Muscular Maternity: Progressive Era Physical Culture, Biopolitics, and Performance A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Shannon Leigh Walsh IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OFPHILOSOPHY Dr. Margaret Werry, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Dance, Adviser September 2011 © Shannon Walsh 2011 i Acknowledgements This dissertation would have been virtually an impossibility in one year had it not been for a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Minnesota that allowed me to devote my full attention (when my kids weren’t demanding it) to research, writing, and revision. In addition, I’m incredibly thankful for research funding over the past several years from the Graduate Research Partnership Program through the College of Liberal Arts, two Department of Theatre Arts and Dance Research grants and numerous Travel grants, the Theatre Arts and Dance Kenneth L. Graham Fellowship, and numerous Graduate and Professional Student Association travel grants. The travel needed for the core archival research needed to complete this project would have been impossible without the generous support of these organizations. Additionally, the foundational archival work of my project was supported by the generous staffs at the Harvard University Library, the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Social Welfare History Archive at the University of Minnesota. I’d especially like to thank Cindy Slater and Jan Todd of the Stark Center, and Linnea Anderson of the SWHA for going above and beyond the call of duty by providing me with incredible access, warm support during my visits, and amazingly remembering who I was and the details of my research over vast spans of years. I was blessed with an amazing committee, who all riffed off each other’s ideas and comments in a particularly productive way for me. I owe a great debt of gratitude ii to my advisor, Margaret Werry, who unshakingly guided me through this grueling process, having more faith in my abilities than I often had in them myself. Sonja Kuftinec provided crucial encouraging feedback at moments when the weight of the project seemed ready to cave in on me. Gil Rodman encouraged me to push the work beyond the project, smartly (and thankfully) using food and drink to feed and relax my wearied soul in the final push. Cindy Garcia continually pushed me to see numerous blind spots that I was, at times, quite content to stay blind to, but her groundedness and fairness opened spaces for me to acknowledge those gaps, and, thankfully, leave some of them for the “book project.” I’d also like to thank Michal Kobialka who, though he was not on my committee, shaped and affected my work in myriad ways over the years, including early drafts of chapter four. His ethics and attitude pop up in places in my work when I am least expecting them. I’d especially like to acknowledge Megan Lewis for her fierce momma support, for nurturing my teaching, and being my dear friend. I would have been lost in this process if it weren’t for the unflagging support and endless wells of unconditional love from my family and friends. I want to thank Greg and Annette Walsh, and the other Walsh clan for openly embracing the often inexplicability of what I do and how the heck it has anything to do with a doctorate in theatre historiography. To my Dad, for calling me over and over again to ask me to say, spell, and explain “historiography” so he could proudly tell all his co-workers what I was doing. To my sister for intercepting several late night phone calls over writing blocks and pitfalls, most often accompanied by copious weeping. With two small children at home, I relied heavily on local friends who acted as family over the past three year, and served as babysitters, proof-readers, chefs, sisters, iii brothers, guides, and most often needed and dear companions. Stephanie Lein Walseth, Eric Colleary, and Kimi Johnson provided a core base of support that was seemingly my only lifeline at times. I utilized a veritable army of friendly support, calling in every favor I had from Peter and Madeline Kastler, Will Daddario and Joanne Zerdy, George McConnell, Carra Martinez, Beth Ellsworth, Elliot Leffler, Ivone Barriga, Diana Morgan, Sarah Shrum, Shawanna Kimbrought, Nate and Karen Solas, and Melissa Dickard. I feel like this dissertation, and sometimes my children, are as much theirs as they are mine. Ten years ago I somehow landed myself the most amazing husband anyone could ever possibly wish for. He then moved with me to Tallahassee and Minneapolis for my graduate education, selflessly shifting his plans to help me pursue my dream. Thank you, Scott, for tolerating me, for caring about my work, and being an amazing dad to our children. And finally, I’d like to thank Josephine and Elliot. You reminded me daily of the stakes of finishing this dissertation and program, provided the needed total breaks from writing on a regular basis so I didn’t loose myself, and occasionally were so amazing and beautiful as to remind me how small a dissertation really is. iv Dedication To Annette Carol, whose survivor spirit propelled me forward even after it had left this world. v Abstract This dissertation examines the emergence of women’s physical culture (sports, fitness regimes, grooming, dieting) as a performance practice in the US Progressive Era and as the invisible biopolitical foundation of our modern habitus. In other words, biopolitics (the seemingly mundane ways in which we govern ourselves, and are governed by others through bodily conducts related to health) lies at the root of how we operate in our (post)modern world. I investigate three forgotten figures of physical culture – Harvard physical director Dudley Allen Sargent, Minneapolis Y.W.C.A. physical director Abby Mayhew, and magazine tycoon Bernarr Macfadden – revealing the problematic connections of the bodily conducts they espoused to eugenics and its promotion of white reproductivity. Their customized physical exercises shaped populations of women over time through discourses and performances of biological and social maternity that incited individuals to adopt certain physical conducts over others. These conducts achieved their racialized, gendered, and classed attributes through the performative work of surrogating and mobilizing the physical practices of marginalized populations, especially the rural lower classes and distant and/or disappearing “primitives.” Ultimately, the private acts of self-management (sit-ups, fasting, cold baths, etc.) they promoted through handbooks, anthropometry, exhibitions and demonstrations, and other forms of visual culture (including photography, popular magazines, and film), facilitated the categorization and organization of subjectivities by race, class, and gender within the socio-economic sphere. In examining these written and visual texts, this study insists on a closer scrutiny of the “culture” of physical culture, which in its various forms (physical, intellectual, moral self-cultivation) vi operated as a mode of biopolitics enabling liberal governmentality (the management of populations through cultivating particular forms of subjectivity and productivity in individuals) to function. In approaching liberal governmentality as a performance I demonstrate how individual acts of self-cultivation travelled from one body to the next through witness and repetition, eventually spreading to the entire population. Hence, I forward physical culture 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 governance. vii Table of Contents LIST  OF  FIGURES......................................................................................................viii   CHAPTER  1  :  INTRODUCTION:    PERFORMING  HEALTH  THROUGH  PHYSICAL  CULTURE 1   CHAPTER  2  :    (RE)CONSTRUCTING  NATURE  THROUGH  MIMETIC  EXERCISE:    DUDLEY   ALLEN  SARGENT’S  SYSTEM  OF  PHYSICAL  CULTURE .................................................. 47   CHAPTER  3  :    “THESE  WALLS  COULD  NOT  CONTAIN  ME”:    YWCA  PHYSICAL  CULTURE,   ABBY  MAYHEW,  AND  SOCIAL  MATERNITY..............................................................104   CHAPTER  4  :    LEOTARDS  AND  LEOPARD  PRINT:    WHITE  MOTHERHOOD  AND   “SAVAGE”  SURROGATES  IN  BERNARR  MACFADDEN’S  PHYSICAL  CULTURE .............166   CONCLUSION:    THE  FORGOTTEN  IN  PHYSICAL  FITNESS ...........................................220   FIGURES.................................................................................................................232   NOTES....................................................................................................................254   BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................278   viii List of Figures Figure 2.1. Anthropometric chart of “typical American male physique” from "The Physical Proportions of the Typical Man." The Out of Door Library: Athletic Sports. Charles Scribner and Sons, 1897. 44....................................................... 232   Figure 2.2. Wood-chopping exercise from Health, Strength, and Power. New York and Boston: H.M. Caldwell, 1904. 173...................................................................... 233   Figure 2.3. Pitching Hay exercise from Health, Strength, and Power. New York and Boston: H.M. Caldwell, 1904. 225...................................................................... 234   Figure 2.4. Photographs accompanying the article covering Sargent’s wall-scaling exercise. “Wall Scaling New Athletic Fad of College Girls.” New York Times. 19 May 1912: SM10................................................................................................. 235   Figure 3.1. The YWCA building from 1893-1898 at 808 Nicollet. From Undated, Unnamed newspaper clipping. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895-1898. Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota......................................................... 236   Figure 3.2. Headline prefacing the inaugural run of the Minneapolis YWCA Cycling Club in 1894. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895-1898. Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. ...................................................................................... 237   Figure 3.3. Cycling Club posed outside the YWCA building at 808 Nicollet in May 1894. Box 12, Clippings 1895-1898. Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archive, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. .............................................................................................................................. 238   Figure 3.4. Illustration of Abbie Mayhew in article "Working for Young Women" dated in pen, Feb. 4, 1896. Clippings 1895-1898, Box 12, Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archive, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. ............................................................................................................ 239   Figure 3.5. Picture accompanying article about Mayhew's departure. “Miss Abbie Shaw Mayhew.” Minneapolis Tribune. 23 May 1897: A3. ................................ 240   Figure 3.6. One of the images accompanying the article about the failed domesticity of the YWCA rooms. Undated, unnamed newspaper clipping (though must have been between 1894 and 1897). Box 12, Clippings 1895-1898, The Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. ........................................................................ 241   Figure 3.7. Illustrations accompanying newspaper clipping dated May 1, 1897. Unnamed clipping, Box 12, Clippings 1895-1898, Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. ............................................................................................................ 242   Figure 3.8. Newspaper clipping handwritten in date 1893, from the Minneapolis Journal. Box 12, Clippings 1895-1898, Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. .............................................................................................................................. 243   Figure 3.9. Niobe statues occupy the top row and the bottom corners. From Elsie Wilbor's Delsarte Recitiation Book. 2nd Ed. New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893. ix 371. ....................................................................................................................... 244   Figure 3.10. Photograph of the Borghese gladiator in Elsie Wilbor's Delsarte Recitation Book. 2nd Ed. New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893. 371...................................... 245   Figure 4.1. The female contestants from the 1903-04 exhibition. Photo courtesy of the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports. University of Texas, Austin. .................................................................................................................. 246   Figure 4.2. Rose Read before and after photos from “Our Thin Subject.” Women’s Physical Development 2.3 (Jun. 1901): 99.......................................................... 247   Figure 4.3. Image from “Light Exercises for the Entire Body” by Bernarr Macfadden. Physical Culture 15.1 (Jan. 1906): 51. ................................................................ 248   Figure 4.4. from “The Physiques of Player-Folks” by J.R. Redding. Physical Culture 9. (Jan. 1903) : 19. ............................................................................................... 249   Figure 4.5. Cover of Physical Culture 8.2 (Nov. 1902). ............................................. 250   Figure 4.6. Photograph of correct way to “dress” the patient following labor in Henry Garrigues, A Practical Guide in Antiseptic Midwifery in Hospitals and Private Practices. Detroit: George S. Davis, 1886.A Practical Guide to Antiseptic Midwifery by He (1886). 40. ............................................................................... 251   Figure 4.8. Beatrice Marshall in Art Portfolio No. 2 From Life. Green Binder. Ottley Coulter Collection. H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport. University of Texas, Austin.................................................................................. 