The physical education of women is fraught with issues of body, sexuality, and gender
A new book, ‘Active Bodies,’ explores the history
“Who is that woman?” a man exclaimed to his friends at a California public school “Family Fun Night” in the late 1940s, as he gazed upon physical education teacher Winifred Van Hagen. “She has the strength of a man, the refinement of a lady, and plays like a kid.”
Van Hagen was probably used to it. Women who made a living as gym teachers — combining the “manliness” of a gym-centered life with the grace and maternal energy associated with femininity — were a puzzling sight to some, particularly before women’s professional sports existed. Gym class is now such an entrenched part of American education — and American comedy — that it seems like it’s always been with us. But in her new book, Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America, Bucknell University historian Martha H. Verbrugge traces the very specific history of this field, and its relationship to gendered ideas about health, bodily capabilities, and living an “active” life.
Before Woody Allen’s famous line — “Those that can’t do, teach, those that can’t teach, teach gym” — and before lowbrow dodgeball humor, there was the German, English, and American physical culture movement, a late 19th century wave of health mania inspired by a zest for competition and a belief that calisthenics and fresh air were core civilizational pressure valves.
By the early 20th century, physical education emerged as a distinct discipline and a vocation in the U.S., and it drew a varied lot of young men and women. As Verbrugge writes, before 1915, only three states required physical education. By the end of World War I, that number had grown to 28. Just over a decade later, it was 46 states. In addition to its roots in physical culture, the rise in phys ed was part of a broader national push for compulsory education, which included the formalization of attendance policies and curriculum. Exercise programs at public schools grew sharply during the first half of the 20th century, and many of the teachers were young women.
The women who found their way to the nascent field were mostly “white, native-born and middle-class,” according to Verbrugge, and their routes to phys ed were often “indirect or unplanned.” Some were athletes turning their enthusiasm for sport into a profession, others had discovered phys ed through forms of physical therapy after an injury. And still others may have been drawn at least in part by the promise of community. As Verbrugge writes, “A significant number of unmarried teachers were lesbians….Careers in recreation, physical education, and sports not only nurtured lesbians’ professional interests but also opened doors to nontraditional jobs and friendships.” Lesbianism was the field’s “open secret” (and best known stereotype) for decades, but fear of actually being accused of “deviance” was very real.
Cultural expectations around women’s physical appearance were fairly rigid for the better part of the 20th century, and teachers in particular were thought to be setting an example for young people. As the field of physical fitness became more specialized and professionalized, more and more phys ed teachers came by way of a degree in education. During their studies and traineeships, female gym teachers were trained to be “ladylike” and to “teach like a lady.” Blanche Trilling, director of the physical education department at the University of Wisconsin and a founder of the Athletic Conference of American College Women, told trainees not to wear “plaid shirts, ‘skimpy skirts,’ or brassieres that were ‘too pointed’ and to avoid boyish haircuts, costume jewelry, and ‘vivid makeup.’” Verbrugge writes that Mary Channing Coleman, head of the renowned physical education department at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, “directed a mannish-looking major…to ‘let her hair grow longer, get a blouse with lace and ruffles and take up knitting and crocheting.’” At some schools, phys ed majors were expected to attend department teas in hats and gloves. This was all part of what was then known as “Phy Ed-iquette.”
It wasn’t just that women were expected to look feminine and behave virtuously. As Verbrugge points out, the turn-of-the-century commercialization of fitness also corresponded to new social expectations and values. “Increasingly, material goods, physical appearance, and public behavior rather than private character and moral bearing, became the hallmarks of bourgeois life….Fitness entrepreneurs sold the promise of muscular, sensual bodies to a flabby, insecure public.” As arbiters of health and body management, physical education teachers were expected to look strong and vigorous while still peddling an idea of femininity female students would want to emulate. After all, physical education “marks and patrols the border between ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’” in Verbrugge’s words. So, women physical education instructors were influencing gendered “American views and experiences of the body-in-motion.”
In Active Bodies, Verbrugge traces the history of the role of educators in a field she says “remains distinctly gendered, hierarchical, and insecure.” To put it in less academic terms, most Americans recall the cultural figure of the female gym teacher as an over-earnest, under-paid, and often-derided stand-in for all kinds of unease with our bodies and school and gender. But in this book, with great sensitivity and careful attention to detail, Verbrugge asks us to consider the female gym teacher, as both a complex symbol of athleticism and as an individual.
