Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

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 movements 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. Shannon Walsh is an 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). Shannon L. Walsh is Associate Professor of Theatre History at Louisiana State University, USA. She has published in Theatre Annual and Theatre Journal. S he also edited Sporting Performance: Politics in Play (2020) Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures 1 Introduction: Exorcising a Forgotten Physical Culture Why Performance Defining Physical Culture Muscular Motherhood Watching Whiteness The Drive to Delineate Class Sites of Exploration Bibliography 2 Progressive Era Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Whiteness The European Schools: British, Swedish, and German Physical Training Delsarte: “Too Rooted in Eternity to Negotiate with History”1 Delsarte’s Drawings Progressive Era Physical Culture in the US: Governing the Strenuous Life Eugenics and Whiteness in the Progressive Era Americanization of the Systems Americanized Delsarte: Classicism as Self-Culture Conclusion: Americanized Delsarte Moves Bibliography 3 Dudley Allen Sargent’s Classed and Classing Fitness: Nature, Science, and Mimetic Exercise Dudley Allen Sargent: From the Farm to the Big Top to the Ivy League Back to Nature: Romanticizing a Rural Past Mimetic Exercises and Class Surrogation Anthropometry: The Mean and Symmetry Body-Builders: Producing the Reproducers Conclusion: Habitus and Performance Bibliography 4 “These Walls Could Not Contain Me”: Social Motherhood at the YWCA The YWCA, Physical Culture, and Abby Mayhew The Marvelous Miss Mayhew Skirts, Bloomers, and Bicycles Flailing Limbs and the Grotesque Social Motherhood and Racial Fitness Performativity and Security Muscular Christianity for Ladies Governing Through Self-Control: Mayhew’s Classes Perform Conclusion: Do as I Say, Not as I Do Bibliography 5 Racialized Surrogates in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture Bernarr Macfadden: Weakling to Strongman Physical Culture: Procreation and Motherhood Culturing the Physical, Taming the Sexual Before and After Photographs: Coming into Whiteness Childbirth and Surrogates Conclusion: Racial Reproductivity Bibliography 6 Exercise for Assimilation: Physical Culture for Indigenous Girls and Women Scene 1: Education for Extinction Scene 2: Spectacle for Progressive Ends Scene 3: Physical Culture by the Community, for the Community Conclusion: Challenging Whiteness Bibliography 7 Conclusion: Community Fitness for Social Change? Bibliography Index