253   1 Chapter 1 : Introduction: Performing Health Through Physical Culture We need to have employers reward employees who join health clubs and practice wellness and fitness. – John McCain, in response to how he planned to cut health care costs during presidential debate, 2008. The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake. – Michelle Obama, speech at the February 9, 2010 Let’s Move! launch These quotes are only a piece of a much larger proliferation of “health” rhetoric in the United States. The statements not only reflect the unilateral promotion of health – McCain stresses the need for exercise, while Obama’s Let’s Move! organization focuses on childhood nutrition – but also a more implicit connection between the population’s health and the state of the economy. In a culture permeated by a seemingly endless stream of fitness rhetoric, these are fighting words. The 80s had the “War on Drugs,” the first decade of the millennium had (still has) the “War on Terror,” and all indications point to the next decade as the “War on Obesity,” where obesity operates as the key 2 marker of unfitness and poor health. The battle over Americans’ physical health reached a fevered pitch in 2010 when, on the heels of President Obama’s controversial health care reform, a series of government-sponsored programs took effect. February, 2010 saw the launch of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move!, a project “dedicated to solving the problem of childhood obesity within a generation.” (“About Let’s Move!”). In May of 2010 Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in coordination with a cohort of national institutions including the Center for Disease Control, the American Cancer Society, and the American Heart Association, proposed a US National Physical Activity Plan.1 This plan “aims to create a national culture that supports physically active lifestyles. Its ultimate purpose is to improve health, prevent disease and disability, and enhance quality of life” (1). December 2010 saw the launch of “Healthy People 2020,” a decades long project, also spear-headed by the Department of Health and Human Services, that provides health goals for the entire population in the US over a ten-year period. The 2020 goals include: Attain high-quality, longer lives free of preventable disease, disability, injury, and premature death. Achieve health equity, eliminate disparities, and improve the health of all groups. Create social and physical environments that promote good health for all. Promote quality of life, healthy development, and healthy behaviors across all life stages. (1) All three initiatives – the Let’s Move campaign, the US Physical Activity Plan, and the “Healthy People 2020” project – are, in turn, promoted by the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition, a committee in place since the presidency of Dwight D. 3 Eisenhower. As of 2011, the council had 16 members, almost all celebrities in the world of sports and/or fitness. The committee co-chairs are NFL quarterback Drew Brees and former Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes. The remainder of the committee is composed of nine professional athletes, a personal trainer, a pediatrician, a CEO, a chef, and two “fitness gurus” with stints on popular reality television shows.2 This council, along with the multiple initiatives launched by the federal government, demonstrate the pervasiveness of health campaigns in the current decade that bridge government institutions, private corporations, and popular culture. Such a sprawling governmentalization of health projects, coupled with the quotations above, demonstrate that health – joining its ideological siblings democracy and freedom– is an idea that no one can afford to be against. However, that is exactly what psychiatrist and American Studies scholar Jonathan Metzl and social policy scholar Anna Kirkland, and their contributors do in the recent anthology Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality. Stressing that they nonetheless support bike helmets, penicillin, and stem cell research Metzl explains that the target of their critique is the implicit, but unspoken morality attached to such statements as “Smoking is bad for you,” which indicates, “You are a bad person” (1). Additionally, Metzl says, the assumption made by initiatives like those outlined above is not so much that health is universally accessible – the statistics that drive the proliferation of such projects demonstrate the inequities of our systems of health – but that health is easily transposable from the elite to the poor. Such initiatives neglect the specificities of our capitalist economy, which necessarily cut low-income and minority populations off 4 from the leisure time needed to engage in “healthy” activities, and the income needed to buy “healthy” foods. Many current health problems disproportionately affect marginalized populations – poor and/or ethnic minorities – but due to hierarchical structures in place within physical culture institutions remedies are more accessible to those with some measure of disposable income, or access to better schools with solid athletic programs. The corporate structure of fitness programs and food production in the US unfairly and often invisibly make “health” a way of living that must be paid for, most often and most easily by white, upper-middle class citizens. This project does not intend to dismiss either the benefits of or the need for physical education programs in schools and/or gymnasiums and fitness clubs. Instead, I strive to unmask the inequality of systems of physical culture that, historically and ideologically entrenched from their inception, privilege and invest in white bourgeois bodies, ensuring they have the “health” needed to succeed as productive agents in the workplace. The health represented and performed in physical culture showcased white bourgeois bodies as ideals toward which all bodies should strive, and framed any deviation from that goal as a moral failing that could and should result in an underprivileged social position. Moreover, the omnipresence of health initiatives, fitness centers, and diet programs throughout US popular culture often obscures the more dubious biopolitical genealogies attached to physical education histories. The continual presence of physical fitness on the national agenda, and the ubiquity of its popular consumer culture ideology as a necessary, beneficial practice needs to be interrogated in order to problematize its roots in a neoliberal impetus toward global economic efficiency 5 and individual productivity. Furthermore, physical culture as a physical, moral, mental, spiritual, and commercial venture, and its complex interplay of competing and contrasting incitements to particular forms of bodily conduct, forwarded an overall project of class and racial categorization focused primarily on (self) governing white female reproduction. The ubiquity of physical fitness (practices and ideologies) has recently drawn a cadre of scholars to investigate the roots of contemporary sports and physical fitness in the US Progressive Era, especially for women.3 These analyses often operate from a cultural history or materialist perspective that works to unearth sites of agency and/or repression in the face broader systems of power. My project reframes the materials, events, discourses, and historiographies of physical culture for women through the lens of Foucault’s biopolitics and governmentality. As a point of “contact between technologies of domination of others and those of the self” governmentality offers a means to explore the myriad manifestations of physical culture across different strata of Progressive Era institutions and organizations related to higher education, social welfare, and mass culture (Foucault, “Technologies of the Self” 19). Utilizing these theories enables me to examine the critical interactions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in macro-level processes related to political economy, and micro-level practices of subjectification. Accordingly, the following chapters genealogically trace the ways that physical culture organized, categorized, and cultivated bodies in ways that shaped them to occupy specific roles in the productive and reproductive mechanisms of early neoliberal capitalism in the US – a process that left traces in contemporary ties between the physical fitness of 6 individual bodies, and the mental and emotional health, economic productivity, and “racial betterment” of the nation as a whole. By examining magazines, newspaper reports, visual media, medical examination logs, exercise manuals, committee reports, and physical culture discourse around the turn of the twentieth century, this project investigates the incessant labor involved in laying the groundwork for practices and discourses that are now taken for granted as part of “healthy living” today. To get at the core of how bodies imbibe, transfer, proliferate, and remember specific physical culture practices, I utilize performance theory as a necessary correlate to biopolitical governmentality. This pairing enables me to consider how liberal subjects (re)create themselves, and in doing so construct neoliberal orders. Performance provides a means of addressing how physical culture practices, each aimed at particular groups, were utilized across cultural strata as a way to shape individual bodies, and (through repetition and through reproduction) to shape entire populations. By looking at how the everyday, seemingly mundane “techniques of the self,” when practiced on a massive scale, affect ideological, symbolic, social, and economic orders, this project refigures the position and impact of eugenics on configurations of physical culture in the US, a topic given short shrift in most cultural histories of sport and physical culture.4 Additionally, it argues that performance served as a citational strategy that framed in a moment – either in photographs or live exhibitions – the history of a specific body’s or bodies’ practices.5 Performance is crucial to understanding how these daily routines and habits became a “natural” way of being and moving through the world as a modern subject. Engaging performance as a way of framing bodies as exemplars of particular forms of conduct 7 allows me to look at how physical culture practice moved through and among bodies, therefore making visible its historical contingency. By looking at moments in Progressive Era physical culture that expose the contingency of certain now naturalized practices, this project aims to open spaces to consider how we might be governed, and govern ourselves “differently and, perhaps, less.”6 I begin my study at the nexus where physical culture as a popular movement collided with the entertainment industry, and the turbulence of Progressive Era economic, social, and cultural regulations and transformations. The physical culture I address in this project spans a period from 1893 to 1905, and consists of mainly exhibitions and classes, but also its manifestation in exercise handbooks and magazines. The transformation of physical culture from the private practice of calisthenics into a popular movement paralleled the rise of many social reform advocacy groups including the labor movement, the women’s movement, the agrarian reform movement, and the corporate reorganization movement. I look at three sites of physical culture practice, focusing on how women’s involvement in these highly regulated practices produced conflicting notions of gender, class, sexuality, and whiteness. How were women's bodies positioned within the Progressive Era crises of femininity, class, and whiteness? What kinds of labors were their bodies expected to perform and to what ends? I utilize published volumes on physical culture written by practitioners Dudley Allen Sargent, Abby Mayhew, and Bernarr Macfadden in order to investigate how the regulatory practices promoted by this literature produce economically efficient, self-cultivating, regulated, and regulating bodies. Additionally, I look at the traces of these corporeal performances at three sites – 8 Sargent’s gymnasiums at Harvard, Mayhew’s Minneapolis YWCA Physical Culture program, and Macfadden’s Madison Square Garden Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions – in newspaper and personal accounts, photographs, drawings, and films. In attempting to reconstruct the practices themselves through this material I examine how these performances complicate existing historiographies of physical culture, gender, race, and class in the Progressive Era. I choose these particular sites because of their position at the height of physical culture’s popularity in the U.S., and their embeddedness in emerging conceptions of gender, class, race, and sexuality. Additionally, the widespread circulation of the three main players’ (Sargent, Mayhew, and Macfadden) discourse, practices, and ideals in the strata of national flows of physical culture practice contributed to the stabilization of physical culture as a necessary avenue to individual and national health, but their legacies have been largely excised from contemporary treatments of Progressive Era health movements. Sports History, Feminist Historiography and Physical Culture To cover such a broad range of issues and problems requires that I cast a broad, interdisciplinary research net. My work relies heavily on scholarship from women’s/feminist history, and sports history, and theoretical analysis from whiteness studies, visual culture, and performance. While these categories necessarily bleed into one another, and the work is not always limited to these categories, they are an essential foundation in which to ground the proceeding arguments. Much of the work in both women’s history and sports history operates from a cultural materialist position, seeking 9 out the ways particular people and/or sites challenged or reinforced dominant hegemonies perpetuated by the state. Without undermining or denying the presence of unequal power relationships, an analytics of biopolitical governmentality offers a means to explore how larger networks of institutions and organizations, and smaller individual habits concerned with the self were mutually constitutive. Furthermore, rather than seeing resistance as a necessary force against an all-encompassing patriarchy, governmentality (re)envisions it as multiple and shifting, changing registers in accordance with the anxieties and desires that produced categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Biopolitical governmentality in the Progressive Era nurtured a sense of self-control, choice, and agency in individuals, while simultaneously rendering them as legible subjects of state sanctioned social policing mechanisms epitomized in schools, social welfare, and popular media. This move facilitates the inclusion of often separately situated figures (Harvard professors and commercial showmen) and topics (medicine, pornography, maternity) under the rubric of Progressive Era physical culture The topics and people covered in the following chapters are most often separated out into distinct areas of sports and leisure histories, reflecting in some ways the expanding modes of categorization that marked much Progressive Era discourse. Scholars tend to characterize the Progressive Era (despite its name) as a period of economic and social crisis.7 Physical culture trends demonstrated this instability, its popularity rising on the cusp of what many scholars, including social science scholar John J. MacAloon and historian Clifford Putney, argue to be a crisis of masculinity. Progressive Era shifts in the organization of work and industry saw working men 10 increasingly separated from the products of their labor by their rapid incorporation into the market as wage earners rather than craftsmen. This shift towards corporatism and urban industrialism was accompanied by an influx of new immigrants and women into what had been a white, Protestant, male-dominated workplaces. Additionally, the worker himself – whether in the office or on the factory floor – was often at the mercy of institutional hierarchies that undermined association of masculinity with autonomy and self-reliance. As a result, numerous figures of “ideal” American manhood, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Eugene Sandow, emerged in political and popular spheres. These figures demonstrated both muscular and moral fortitude, aspects that were closely linked with masculinity in both political and physical culture, and forging an implicit connection between physical and mental capabilities. As an arena of physical, and increasingly moral, cultivation physical culture became intimately connected with conceptions of (white) masculinity not only through the “strenuous life” promoted by such figures, but also, as Putney argues, through political, economic, and Christian rhetoric, that promoted morality through physical education’s placement in schools, the creation of parks and gymnasiums in urban spaces as a part of the move to promote “rational recreation” among the working and poor classes, and amateur and professional competition.8 While the masses it seemed needed rational forms of exercise, the bourgeois needed the play of leisure in order to cope with the trials of the business world. Hence, many sports historians connect sports and leisure to the emerging professional managerial class who not only needed to counteract physically sedentary work environments, but also needed leisurely pursuits that improved 11 their personal satisfaction, thus allowing them to refuel for the growing work of capitalism.9 The growth of sports and fitness movements through the white middle-class turn to leisure and athletics, and