patroness of field hockey in America. Field hockey soon became a popular autumn sport in elite eastern women’s colleges and at other institutions which engaged women physical educators who had studied at these colleges. In 1905 Outing Magazine reported on women’s hockey, declaring: ‘Certainly there is no game to test endurance, wind and agility of womankind, that can be compared with hockey as they play it in England .... A football player would not be blamed for dodging from the path of these headlong Amazons ...’ Because it was perceived to be an elite British schoolgirl sport, field hockey was usually considered an acceptable, even desirable, albeit vigorous women’s sport. It was, for example, quite permissible for a woman to run for an hour in a hockey match while it might be totally unacceptable for her to run in a track meeting. Female hockey players might run nearly the length of the 100-yard fiel d but be confined to half or less of an 80-foot basketball court.
By the twentieth century American college women were playing many of the games that male students were playing, and the intensity with which the women approached their sport could be nearly equal to that of their male contemporaries. However, with few exceptions, the women played their sports away from the prying eyes of the public. Whereas the male sports model was intentionally a very public cultural performance, women’s sporting events remained cloistered. An article which appeared in the Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1901 entitled ‘A Girl’s College Life’, aptly reflects the collegiate experience of many early twentieth-century American women. College females, it was asserted, were likely to be more serious than college men because the majority of the women were in college to prepare themselves to earn a livelihood. While it was not acceptable for women to engage in riotous behaviour over an athletic victory, as the men often did, ‘ ... the triumph of their class and colors [was] just as de ar to them’. Within the walls of their institutions young women were often extremely enthusiastic about their sports. It was customary for each college to hold a ‘Field Day’ - later a ‘Field Week’ – to culminate the year’s athletic work. On this special occasion a public display of athletic accomplishment was permitted. It was also permissible at these well-defined times to ‘break previous records’ and exalt and fête winners.76 Once a year the mould in which the New Woman and the Victorian Angel in the House were bound together could be broken. But in athletic sport, one of the few remaining male bastions in twentieth century America, it would not be until the 1970s that anything even beginning to resemble equality for the two sexes would become available.
Biography
Roberta J. Park is an Emeritus Professor at University of California- Berkeley. She has been throughout her distinguished career a scholar with a mission - to win academic recognition of the significance of the body in culture and cultures. Her scholarship has earned her global esteem in the disciplines of Physical Education and Sports Studies for its penetrating insights.
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labrys,
études féministes/ estudos feministas
julho/dezembro 2015 - juillet/décembre 2015