the less visible use of sports as a means to govern unruly populations led to what sport historian Elliott J. Gorn considers to be the origin of modern sports – where “modern” hides the implicit whiteness, masculinity, and elitism of such pursuits – in the late nineteenth century (51). This deceptive christening of the “modern” in sports disguises the appropriation of some physical culture practices from lower classes and exoticized “savage” others, rooting the origin of those practices instead in a white, middle-class ethic of morality and health. This move to elevate white middle- class pursuits and erase their connection to previous practices was/is a crucial move in establishing the “naturalness” of physical culture as a means to overall mental and physical health.10 By investigating how the discourse of the natural serves to justify the continued intervention of governmental apparatuses, my project seeks to address questions left unanswered by much sports history. How were these individual routines meant to shape entire populations over time and why? How did the discourses and performances incite individuals to adopt certain physical conducts over others? How and why do private acts of self-management enable categorical differentiations of class, race, and gender? Athletic Women: Dominated or Empowered? As an initial step to answering these questions I focus primarily on white, mainly bourgeois women’s physical culture, suggesting that the interplay between the 12 government of self and government of/by others structured women’s exercise in the Progressive Era in ways that incited them towards maternal conducts. Feminist sports historiography on the Progressive Era tends to focus on government of the self as a path to agency, and liberation from a hegemonic patriarchal form of government that casts women either as hapless victims or empowered pioneers.11 For instance sports historian Patricia Vertinsky argues that nineteenth century medical and physical culture discourses constructed female bodies as “eternally wounded,” focusing on the maintenance and protection of women’s reproductive organs in order to tether women to their appropriate sphere, the home. Exercise, she suggests, was a means of control over “women’s bodies as a deviation” from the male norm, especially by male physicians (4). In response to this repressive apparatus, she argues many women turned to exercise as a way of “freeing themselves” from the restraints of the Victorian ideals of femininity, which included maternity (15). Working with a similar construction of power, sports historian Jennifer Hargreaves argues that the Victorian cult of the family functioned as a “bourgeois ideology and acted as a dominant and constraining force on the early development of women’s sport,” suggesting that women were victims of a patriarchal system (52). Both interpretations, Vertinsky’s in particular, rely on a concept of power that is decentralized and dispersed throughout multiple discourses and institutions, similar to Foucault’s theory of governmentality, yet feminists tend to view this dispersion as equally, if not more oppressive than a singular model of state power. As a result of these similarities and differences between feminist theories of power and Foucaultian theories of power, feminist theorists tend to either praise Foucault 13 for providing a more dynamic model of power, or roundly critique his work for denying agency to the (female) subject. The first move is commonly adopted by feminist scholars who advocate using Foucault’s theories of power, particularly those articulated in Discipline and Punish regarding “docile bodies,” as a way to investigate “the body as a site of cultural inscription and social controls” (McLaren 95). This interpretation of Foucault allows for a sense of agency on the part of the female subject who is either complicit or transgressive in relationship to dominant systems of power. Alternatively, feminist critics of Foucault interpret his theories of the body as potentially depoliticizing, deterministic, and disempowering. If power flows and circulates, they argue, a unified subject capable of resistance becomes impossible, undermining the liberatory and emancipatory politics of the feminist movement, resulting in “nothing less than the depoliticisation of feminism” (Moi 95). Utilizing biopolitics in my investigations shifts the focus of such debates from arguments about who has power and how to resist, to a consideration of subjectification, that is, a form of power that “applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches his to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him” (Foucault, “The Subject and Power” 331). In other words, I address how physical culture practices, as a form of power, rendered subjects intelligible to themselves and others. The liberatory model and its sole focus on the subject as either resistant or complicit neglects the nuanced workings of Foucault’s conceptualizations of biopolitics, in particular its models of the economy and government. Biopolitics is often interpreted 14 in feminist scholarship more broadly as the “political dimensions of the biological” (Franklin 72). This example of biopolitics being “broadly reduced to a kind of body politics” neglects a concept of government which Thomas Lemke argues “directs our attention to the relation between forms of self-direction and government by others, allowing an investigation of moral-political modes of existence” (“Beyond” 166). In other words a consideration of “government,” distinguished from a concept of oppressive power, such as the state or patriarchy, focuses on the relations between agency and forces of subjection in order to examine complex matrices of power flows. This move to open up the field as a horizontal plane rather than a vertical top-down model enables a further examination of how biopolitics could give rise at the same time to the eugenics movement and the feminist movement itself, both movements promoted by a range of physical culture practitioners. Positioning both eugenics and feminism in an emergent biopolitical neoliberal field provides a necessary corrective to the liberatory model by asking feminism and feminists to examine and acknowledge biopolitics as an endlessly productive, albeit politically ambivalent mechanism rather than an even more pervasive form of patriarchal oppression. Hence, a central question of this project is how does resistance operate in and through physical culture practices and what kinds of impacts does that resistance have on governmental power structures? As Foucault argued, resistance is instrinsic to, but also superior to, the operations of power, “power relations are obliged to change with resistance” (“Subjectivity” 167). However, Foucault does strive to dislocate resistance from individual agency, arguing for a form of resistance “without having to give a sacred 15 status to this person or that as a dissident, we can no doubt analyze the components in the way in which someone actually acts” (Security 202). Focusing on those “acts,” Foucault proposes the idea of “counter-conducts,” those acts which constitute a “struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others” (201). He further clarified that by focusing on acts rather than individuals, counter-conducts could be enacted by a variety of agents including dissidents, but also “delinquents, mad people, and patients” (202). Thus, resistance does not necessarily require the desire to resist, change, or overthrow, but can be both intentional and unintentional. This reconfiguration centralizes that act rather than the motivation, unhinging endless binaries of transgression and complicity. Such a reimagining of resistance discards the question of liberation. Instead, following Foucault’s assertion that “[w]e can never be ensnared by power: we can always modify its grip,” it asks how this conception of power operations might “enable us to be governed differently and, perhaps, less” (“Power and Sex” 123; Schachter 10). Defining Physical Culture Throughout these chapters I use the term physical culture to encompass a specific historical movement that was nonetheless operating as form of power encouraging specific kinds of self-cultivation, for specific subjects, thus also operating as a means to manage large sectors of the population. According to most scholarship on the subject, physical culture emerged as a historical movement throughout Europe and the US around the middle of the nineteenth century as Swedish and German systems of gymnastic exercise began to spread into colleges and universities. At the time physical culture 16 practice was attached primarily to medical and educational institutions where it was used to describe daily habits meant to affect and correct bodily functions (digestion, breathing, musculature, circulation). It was often designed to enable individuals to manage their bodily conduct through interventions into dress, bathing, posture, and diet as a way to combat the confined, polluted, and often sedentary character of urban living by promoting exercises and routines that could be effectively deployed within small indoor spaces. By the latter part of the century it ballooned into a popular health movement, spreading into social welfare institutions, and taking up residence within numerous newly built city gymnasiums. Accompanying this geographical growth was an expansion of activities which qualified as physical culture: by the late nineteenth century physical culture was an umbrella term used to describe everything from various different schools of gymnastics to Delsarte movement, elocution to athletics. Physical culture exhibits appeared at World’s Fairs in both Chicago in 1893 and St. Louis in 1904, at exhibitions in Madison Square Garden beginning in 1902, and also at multiple smaller exhibitions given by schools and classes based out of the multitude of city gyms. In this emerging urban economy, consumption – the purchase of services, products, and entertainment – became rationalized as a crucial aspect of rational recreation, a way that Chris Waters suggests marketed middle class values to the working class while simultaneously keeping them “working,” and thus outside of the boundaries of the middle class (22). By the turn of the century, the physical culture movement was hitting its peak with classes in most public and private schools, numerous exhibitions on both local and national levels, mass production of related equipment and machines, and a panoply of rapidly circulating 17 media – magazines, books, photographs, and films – championing its positive results for men, women, and children. In its contemporary context, the term is most often used as a synonym for physical fitness where it is “associated with the forms of keep fit exercises to music for women that were precursors to the 1970s ‘pop mobility’ and more recent ‘aerobic dance,’ and with the esoteric and sometimes bizarre worlds of naturalism and body building” (Kirk 63). While aerobics, jazzercise, and women’s keep fit exercises necessarily feminize and marginalize the term in contemporary usage, such a move also masks the ubiquity implied by the use of the word “culture.” Both historical and contemporary usage of terms like physical fitness, physical activity, physical education, and physical training neglect not only the serve to differentiate these practices, enabling the separation (or marginalization) of the figures I discuss in this project, but also enable a relatively easy disavowal of the gender, racial, and class hierarchies implicit in a consideration of the “culture” of physical culture. Inserting “culture” back into the myriad physical practices that constitute a healthy lifestyle (sports, recreation, education, training, fitness, activity) forces an acknowledgement of the constructedness, contingency, and historicity of these now pervasive forms of self-fashioning and discipline, as well as pointing to their often elitist, sexist, and racist baggage. As numerous contemporary scholars have pointed out, “culture” often served (serves) as a seemingly relativistic and supposedly value-free term, under which liberal regimes incite individuals to practice forms of self-government and self-cultivation.12 In this formulation culture in its various forms (physical, intellectual, moral, etc.) operated 18 as a mode of biopolitics that encouraged forms of self-management that ultimately facilitated the categorization and organization of subjectivities within the socio-economic sphere. As cultural theorist Tony Bennett suggests, [c]ulture thus offered an important means for regulating societies by suggesting that their key divisions resulted from the ways in which individuals seemed naturally to differentiate themselves according to how far they did (the respectable middle class) and did not (the feckless poor) respond to the cultural imperative of self-improvement. (“Culture” 69) This imperative to “culture” oneself – whether it be through literature, museums, theatre, the opera – “suspends conclusion and conclusiveness [ . . . ] always able to compel its practitioners to begin again” (Hunter 353). This endless circuit of (re)productivity is a central aspect of biopolitics in its neoliberal formulations, where despite the “tendency to a falling rate of profit” capitalism will always “discover new forms of productivity, and make technological innovations (Foucault, Birth 231). Furthermore, Bennett’s definition forges direct links between macro-level processes of population identity consolidation and differentiation, and micro-level processes of embodied self-cultivation. Foucault refers to both these processes under the term “conduct” in the double sense of the word as “at the same time a way to ‘lead’ others [ . . . ] and a way of behaving” (“The Subject and Power” 341). Combining these ideas suggests that culture as a form of liberal governmentality is performatively constituted through doings and things done.13 Consequently, Bennett’s multi-pronged vision of culture becomes a useful lens through which to examine physical culture across times, spaces, and people by providing a way of 19 perceiving its practices fluid and multivalent acts that differentiate bodies according to ideologies of class, race, sexuality, and gender. Accordingly, I organize the material in the following chapters in orbit around this culture-biopolitical governmentality- performativity constellation in order to conduct a more nuanced, but also broad-reaching investigation of physical culture as a conduct of modernity. Interventions: Culture, Biopolitical Governmentality, and Performance The existing scholarship in sports history tends to take the “culture” of physical culture as self-evident, rather than as the most important, contested, and complex dimension of the phenomenon. The adoption of the term physical culture in the mid- nineteenth century by reformers placed the practice alongside a host of other leisure pursuits that were similarly aimed at self-fashioning and self-improvement through aesthetic engagement. As an aesthetic practice, poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold in 1876 referred to culture as “the acquainting of ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit” (xi). Physical culture practices operated through a similar holistic approach, utilizing exercises, daily diet, and bathing routines that were said to not only improve the body, but also the mind and spirit. In this sense, physical culture in the Progressive Era was an aesthetic practice whose most evident fruits were “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” (R. Williams 80). However, the instigation of a practice bent on perpetual self-improvement necessarily operated from the assumption that the “self” was incomplete. Hence, as cultural theorist Ian Hunter observes, culture in this form operated 20 as a “device in self-problematization” where people “relate to themselves as aesthetically incomplete beings” who need to engage in and with “culture” in order to be complete (351-2). This relationship simultaneously created and justified the need for “experts” who might guide these incomplete subjects on their journey towards an indefinitely deferred wholeness. It also enabled the categorization of people and populations according to their relative levels of (in)completeness, driving a universal imperative to improve. The drive to improve fuelled sweeping social reforms, especially in urban areas, where rapid industrialization and urbanization was viewed as a social ill connected to the progression of civilization, posing culture as a necessary corrective. In this scenario, culture worked “to combat the shortcomings of civilization by diffusing the higher standards of culture throughout society” (Bennett, “Culture” 66). Civilization in this context was “indicted for its shallowness, coarseness, or incompleteness, when viewed from the higher standards of human wholeness or perfection that the notion of culture increasingly came to represent” (Bennett, “Culture” 65). Supremely concerned with environment, culture as anti-civilization paradigm worked to transform the spaces of the city into the perfection embodied in classical forms of art, and architecture, to counter the brutality of coal smoke, waste, and tainted food that were the by-products of industrial progress. By opposing culture (a social ideal) and civilization (the polluted reality of urban living), Progressive Era intellectuals perpetuated a classist/racist/sexist project of assimilation and segregation. Utilizing architectural styles to instill the material layout of the city with spiritually inflected morality, city leaders across the country built museums, 21 libraries, and galleries “that beckoned the urban population with the prospect of spiritual and cultural uplift and improvement.” However, the benevolent paternalistic moralism of the ruling classes was also expressed in a concern over the shortcomings of “the ways of the life of the urban working-classes and the need to enfold these classes within the improving force of culture if the threat of anarchy were to be averted” (Bennett, “Culture” 66). As a similarly moralistic force, physical culture in the city operated through city gymnasiums and social welfare institutions such as the YW and YMCA, to avert this threat by “enfolding” members into a form of white bourgeois bodily conduct. This conduct was equated through the consumption and practice of culture with overall improvement of the urban population. Raymond Williams envisioned culture as a “particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group” began manifesting as early as 1874 in the writings of social anthropologist Edward Tylor that classified and divided the socio-economic sphere along an evolutionary trajectory (Bennett, “Culture” 80). The call to a common humanistic project whose work then paradoxically created divisions through classification was clearer in Tylor’s definition of culture as a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” followed by a differentiation between “savage and cultured life” (1, 26). Culture as a way of life, Bennett argues, provides a “means of dividing societies into separate groups” enabling various forms of colonization to perpetuate. Culture facilitated a similar process of stratification at the level of the self, where culture, as Bennett asserts in his characterizations of museum exhibits, “served as a template for a process of 22 developmental self-fashioning in which the legacy of earlier layers of development was to be sloughed off in order to update and renovate the self so that it would be able to respond appropriately to the imperatives of social evolution” (“Civic Laboratories” 533). It was through this conceptualization that white women became a particular problem of culture to themselves, and for others. As beings unable to fully develop along the established lines of evolutionary trajectories, according to numerous scientific experts, due to the demands of reproduction upon their bodies and minds, white women were in particular need of improvement for the benefit of the “race.”14 Race, like culture, was often used under the auspices of the “human race,” an idea that was undermined by not only by racial sciences, but by social sciences that viewed the “primitive” as a kind of “evolutionary ground zero” (533). In this equation the “primitive” and its various derivatives, was viewed as unable to “respond appropriately” to the imperatives of self- improvement. However, the white woman, despite her hampered evolutionary status, was necessary for the perpetuation of “human capital,” a key aspect of neoliberal forms of governmentality. It was at this conjuncture, where discourses on the “savage primitive” and the enfeebled white woman met, that the eugenic drive behind many physical culture practices was laid bare. Governing Others, Governing Self: Eugenics, Race, and Visual Culture My project foregrounds eugenics as a key driving force that enabled the institutionalization of physical culture into education, and contributed to its popular appeal for those advocating stronger mothers. Eugenic calls to “strengthen the race” 23 appeared in the writings of each of the figures discussed in this project, and were used as the ultimate end that justified their means. Eugenics, a term coined in 1883 by British statistician Francis Galton by joining the Greek eu meaning “good” or well to genesis meaning “to be born,” referred to the so-called science of breeding better humans.15 Caleb Saleeby, a Galton protégé, further clarified that eugenics consisted of both positive types – “the encouragement of worthy parenthood” – and negative types – “the discouragement of unworthy parenthood.”16 After WWII eugenics became linked to the negative type following the atrocities of the Nazi death camps, a connection that led many historians, especially in the US, to excise the prevalence of eugenic ideals from history books, neglecting its continued presence in more contemporary ideologies. More recent scholars such as Wendy Kline, Daniel J. Kelves, Troy Duster, and Edwin Black not only strive to shed light on the pervasiveness of eugenics in the early twentieth century US, but also demonstrate its emergence in fields such as genetics, bioethics, medicine, and evolutionary biology.17 As a mode of governing others, Progressive Era discourses in the US on eugenics provided a pivotal synthesis of biopolitical practices – gendered and racialized conducts – and coercive techniques that ensured the proliferation of certain populations, and denied privileges to allow the death of others. Foucault found modern racism to be a manifestation of a form of modern sovereignty with “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death,” a “making live and letting die” (emphasis in original, Security 247, 80). The compulsory sterilizations of the first part of the twentieth century in the US certainly served as a negative type of eugenics, a “letting die” by forcibly preventing 24 “unfit” men and women from being able to reproduce offspring.18 What Foucault’s definition of racism enables is a more thorough investigation of how positive eugenics “allows for a hierarchization of ‘those who are worthy of living’ but also situates the health of one person in a direct relationship with the disappearance of another” (Lemke Biopolitics 42). In other words, an analytics of biopolitics opens a theoretical field that positions both positive and negative eugenics as two pieces of a whole, where neither can be entirely absent from a conceptualization of the other. This (re)positioning also demonstrates how positive eugenics utilizes modes of self-government, like exercise and birth control, as a means of governing entire populations. Tracing the biopolitical maneuverings of race through late nineteenth century physical culture practices requires an in-depth incorporation of racial science and the complex interplay between gender, race, and class at work in visual culture. While Foucault’s theorization of race is a useful paradigm for examining racism as a modern invocation of sovereignty, it neglects the way race was used to organize populations in liberal governmentality and incite them to practice specific forms of productivity. Visual culture, I argue, acted as one of the mediums that physical culturists utilized to encourage certain conducts for certain populations. In this study I pair biopolitical analysis with a consideration of how culture facilitates the separation of the population by categories of race, gender, and class in order to conduct a deeper analysis of how race operated as an incitement to productivity in white bodies. The influx of Southern and Eastern European and Asian immigrants, the migration of displaced and disenfranchised blacks to northern cities, the expropriation of Mexican land in the southwest by white settlers, and the 25 sequestering of Native Americans into white administered boarding schools, as Catherine Rottenberg suggests, spurred debates over subsequent “degrees of [white] privilege” in the late nineteenth century (122). While agrarian and labor reform sought to create bridges between native-born and white immigrant laborers, and even white and black farmers in the south, historian Carol Horton argues that the lack of federal action against Jim Crow laws, and continued discrimination and segregation of Asian immigrants in urban areas, reveals an underlying assumption of white supremacy on both local and national levels of reform (225-6). In the Progressive Era this assumption was most blatantly played out through the project of “manifest destiny.” As historian Reginald Horsman points out in his book Race and Manifest Destiny, the US policy of manifest destiny was propelled, justified, and supported by racial sciences that argued for the “innate superiority of the American Anglo-Saxon branch of the Caucasian race” (1). For example, pseudo-scientific disciplines such as phrenology and physiognomy utilized recent evolutionary science to demonstrate the alleged superiority, and also deficiency, embodied in particular physical traits such as head shape, by tying these physical traits to the expression of inner character. Such practices constructed connections between head size and intelligence (both focused almost exclusively on the face and head) and, as art historian Allan Sekula argues, allowed these disciplines to “legitimate on organic grounds the dominion of intellectual over manual labor” (12). As Sekula’s assertion highlights, these sciences also enabled the articulation of whiteness with a host of other attributes including nationality, intelligence, and gender. Racial science allegedly revealed the lesser intelligence and 26 susceptibility to mental and physical disease broadcast through women’s physiques, but the project of racial superiority also depended on women’s ability to fuel racial progress, “[t]hey guarantee its reproduction, even while not succeeding to its highest heights” (Dyer 29). As arbiters of a practice that worked to shape, correct, and improve (white) bodies, physical culturists utilized the supposed truth of racial sciences to focus on those bodies that were capable of improvement (passing over those doomed to evolutionary extinction) with the bold proclamation that anyone could get fit through their methods. The alleged truth of such assertions was most often broadcast in physical culture through photographs. As a biopolitical mechanism for categorization, surveillance, and the representation of “truth,” photography served as evidence of the efficacy of physical culture practices. However, by utilizing photography, physical culturists also necessarily dipped into the concomitant ambiguity and excess produced when subjects – especially non-whites and women – were photographed. Anthropologist Deborah Poole makes the intimate connection between race and visual culture explicit when she asserts the “[f]rom its beginning, race was about revealing – or making visible – what lay hidden underneath the untidy surface details – the messy visual excess – of the human cultural body” (164). As Richard Dyer argues, the emergence of photography facilitated a double-movement in racial science by enabling the dominant culture to “see” itself and justify its imperialist actions, while also serving as a surveillance mechanism for marginalized populations, especially criminals. Thus, nineteenth century visual culture, as articulated by this dual function, operated biopolitically as a way of governing both self and others. However, such a dual conception also demonstrated some of the difficulties inherent in biopolitics’ 27 all-encompassing productivity. Photography, for example, as a medium that captured the place of a specific moment in time, seemed to promise both the “truth” of racial hierarchies, and serve as a tool for infinite categorization possibilities. However, the contingency of the photograph also (re)produced a tangle of unexpected excess produced by the “intersubjective space constituted by the act of photographing” (Edwards 145). Performance, in staging that space, often let loose the barely contained excess of visual imagery, the masked interiority of the subject, opening an almost infinite field of choice for its audiences. What Elin Diamond calls the in-the-moment “doing” of performance, its radical contingency, simultaneously stages the subject and the ghost of its opposite (1- 2). Physical culture performance, as a governing mechanism, was intended to persuade its practitioners and audience to adopt certain ways of being in the world that carried gendered, racialized, and classed implication. However, the instability of performance’s “doing” always also proposed past and as yet unimagined future possibilities for individual conduct, and thus the potential to reroute, reorganize, and reimagine racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Biopolitical Governmentality, Nature, and Human Capital The broad range of mechanisms of power at work in physical culture requires an analytic that can operate with both broad sweeping strokes and specific nuanced detail on the everyday practices of a body. Thus, my project utilizes an analytics of biopolitics as a way to examine how physical culture for white, primarily middle class women enabled them to be known, and to know themselves as modern reproductive subjects.19 I rely 28 primarily on the theory articulated in Michel Foucault’s work, specifically his lectures at the Collège de France: Security, Territory, Population, 1977-1978 and The Birth of Biopolitics, 1978-1979 that sees biopolitics as a “strategic field of multiple power apparatuses” – especially the “modern human and natural sciences and the normative concepts that emerge from them” (Weir 9; Lemke Biopolitics 33). Foucault sees biopolitics forming out of early nineteenth-century emergent fields like biology “and the normative concepts that emerge from them,” that are then “crosscut by contestations pertaining to vital phenomena” – the “biological features [of human beings] measured and aggregated at the level of populations” (Lemke, Biopolitics, 33; Weir 9; Lemke, “Beyond” 5). Physical culture in the Progressive Era functioned as one of these contestations as it worked to affect biological functions like breathing, digestion, and defecation, but also biological features like weight, posture, and shape. These contestations then “structure political action and determine its goals” (Lemke, Biopolitics 33). In other words, biopolitics operates on the assumption that politics and life are mutually constitutive, unstable categories with a fluid and mobile border. It strives to operate in the interstices of competing scholarly discourses by “focusing on neither the causes nor the effects of the politics of life, but describing instead its mode of functioning” and “investigat[ing] the network of relations among power processes, knowledge practices, and modes of subjectification” (Lemke, “Beyond” 188-9). This project addresses each of these three aspects of biopolitical analysis as lines of argumentation that utilize a genealogical approach emphasizing flows, circulations, and mobilizations of discursive practices and performances, rather than operating as a 29 primarily descriptive account of people, places, and things. Rather, as Foucault suggested, the genealogical analysis “is only possible as the analysis of our own subsoil” that finds its “point of departure in our actuality” (Aesthetics 263). As a mode of historiography, this analytics requires elevating questions of “how” and “why” over “who” and “what.” Hence, while my project is structured around specific gymnasiums, performances, and physical culturists it asks how physical culture functioned biopolitically in these settings. How did physical culture act as a form of domination, a process of self-improvement, a mechanism of exclusion, and tactic of resistance that shaped how experiences of racism and sexism were inscribed on the body in the Progressive Era? Who profited and how from the regulation and improvement promised by physical culture practices? How did physical culture practices lend certain social issues political recognition, while obscuring others? How did physical culture promote certain conducts linked to whiteness, masculinity, and class, and then cover its tracks, enabling its practices to be taken up and distributed as universally beneficial for all?20 To address how biopolitical power processes operated as a form of governmentality, I position physical culture as a system bent on managing, regulating, and fostering the continued growth and improvement of the population through tactics aimed at individual bodies, or the “conduct of conduct” (“The Subject and Power” 341). According to Michel Foucault governmentality is an “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflection, the calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of [a] very specific albeit complex form of power which has as its target the population” (“Governmentality” 102). The complexity of this system rested on the 30 incorporation of intellectual and popular criticisms of the state, such as those forwarded by Progressive Era reform movements, that “none the less serve[d] to act in the interests of good government” (A. Barry, et al 10). As governmentality scholar Graham Burchell argues, in reform eras the population is not only a target but also a “partner” in its own regulation and maintenance (“Peculiar” 127). The population is not subject to tyrannical state subjugation, or, on the other hand, the victim of a perceived lack of state regulation; instead, Foucault argued, interventions in the population occur through the dispersion of regulatory techniques through social welfare movements and institutions such as those responsible for the regularization of the bodies of immigrant women, children, the poor, and ethnic minorities. In the shift away from what historian John Whiteclay Chambers characterizes as a century marked by “unrestricted individualism” and an “autonomous and apolitical market system,” the Progressive Era move toward social welfare worked to incorporate, assimilate, and indoctrinate marginalized sectors of the population into a productive conduct of whiteness and heterosexual (re)productivity (136). Physical culture operated as a part of this ensemble through a system of everyday practices designed for the individual, but meant to increase the physical and mental efficiency of the population. The second line of argumentation I develop through the following chapters investigates knowledge practices, and focuses on how liberal governmentality formulates the idea of “nature” as a knowledge practice that establishes the conditions upon which governmental intervention into populations can be justified. Physical culture practices, especially for women, in the Progressive Era functioned variously as an intervention to 31 ensure the population’s natural functioning, as an assertion of the nature of that population, and as a means of ascertaining the nature of a population. Nature in liberal governmentality does not refer to an external space taken up by forests, mountains, lakes, etc. and generally devoid of populations, but rather refers to something akin to the essence of a population of people.21 As Thomas Lemke points out “nature does not represent an autonomous domain that has to be respected by governmental action but depends of the practices of government itself. Nature is not a material substratum to which practices of government are applied but the permanent correlate of those practices” (Biopolitics 5). Lemke’s definition exposes a constructed form of “nature” that is produced through a relationship of governance between populations and their conductors. It is the nature of a population that must be maintained, regulated, and managed through biopolitical procedures in a system of governmentality. Knowledge of a population’s nature opens up the option to “deploy reflected procedures of government within this nature, with the help of it, and with regard to it” (Foucault, Security 75). For example, Harvard physical director Dudley Allen Sargent’s practices worked to correct the deleterious effects of urbanization on bodies by returning them to a more “natural” state. His measurement practices and fitness tests served to produce knowledge of the nature of the student population in the US. Additionally, while the self-proclaimed “father of physical culture” Bernarr Macfadden used similar tools, and expressed concerns about the effects of urbanization on bodies, his physical culture shows operated as a showcase for the eugenic potential of physically fit contestants. The performance of physical feats in the gymnasium and on the streets of Minneapolis by YWCA students created doubt 32 about the efficacy of physical culture’s reform mission. Thus, physical culture operated on multiple fronts to maintain, proclaim, and even contest assumptions about the nature of human populations. My third line of argumentation focuses on how theories of human capital – emerging at the beginning of the 20th century and evolving through mid-century – enabled processes of subjectification that produced the neoliberal “entrepreneur of the self.” Human capital theory, as initially proposed by Rudolf Goldscheid, was indicative of a global shift toward a neoliberal collapse of the social and economic spheres that conceived of “human life as economic capital” (Lemke Biopolitics 108). This conceptualization, Foucault argued, produced humans as “entrepreneurs of the self,” mobile enterprises focused on building and developing innate capacities, and accumulating material wealth and social advantages that would contribute to an individual’s overall feeling of satisfaction with life (Foucault, Birth 226). As a form of biopower – modes of subjectification through which “individuals can be brought to work on themselves for the sake of individual or collective health” – physical culture increased human capital, developing individuals’ innate attributes, correcting defects, and increasing their earning capacity by making them less prone to breakdown (Rabinow and Rose 3-4). Consequently, Goldscheid hoped, “the rising significance of human capital [ . . . ] [would] lead to a more humane treatment of human beings” in a world beginning to see the rise of corporations that heralded the dawning of post-industrial capitalism (Bröckling 260). Hence, the idea of the human as economic capital encouraged populations to work on themselves through the self-cultivating practices of physical 33 culture, thus acquiring an increased sense of agency and feeling of pleasure in life. However, the idea of human capital also enabled a de-humanization of life and labor that, through the medium of physical culture, crafted bodies to operate in specific roles in the larger machinery of progress. While various groups resisted this formula – feminists, labor unions, etc. – the resultant call for empowerment was often implemented through further physical self-cultivation and discipline, a move that nonetheless furthered the project of better, stronger, healthier populations. Ultimately, my project (re)imagines Progressive Era physical culture as both a conduct and counter-conduct within a system of liberal governmentality and biopolitics. More specifically, as a conflicted site in which bodies were forged through acts, physical culture operated as a key battleground for envisioning how women should be governed in the twentieth century. The co-presence of dynamic and constantly shifting modes of conduct and counter-conduct marked physical culture as a primary arena of struggle in liberal governmentality, supported by cross-current battles around the place of work, family, children, technology, and education (just to name a few) in people’s daily lives. Such tensions necessarily foregrounded not only discourses about gender, race, and sexuality, but also asked how those discourses operated on and through bodies. How might acts be constitutive of gender, race, and sexuality? To investigate this question I make an intervention into current biopolitical scholarship by utilizing performance theory. 34 Performance, Reform, and Surrogation It is the emphasis on governmentality as the “conduct of conducts,” and biopolitics as a series of everyday routines, habits, and practices, that makes performance theory an apt partner to an analytics I pursue throughout this dissertation (Foucault, “The Subject and Power” 341). To summarize his series of lectures on biopolitics, Foucault suggested that he spoke of liberal governmentality “not as a theory or an ideology, and even less, obviously, as a way in which ‘society’ ‘represents itself,’ but as a practice, that is to say, a ‘way of doing things’ directed towards objectives and regulating itself by continuous reflection” (Birth 318). As a “way of doing things” I suggest that liberal governmentality can be aligned with Elin Diamond’s assertion that performance is always “a doing [ . . . ] embodied acts, in specific sites, witnessed by others (and/or the watching self)” and “a thing done [ . . . ] the completed event framed in time and space and remembered” (1). Viewing liberal governmentality as a performance enables an exploration of how individual performative acts of self-cultivation serve as “vital acts of transfer,” travelling from one body to the next through witnesses, eventually spreading through entire populations (D. Taylor 2). In return, biopolitics provides a way to examine how these various acts are then utilized not only to govern populations, but also order and separate those populations according to (performative) categories of race, gender, and class. Examining physical culture through these lenses opens up a space to understand how its practices govern our bodies, to examine its contingency and in so doing provide an opening for different forms of (self) government, and thus the potential to reconsider, and perhaps redraw, boundaries of class, race, and gender. 35 The repeated doingness of performance helps explain how certain acts of transfer cease to bear the markers of their creation and come to be perceived as natural, or given.22 In the deconstructive sense “performativity signals absorption,” a naturalness to the way something is enacted that masks its constructedness (Parker and Sedgwick 2).23 In other words, in order for a conduct or an act to become a “nature” or “essence” it must disappear, or as Bourdieu suggests, be “internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history” (56). As a medium for staging conducts, physical culture as a performance facilitates the construction of the nature of populations, makes that nature visible, and in doing so makes them calculable and governable. However, performativity, as Derrida and Butler suggest, is always already “a citational practice,” and as such often destabilizes the “given” nature of certain conducts.24 In order for a conduct to be absorbed it must be practiced and repeated. For example women’s physical culture used repeated practicing of exercises in order to showcase the practitioners’ absorption of certain movements into their bodies, demonstrated in the final performances as a naturalness through the perceived effortlessness of the movements. However, the stability of that naturalness was often disturbed by the presence of unpracticed bodies, or bodies that cast off choreographies of effortlessness. Such examples suggest that performance stages performativity’s undoing by paradoxically asserting the naturalness of certain conducts while also signaling their theatrical constructedness. What marked physical culture as a uniquely (neo)liberal form of training was the way it operated to incite its audiences to adopt particular conducts, and in this transfer, perpetuate and sustain the habitus it hoped to promote.25 36 However, returning to Diamond’s definition, performance as process of naturalization is never foreclosed or complete in that, with every performance, the unnaturalness of the movements is (mis)remembered. It is at this crossroads, where both the “doingness” (its immediacy as an action happening right now, in the moment) and the “doneness” (its history as a series of repeated gestures with historical and ideological weight) of performance come to the forefront, providing an opportunity for (re)imagining ways to “modify [power’s] grip” on us (Schachter 10). Taking both the radical contingency and the historicity of performance into account, performance scholars Shannon Jackson and Joseph Roach articulate theories that provide a fertile foundation to my project’s exploration of physical culture. Jackson formulates her theory in relation to the Progressive Era’s reform mission, specifically addressing the reform activities performed by Chicago’s Hull House residents around the turn of the twentieth century. Jackson suggests that the shared etymology of reform and performance link both processes together to “re-create individuals by restoring behaviors and environments along alternative lines” (Lines 339). In other words, reform practices borrowed conducts from the past in order to re-imagine the present through the body. Roach’s theory of surrogation expresses a similar combining of past, present, and ultimately future as he explores circum-Atlantic performances of racialization. Roach proposes that societies cope with loss – variously expressed in death, trauma, and/or historical distance – by (re)fashioning substitutes to perform the functions and replace the affective weight carried by the person/custom/thing that has left. Such a process, Roach argues, demonstrates a “doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand- 37 ins,” highlighting the ties and tensions between historicity and contingency. In my work surrogation enacts both the citational and absorption aspects of performativity by appropriating the physical actions of marginalized groups, then performing them as natural aspects of a white bourgeois physique, thus continually staging the actions of people depicted as part of an evolutionary past. These instances of surrogation not only destabilize an ideal and natural white bourgeois masculinity, but also demonstrate how performing race, class, and gender operated to spur white women to adopt maternal conducts. The Biopolitical Performativity of Reproduction Reproduction – a performance constructed as a natural way for women’s bodies to act, and as a duty women are often expected to perform for the good of the family, population and/or nation – operates here as the often invisible axis around which discourses of eugenics, feminism, biopolitics, and governmentality revolve. If, as governmentality scholars Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose suggest, biopolitics are “strategies having the objective of implanting life and health,” then women’s reproductive bodies take up a central node in biopolitical operations as bodies capable of creating and fostering life (3-4). While much scholarship on governmentality and biopolitics focuses on Foucault’s assertion that the household emerges as a primary unit of production in neoliberalism, very few scholars emphasize how gender operates in this equation.26 Such an examination of reproduction – both biological and social – as women’s work requires viewing the process in economic terms. For example, children 38 come to be considered in terms of human capital in neoliberal governmentality; an investment that requires tending. As Foucault suggests, “What constitutes an investment in an abilities-machine? [ . . . ] We know that the number of hours a mother spends with her child will be very important [ . . . ] the simple time parents spend feeding their children, or giving them affection [is an] investment which can form human capital” (Birth 229). Viewed through these terms, maternal conducts become productive of the main constituent of neoliberal economy: human capital. Consequently, having children (an idea I stretch beyond biological reproduction) often intertwines women’s productivity with her reproductivity. Although some feminist historiographers believe the Progressive Era signaled a significant shift from “woman-as-mother” to “woman-as-worker,” a close look at physical culture discourses and practices (as well as legislation, social reform projects, and popularly circulating handbooks and magazine articles) through the lens of an emerging biopolitical form of governance suggests instead that maternity had become a naturalized conduct. Feminist historiography on the Progressive Era depicts the maternal as a somewhat waning construction of femininity deriving from the mid-nineteenth century “Cult of True Womanhood.” Numerous feminist historians, such as Carroll Smith Rosenberg, suggest the Progressive Era marked an end to the domestic construction ushered in by the entrance of the “single, highly educated, economically autonomous New Woman” (245). The emergence of the New Woman “replaced the purity, piety, domesticity, and obedience of [Victorian True Womanhood] with a model of womanhood committed to women’s social, political, and sexual equality” (Rich 2).27 39 However, the valorization of the New Woman has been criticized from multiple angles, arguing that such a conception neglects multiethnic experiences, is an “anxious and paradoxical icon of modern American power and decline,” and another agent of colonizing imperatives and desires (Patterson 3).28 While most often characterized as childless, as Martha Patterson points out, to many Progressive Era female fiction writers “maternal status was central to their vision of the New Woman” (6). Furthermore, domesticity and maternity shifted into larger spheres, shattering easy distinctions between private and public, home and the marketplace. In the space of the city, many feminist reformers relied on what I call conducts of social maternity – caring, fostering, and nurturing the poor, ill, and/or young – in order to justify their increased presence in both the workplace and politics. Though the prevalence of labor diputes, the influx of women into industrial and service jobs, and their increasing presence in local and national leaderhsip positions placed a heavy emphasis on the woman-as-worker paradigm, this ideology continued to be firmly yoked to the woman-as-mother. Many of the social reforms of the Progressive Era, reforms which we take for granted as universal today, were instituted based on women’s biological reproductivity. For example, the 1908 Supreme Court decision that limited work hours for women and children was passed on evidence collected that suggested such long hours were detrimental to women’s reproductive functions. In the closing remarks on the case Justice Brewer stated that “as healthy mothers are essential to physical off-spring, the physical well-being of a woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race” (Muller vs. State 40 of Oregon 1908, 148). In this statement the federal government intervened to ensure the continued productivity of women in industrial occupations, but curtailed their working day in order to ensure their primary responsibility as reproducers of the race and producers of the nation. However, such legislation also specifically targeted industrial workers, mostly poor and immigrant women, necessarily reducing their income. A similar problematic move was made in efforts to push through Child Labor laws. While many middle-class female reformers adamantly rallied against child labor, subsequent laws “deprived poor families of much-needed income without providing them with a viable substitute for lost wages” (Ladd-Taylor 119). Such assertions attest to how Progressive Era biopolitics surrounding reproduction affected modes of governmentality by provoking the cultivation and reproduction of white Americans, perceived through evolutionary science as “naturally” superior, while intervening into poor and/or non- white populations to limit, invalidate, and contain their cultivation and reproduction. In a much more widespread and less politically entrenched manner, physical culture used different means to achieve the same ends. As a practice for primarily middle class white women, physical culture worked to push forward positive eugenic aims by increasing women’s bodily capacity for reproduction. As biological reproducers, women’s bodies became prime sites of regulatory management. The result was a rampant flourishing of discourses, organizations, and institutions concerned with ensuring the flowering of the bourgeois population through the body of the mother. Consequently, whether social or biological, the issue of reproduction lies at the heart of Progressive Era formulations of gender, a move that cultural studies scholar Ron Greene 41 argues constitutes women’s subjectivity, arguing that a “modern woman is a subject whose truth status as modern resides in her ability to govern herself through the regulation of her reproduction” (34). As a form of subjectification, physical culture produced women as maternal subjects of modernity whose agency pivoted around choices about reproduction. As I suggest in chapter one, Sargent’s system placed women’s bodies in a biopolitical practice which “empowered” them through self- fashioning, but also allowed them to be “governed by others,” a position which enabled their emergence as modern reproductive subjects. A Physical Culture Genealogy: Sargent, Mayhew, and Macfadden As a point of entry my first chapter, “(Re)Constructing Nature Through Mimetic Exercise: Dudley Allen Sargent’s System of Physical Culture” explores the discourse and pedagogy of Dudley Allen Sargent, Harvard's physical director from 1879-1919, a key figure in the physical culture movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In response to increasing urbanization and industrialization, physical culture advocates like Sargent promoted a system of exercises and machines that worked to prevent the breakdown of the bodies of bourgeois “brain-workers” by encouraging a symmetrical approach to physical activity. Through the promotion of such mimetic exercises as wood-chopping, Sargent’s system promoted forms of subjectification that simultaneously created a more “fit” population of bourgeois workers, and enabled the emergence of a neoliberal “entrepreneur of the self” who produced himself as physically fit for his own satisfaction. Key to this shift is a thorough grounding in Foucault’s 42 theories of the function of the natural in biopolitical governmentality, Boudieu’s concept of habitus, and Roach’s performative act of surrogation. Utilizing these theorists I argue that performance, as the cornerstone of this transition from the body as a tool for production to the body as a production good itself, provided the act of surrogation needed to simultaneously distance mimetic exercises that simulated rural and working class practices (wood chopping, pitching hay, etc.) from their association with those populations, and (re)create it as a natural bourgeois habitus. Though an instrumental figure in physical education as the physical director of male bodies at Harvard, Sargent is most often touted as an innovator in women’s physical culture. While Sargent’s exercises served as classed and classing practices that contributed to the construction and definition of bourgeois masculinity, his work with female students served as gendered and gendering practices that facilitated the subjectification of women as modern reproductive subjects. Tracing similarities between medical discourse and Sargent’s physical culture discourse and practices, the second part of this chapter suggests that Sargent’s exercises for women focused not on symmetrical (re)construction, but emphasized areas of the body that most contributed to reproductive success. In this sense, women’s bodies, even more so than men’s bodies, operated within the emergent economic discourse of human capital. Conceiving of women’s reproduction in economic terms as (re)productive consumers benefitted the woman by reducing the physical risks of childbirth and benefitted the race by increasing birth rates. Ultimately, I argue that performing Sargent’s exercises facilitated the visible marking of 43 women’s economic choices on her body, ushering the modern maternal subject into being through a simultaneous adoption and disavowal of a nostalgic American rural past. In chapter Three, “‘These Walls Could Not Contain Me’: YWCA Physical Culture, Abby Mayhew, and Social Maternity,” looks at how Sargent’s biopolitical ideas and ideals shifted once circulated through and mobilized in women’s bodies in a different institutional setting at the Minneapolis YWCA. I speak specifically to the take-up and distribution of Sargent’s discourse by one of his former students, Abby Mayhew. Mayhew’s practices exceeded the walls of the YWCA, taking the bodies of athletic girls and women into the streets and parks of the city, and into local theatre houses, conflating notions of the public and private, practice and display. In social welfare institutions physical culture was often deployed as a mean of quite literally re-forming women’s bodies. Relying on Shannon Jackson’s idea of reformance I argue in this chapter that the YWCA employed what I call the conduct of social maternity to extend women’s reproductive duties beyond the sphere of the biological. In other words, YWCA employees like Mayhew helped shape women’s bodies to be economically, morally, and socially productive. By using a variety of often paradoxical moral-physical techniques such as Delsarte, muscular Christianity, Swedish gymnastics, basketball, and outdoor sports like cycling, rowing, and tennis, Mayhew’s physical culture operated as both conduct and counter-conduct, reinforcing existing forms of social maternal governance, while also challenging those forms by (re)imagining how social maternity could/should function in an urban context. 44 In chapter four, “Leotards and Leopard Print: White Motherhood and “Savage” Surrogates in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture,” I shift sites once more to address the types of physical culture promoted by Bernarr Macfadden through his Physical Culture magazine and the 1903 and 1905 Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions at Madison Square Garden. This site in particular, demonstrates the complicated maneuverings of biopolitics once spread out and circulated through popular press, visual images, and performance. I begin with an analysis of Macfadden’s writings and visual imagery from his magazines containing poly-form content that complicated and often contested Macfadden’s tireless promotion of domestic maternity by layering in connotations of excessive sexuality, white superiority, and commercial capital. Such constructions of physical culture provide a fruitful site to examine the intricacies of biopolitics as it negotiates the terrain of popular consumer culture. The products and methods advertised in Macfadden’s work as enabled governing structures increasingly intimate modes of intervening into the population’s individual lives, while simultaneously giving such interventions the sheen of individual agency and choice. As part of this complex, Macfadden often utilized what I call “savage surrogates” – imagery of physically vigorous women from “savage races” quickly, efficiently, and easily giving birth – to persuade his white primarily middle class female readers to utilize his methods to attain a superior maternal body. Through surrogation female readers could appropriate the physical culture of “savages” in order to facilitate white racial improvement, but the very necessity of doing so cast both their whiteness and reproductivity in doubt. Hence, 45 the need to maintain the visual excess – savagery and sexuality – as an implicit rather than explicit aspect of the imagery used in Macfadden’s publications. However, the instability of performance as a medium, its doingness and doneness, absorption and citation, often created openings for what was implicit in print to become explicit in performance. I focus on a moment from the first exhibition where, despite Macfadden’s choreographed poses that emulated the high class living statues of the Delsartians the female competitors began to “wiggle” and “gyrate” in response to the hoots and calls of their working class male audience/judges. This moment not only lays bare the sometimes indecipherable difference between conducts and counter-conducts, but exposes both the promise and threat of numerous acts of surrogation. As the hand- picked physical embodiments of Macfadden’s ideal white womanhood, the young white fit female competitors in the physique contests, “could not perform themselves [ . . . ] unless they also performed what and who they were not,” thus conjuring racial histories and bodies in order to (de)construct whiteness as a (counter) conduct (Roach 5). Additionally, by crafting a constant and ever present tension between conducts and counter-conducts governmentality in Macfadden’s physical culture ensured the constant productivity of the populations he targeted. This idea problematizes the Foucaultian formulations of race and racism centered around a modern form of sovereignty that saw racism in terms of “death [ . . . ] political death, expulsion, [and] rejection,” and their implication of techniques of repression, prohibition, and regulation (Foucault, “Society” 256). Instead, biopolitics opens a space for a racial analytics of liberal governmentality that organizes populations racially and incites them to particular forms of productivity. 46 To conclude, I reflect on the discourses and histories that were manufactured in the wake of fitness guru Jack Lalanne’s death in January 2011 as a means to consider the relative disappearance of the figures in this project from histories of physical culture. More specifically, I look at how and why retrospectives of Lalanne’s life positioned him at the origin of physical fitness, and what that timeline might look like were we to include Dudley Allen Sargent, Abby Mayhew, and Bernarr Macfadden. Doing so necessarily questions the latent agendas and investments of physical culture in our contemporary moment, highlighting how figures like Lalanne surrogated the discourse and practices of physical culturists from over half a century earlier. This assimilation demonstrates how and why these figures must be forgotten in order to position physical fitness in the US as a universally beneficial, individually gratifying, and necessary “practice of freedom” (Foucault, “Ethic” 2-3). 47 Chapter 2 : (Re)Constructing Nature Through Mimetic Exercise: Dudley Allen Sargent’s System of Physical Culture The public, rapacious for novelty, will not brook any repetition; so the ambitious artist must be constantly moving to new publics that have never seen his work. Then, too, I tired of having people look at me as a cross between a monkey and a gypsy, an interpretation of circus life which the performers must endure, even encourage, since the very strangeness of such a popular conception whets the curiosity of our precious audiences. (Sargent, Autobiography 8) Biopolitics, Governmentality, and Mimetic Exercise With this musing in his autobiography Dudley Allen Sargent – one of the key figures in physical education’s institutionalization – ended his brief career as a circus trapeze artist and moved into the similarly dubious profession of physical education. As a boy growing up in New England, Sargent belonged to the rural working class, spending a significant amount of time floating from one physically demanding job to another, working variously as a seaman, janitor, lumber man, coal miner, and farmer.29 Once he discovered his desire to pursue physical training as a career he moved on to work as a gymnast and a circus performer, two occupations that required a paying audience to witness his physical prowess. This string of unlikely positions preceding Sargent’s 48 almost 50-year career at Harvard complicates his historiographic placement as the father of modern physical education in the US. Furthermore, it troubles Progressive Era distinctions between elite academic institutions, popular performance, and vocational training. Emblematic of these frequently competing institutions and discourses, Sargent occupies a rather ambiguous position within physical culture histories. An undeniable innovator in the realms of exercise technique, training for women, and the establishment of physical education as a profession, Sargent’s blatant eugenic philosophies and promotion of physical training as a form of social control temper historians’ championing of his system.30 Taking the scope of Sargent’s background and philosophies into account, this chapter positions Sargent as a figure on the cusp of a new formulation of physical fitness in the US, one that undergirds American’s conceptions of health to this day. Fuelled by the shift from rural modes of labor and living to more sedentary urban- industrial forms of market-driven capital, physical training and education addressed urban problems attributable to smaller more congested living spaces. Bodies shifted from occupations and living spaces that required all-around physical engagement to the more physically repetitive tasks of industry and sedentary urban desk jobs. Physical culture endeavored to reform urban bodies, bringing them back to their more “natural state” in a nostalgic past before industry and technology intervened. However, to avoid the lower and working class associations connected with rural and physically engaged occupations, physical culturists like Sargent cloaked their practices in a grammar that anticipated a neoliberal conception of man as “an employee of society” (Donzelot 81). By making this 49 move physical culture began to imagine bodies as human capital, a two-fold concept that Foucault suggested combined a body’s capacity to be socio-economically productive based on the genetic material present in the body with the material benefits that body accumulated throughout a lifetime.31 While physical culture’s position as a solution to the physical problems inherent in Taylorism have been traced and critiqued, its anticipation of the neoliberal processes of subjectivization at the core of the production of human capital have yet to be investigated.32 Of primary concern for performance scholars is the centrality of mimetic repetition to this transformation of physical manual labor into human capital. In this chapter I trace the trajectory of a particular practice, the wood-chopping exercise, as it appeared in various exercise, teaching, and advice handbooks in order to highlight how physical culture ascended to its privileged position within national biopolitical schemas, and to suggest that performance was the alchemical touchstone that enabled the transition from the body as a tool for the production of goods to the production of the body as a good in and of itself. As a crucial element of this process, the mimetic performance of exercises like wood-chopping served as classed and classing practices, allowing the ascent of physical culture to its position as a primarily bourgeois practice distanced from its lower class roots. Taking Dudley Allen Sargent’s gymnasium at Harvard between 1879 and 1919 as my central site I investigate how his physical culture discourses and practices shaped and made visible the markers of class on elite male and female bodies, but also ensured their pedagogical proliferation through multiple institutions charged with maintaining and regulating the health and hygiene of the country's bourgeois youth. Using Foucault’s 50 theories of biopolitics and governmentality I attempt to tease out the relationship between Sargent’s practices and their connection to the broader field of both physical culture and a US socio-economic system engaged in sweeping social welfare reforms and federal regulations at the turn of the twentieth century. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics – a system of practices that regulate the bodily functions and daily routines of populations in order to raise birth rates, lower mortality rates, increase life spans, erase biological disabilities, and diminish detrimental environmental effects – enables me to discuss how macro-level economic practices, political imperatives and discourses came to bear on the micro-level practices of the bodies involved in Sargent’s physical training system. It is through biopolitics that governmentality – the dispersion of state power into multiple institutions and daily practices targeting the individual in order to influence the population – is enabled to function. Additionally, I rely on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in order to establish how Sargent’s physical training system became absorbed by bodies, displayed as a marker of bourgeois identity, then erased and normalized as a universal attribute of a “natural” physique. The Nature of the “Natural” The broader circulations of physical culture that influenced the ideals in Sargent’s gym spanned a period from roughly 1870 to 1915, encompassing the Progressive Era. In the final decades of the nineteenth century physical culture practice was attached primarily to educational institutions where it was used to describe sets of techniques and interventions at the level of the body designed to enable individuals to manage and 51 maintain their bodily movements and biological functions. Its transformation into a popular movement was paralleled by a general reform sentiment, which also contributed to the increased visibility of the labor movement, the women’s movement, the agrarian reform movement, and the corporate reorganization movement. These movements disseminated their organizational legacies through the establishment of the American Federation of Labor in 1886, the Food and Drug Administration in 1906, the Federal Trade Commission in 1914. Additionally, national social reform imperatives were put into action at the local level through social welfare programs via the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations and the settlement movement which paired spiritual and social reform with physical fitness. While these reforms sought to correct the State and transform government in general, Progressives also reinforced mechanisms of social and cultural regulation. Following these arguments, in liberal governmentality the population was neither subject to tyrannical State subjugation nor the victim of a perceived lack of state regulation. Instead, as Foucault suggested, interventions in the population occurred through the dispersion of regulatory techniques through social welfare movements and institutions such as those responsible for the regulation of the bodies of immigrant women, children, the poor, and ethnic minorities, thus sowing the seeds for eugenically-based regimes of power. Physical culture operated as a part of this ensemble, managing individuals and thus the population through a system of everyday practices designed for the individual, but meant to increase the physical and mental efficiency of the population as a whole. Hence, exercises like wood-chopping were used in schools and gymnasiums as a means to an end; enacted on the individual level to 52 strengthen muscles and increase cardiovascular capability that produced a population of physically efficient workers. Wood chopping itself was widely encouraged in medical texts and exercise handbooks in the US in the middle to late-nineteenth century. For instance, phrenologist and frequent contributor to Bernarr Macfadden’s magazine Physical Culture Felix Leopold Oswald suggested wood chopping as an outdoor activity in 1886 suitable as a home remedy for dyspeptics as it was “healthier as well as more pleasant than gymnastic crank-work” (Household Remedies 165).33 Such advice assumed readers had ready access to the outdoors, like the hills Oswald suggested patients run up and down for exercise, but also assumed that perhaps readers did not have the funds to pay for professional medical treatment. As an outdoor practice, wood chopping fit quite comfortably within the precepts of American pastoralism’s infatuation with nature espoused by such famous authors as Thoreau, Emerson, and Longfellow. However, some of the American romantics couched their love of the countryside in industrial flair, as Emerson pined in an 1884 lecture, “[r]ailroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water” (“The Young American” 364). The imagery in this passage (re)constructs the railroad as a mystic divining stick, able to awaken dormant natural resources. Technology here was imagined as a means to harness and enhance the natural world. However, this desire for the countryside was complex, sandwiched between a conceptual ideal and perceived reality. Even for Romantics like Thoreau the pastoral was ideal rather than actual, like a “weathered barn in the afternoon sun [ . . . ] most attractive from a distance; up close it showed the dry rot of tradition” 53 (Milder 32). The blurring of the boundaries between the urban and the rural, the industrial and the agricultural brought about by technologies such as the steam engine alternately solidified the connections and increased the distance between a pastoral ideal grounded in a nostalgic past and a perception of the reality of rural life articulated by Emerson as “cultivated by a so much inferior class” (368). Though in 1843 Emerson blamed commerce for the theft of the country’s “flower and first fruit” by the commerce of the cities, he characterized the agricultural class as shiftless, poverty-stricken, and dumb.34 Consequently, wood chopping became a practice in need of some justification within bourgeois institutions of learning through its paradoxical link to a nostalgic rural past, but also its ideological foundation in an obsolete lower class phenomenon. In other words the wood chopping exercise, and others like it, needed to be maintained as a rural practice tied to more natural modes of existence, but removed from subsequent associations with lower class occupations.35 Tied through a more widespread discourse about the “natural,” the wood- chopping exercise was part of a national trend of regulatory techniques that ushered in an economic and social “naturalism” buoyed by scientific theories of evolution. The “natural” mode of the US laissez faire economy operated according to what Foucault deemed to be a demand “not so much to prevent things as to ensure that the necessary and natural regulations work, or even to create regulations which enable natural regulations to work” (Security 17). In other words this system was by no means natural in an organic, pure, unprocessed way, but rather a highly regulated machine that intervened to ensure a more natural, as in “essential” and “true,” functioning of “the 54 course of things.” Foucault referred to this concept as “society as naturalness” where the natural refers to “processes of naturalness specific to the relation between men when they cohabit, come together, exchange, work and produce” (Security 349). As a system of processes this concept manufactured the natural as a product of relations between people, their labor, and objects in their world. Hence, the institutions set in place by the US federal government during the Progressive Era, such as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, provided a corrective to what was viewed as the polluting corruptness of nineteenth century economic policies, allowing the market to function more “naturally” by producing the nature they sought to maintain. In the US, Foucault argued, this naturalist discourse applied not only to the market economy, but also the social sphere. As a result, the discourse of the natural enabled Herbert Spencer to utilize Darwin’s natural selection performatively, transferring the aptly named scientific principle onto the human population to describe social relations.36 It was through the application of science to the social, and the subsequent production of “society as naturalness” that led to the pervasive and popular US eugenics movement at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. As various scholars point out, eugenics itself was the popular manifestation of discoveries in the sciences, particularly genetics and evolutionary biology, and thrived on popular perceptions while also echoing scientific theories. For example, as performance scholar Tamsen Wolff points out, eugenicists relied heavily on analogies to establish patterns of “genetic causality” between animals, even plants, and humans. The result, Wolff argues, was an “overdetermined and inflexible theory that [was] also in a generative, almost 55 frantically fictive state” (11). Accordingly, much like circulations of the natural, eugenics discourse often produced the very “science” it claimed to rely on. Eugenicists used science as a mantle of convenience in order to push through numerous state and national policies related not only to “positive” eugenics such as physical education reform in schools, but also “negative” eugenics – which loosely claimed to discourage the “unfit” from reproducing – such as sterilizing criminals and the insane (Kelves 108.) The insidiousness of eugenics is undeniable given its links to fascism and the holocaust, and its deadly consequences have often led history scholars to obscure its popular pervasiveness. However, recent scholars such as Wolff, women’s historian Wendy Kline, and historian Edwin Black work to unmask this everyday profusion of eugenics in the early twentieth century in an effort to caution current perceptions of advances in genetic science.37 Following in their footsteps I suggest that the eugenic drive behind physical training, fitness, and education must be scrutinized in order to tease out the implications of the relationship between “fitness” and “health”, and race, class, nation, and gender. Indeed, for Sargent these global concerns were at the heart of his highly individualized exercises. Sargent, in a similar if not more insidious fashion, utilized the mass discursive manufacture of the natural to suggest that professional and student classes were more “naturally” disposed to survive, but that urban living was preventing them from achieving the ascension to fitness. In the 1904 preface to his exercise handbook Health, Strength, and Power he argued that the purpose of the book was to give everyone, especially those without access to gymnasiums or equipment, the benefits of his system of training. This 56 statement, however, stood in stark contrast to his remarks in the introduction to the new edition ten years later which suggested that while improvements to “public health and municipal hygiene” had done much to advance the conditions of “the young, the ignorant or reckless and the so-called laboring classes who work largely with their muscles” those involved in more sedentary middle and upper class occupations, “[t]he students, the professional men, or the so-called brain workers” had been sorely neglected. In Sargent’s view this situation resulted in an evolutionary upheaval arguing that “[w]hile improved sanitation has undoubtedly prolonged the lives of those who are weak and would naturally have died young it has not prolonged the lives of those who are strong and would under other circumstances than those of our strenuous, one-sided modern life have lived to a ripe old age” (x). Viewed in this light, Sargent’s handbook set out to reinvigorate what he believed to be the natural, as in evolutionary, course of things. In other words, in evolutionary terms Sargent took practices from mostly rural spaces – where he believed evolution proceeded more freely – and ensured their continued progression in an industrialized urban setting. Surrogation and the Sargent System Biopolitically speaking, Sargent’s mimetic exercises, as demonstrated in his handbook and his gym, intervened in order to ensure the evolutionary movement, imagined as the “natural progression,” of civilization through the continued (re)production of bourgeois as natural. Hence, Sargent’s students practiced techniques of self-cultivation enabling their access to health, but simultaneously intimately linked this 57 achievement with appropriate performances of white bourgeois masculinity. Repeated performance of these exercises signaled a metaphoric, and possibly sometimes actual, erasure of the bodies they imitated, each subsequent movement shoving rural-industrial manual labor and even athletics into the past and out to the borderlands of a bodily entrepreneurship focused on breeding better (white wealthy male) Americans. Through this act of symbolic erasure these mimetic exercises enacted a form of what performance scholar Joseph Roach calls surrogation. The core of Roach’s Cities of the Dead develops this concept as a process where communities fill the “cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure [by attempting] to fit satisfactory alternates” (2). For example, I suggest that Sargent’s exercises attempted to substitute urban bourgeois bodies for rural lower class bodies to deal with the feeling of loss invoked by references to a collective (imagined) American pastoral past. The substitution, Roach suggests, simultaneously highlights the differences and similarities between the surrogate and the collective memory of the body or idea it replaces. The tension produced by this performance of same and different creates a “climate of heightened anxiety that outsiders will somehow succeed in replacing the original peoples” a pervasive fear in the Progressive Era exaggerated by the massive influx of immigrants to both urban and rural areas in the US (6). Often, Roach suggests, this presencing of the body in memory occurs in order to forget and enable its erasure through surrogation. This removal was a key aspect of these mimetic exercises which actively relegated the rural practices they imitated to the past, erasing the actual presence of current rural bodies and their continued use of activities like chopping wood. 58 Surrogation – the presencing and subsequent distancing of physical culture from rural associations – provided the alienation necessary for these exercises to be included, practiced, and disseminated in bourgeois schools and gymnasiums. As a result, wood chopping became a widely practiced imitative exercise reproduced in exercise manuals in the late nineteenth century. As demonstrated by the following excerpt from a 1900 teacher’s handbook, imitation was a crucial form of pedagogy when teaching these physical exercises. This particular excerpt came before a section of exercises that included wood chopping. When a new exercise is to be taught the teacher first performs it alone then the children rise and try while watching her to imitate her movements she uses her left arm and leg while they use their right. In the primary grades the teacher puts a picture illustrating the story on the blackboard and tells the story before giving the new exercise. (Colburn 24) When the teacher led her students through the wood chopping movement her imitation alienated the students from the actual functional labor of chopping wood. She was not actually chopping wood, but rather miming what she imagined that action might be. However, the exercise’s link to a more rural setting was maintained by the story that the teacher was instructed to tell before showing the movements. Ned learned that people in the country did not burn coal but used wood instead. He went into the woods one day with his grandfather and watched him chopping down small trees for firewood. The next day his grandfather gave him a hatchet and let him chop some wood himself. (52) 59 Then, presumably, the students would physically enact the end of this narrative by miming chopping wood. In this story Ned maintained his distance from wood chopping itself; the practice was made strange and nostalgic because it was something familiar to the grandfather, but unfamiliar to Ned. It presumed that “Ned”, and by association the students, were city-dwellers. He learned how to chop wood by imitating his grandfather. The children then imitated the story’s main character by miming their teacher’s movements. Thus, mimetic exercise became doubly imitative miming movements from a mythic rural ideal, but also imitating in order to “learn” something about a distant “countryside.”38 Dudley Allen Sargent: A Class Apart While the wood-chopping exercise was promoted in handbooks for teachers, like Colburn’s, it needed a figure like Dudley Allen Sargent to initiate its practice by more elite classes in higher education. The exercise’s placement within institutions of higher education and adult gymnasiums required even more radical forms of alienation in order to construct a bourgeois physical identity separate from the vigorous “archaic” physicality of the lower classes that nonetheless imparted strength and power to practitioners. As a rural working class transplant in the emerging professional managerial class, Sargent was just the person to enable wood-chopping’s transformation from a pastoral, pedagogical tool into a component within a systematic system of bodily reform. The tales of Sargent’s early childhood in his autobiography indicate the extent to which, at least in memory, constant physical activity shaped the young man’s aspirations. 60 As an unruly youth the dehumanizing and often abusive physical punishments inflicted by teachers gave him an early faith in his own strength of body and fortitude of mind. As a young man this initial faith grew into a desire to re-direct what he felt was an “inherent destructiveness” coupled with “pent-up energies” through “large movements” of his body, a corporeal core that would lead him to a variety of physical occupations and finally to the circus (Autobiography 77). Ill at ease with the life of a travelling performer, Sargent began looking for work as a physical director of newly integrated collegiate programs in physical education, beginning his work at Bowdoin and later at Yale. Buoyed by the seamless narrative of his youth, Sargent made this transition appear destined, the only logical outcome for a smart young man driven by what many viewed as a narcissistic need to sculpt his body, rather than a risky decision to enter a potentially even more unstable career than circus performance.39 He learned of an opening at the Bowdoin College gymnasium through a friend and soon became their first physical director, utilizing his position to take classes in his spare time, eventually receiving his degree. As the Bowdoin gymnasium was not heated, Sargent moonlighted part-time at Yale in the winter, a common occurrence in many colleges and universities wanting to encourage students to stay fit, but as yet unwilling to incorporate physical training into the curriculum. With the success of his programs at both Bowdoin and Yale Sargent saw his opportunity to leverage for higher pay. Using Yale as a bargaining chip, he threatened to leave Bowdoin, and presumably start full-time at Yale, if they didn’t increase his salary. Unfortunately for Sargent, Bowdoin denied his request and Yale refused to hire him as anything more than a temporary seasonal worker. Yet again, using 61 his position at Yale to advantage, over six years he successfully completed medical school. Now Dr. Sargent, he approached Yale once again at which time the school’s President Porter told him that physical culture was “unworthy [work] for a college-bred man” (Autobiography 143). Discouraged, Sargent moved to New York City and set up his own gymnasium, a brief venture as a year later he was approached by Harvard to become their first Assistant Professor of Physical Training.40 Sargent was by no means the first physical director in higher education to have an official faculty position. Dr. Edward Hitchcock preceded him by twenty years, installing a program in physical education at Amherst College complete with apparatus, eclectic combinations of German and Swedish systems, and anthropometric measurements. One of his predecessors at Harvard, Charles Follen, organized a student run German “turnplatz” with several apparatus including bars, ladders, wooden horses, and suspended ropes (Lee 37). His particular concern for women’s heath was rooted in the philosophies of both Dio Lewis and Catharine Beecher both of whom viewed calisthenics as a way to cure the ills of feeble girls. However, Sargent’s “laboring class” background set him apart from many of his predecessors. Hitchcock was an Amherst alum and son of the school’s president, and Lewis and Beecher were from fairly aristocratic families. Physical training was Sargent’s primary occupation while Follen was a German professor and Hitchcock the college’s physician.41 As a result of his complicated background – rural working-class roots with a Yale medical degree, trapeze artist with extensive teaching experience – he was a risky hire for Harvard as it was shaping itself into one of the country’s premier institutions for educating elite young men. 62 What distinguished Sargent was his incorporation of all these aspects of his experience into his physical training, supplemented by his visibility at Harvard, his prolific entrepreneurial savvy, and his performer’s sensibility, all of which helped garner him vast amounts of press and many publications. However, each of these aspects also threatened to destabilize the grounds upon which institutions like Harvard were trying to establish themselves. Sargent’s tenure at Harvard was peppered with conflicts about his “extracurricular” activities including several controversies surrounding his entrepreneurial pursuits, in particular the making and selling of his exercise machines and his circus background. In his autobiography he spends an entire chapter discussing the professional pressures that, lamentably, prevented him from patenting his exercise machines.42 “If I patented my appliances and went into business, I sounded my own death knell professionally,” argued Sargent, and went on to criticize what he saw as the “professional attitude” against “menials [who] work with their hands” (Autobiography 193). Sargent recounted another incident in his autobiography from the first exhibition he arranged of the students at Harvard. He decided to perform his old feat of balancing on a high wire in a rocking chair. The stunt drew the ire of the Harvard community that was “shocked to see a college professor teetering in so unacademic a position. People did not approve of my appearing publicly in the work I was supposed to be teaching.” (176- 7). Such statements were also indicative of the emergence of the professional managerial class at the end of the nineteenth century, consisting of those whose occupations, as Barbara and John Ehrenreich point out, were either “directly concerned with social control or the production and propagation of ideology” or “hidden within the processes of 63 production” (12). Both teachers and doctors, as part of this emerging class “exist[ed] in an objectively antagonistic relationship to another class of wage earners [the working class]” (9-10). Hence, it was important for Sargent, as a doctor and a university teacher, to establish himself apart from the working class physical culturists embodied in the figures of circus performers and strongmen, and instead craft himself as an “expert” in the Harvard Corporation’s cadre of professional managerial men. The fact that it wasn’t until Sargent received his medical degree from Yale that his work began taking more than a peripheral place in higher education curricula, was also indicative of a shift in trends in the medical profession, and its place in the professional managerial class. What we know today as the “medical establishment” was hardly an established profession, characterized at the time by divisive politics, epic failures, and an unwillingness to embrace scientific breakthroughs. Medicine in the early part of the century was characterized infamously by the acts of “heroic” physicians – doctors who used bloodletting, blistering, and evacuative techniques that often killed patients faster than their diseases.43 The Civil War, its horrific tales of battlefield surgeries and historic statistics chronicling the failing health of its soldiers, served as a crucial turning point shared by the medical profession and an emergent field of physical culture. In the wake of heroic medicine and the Civil War, the American public turned increasingly toward more homeopathic and preventative measures to ensure their health, utilizing unorthodox methods and practitioners rather than risking subjection to the painful and risky practices of more orthodox doctors. The tension between these two factions had earlier in the century produced the need for the American Medical Association, established in 1846 64 under the auspices of tighter regulation of the medical profession including barring membership to so-called “irregular” practitioners (Starr 90-1). The result of such moves increased internal divides in the profession rather than mending them and the AMA could not muster the institutional clout to enforce the reforms it pushed so adamantly until the 1870s and 1880s when medical breakthroughs, rapid urbanization, the rise of specialization, and the increasing use of the hospital forced the mutual interdependence between the generalist homeopath and the urban specialist. These massive shifts in medicine created a demand for more doctors, resulting in a rapid growth of medical schools, and a flood of doctors into the market. Such unrestricted growth seemed to beckon to be regulated by a biopolitical governing entity like the AMA. Now a unified “resistance of a threatened petite bourgeoisie,” members of the AMA lobbied to reinstitute medical licensing – regulations that were dropped by states in favor of laissez- faire policies – and intensify and lengthen medical training, looking for alliances that would further contribute to its strength against powerful corporate interests (103). Such dispersion and proliferation of medical practices demonstrates the larger rapidly coalescing systematicity of biopolitics, and how it linked the State, the economy, and micro-practices of health. Similarly, the fledgling profession of physical education was in need of alliances that would ensure its entrance into colleges and universities – medicine was already historically and ideologically entrenched in institutions of higher education – securing its establishment as a “legitimate” profession. Physical culture was by no means a “new” phenomenon. As a popular, albeit relatively private practice in the US, physical culture 65 handbooks like Beecher’s were strewn across the landscape of an expanding consumer culture bent on the nineteenth century sentiments of the “self-made” man ideology that buoyed a growing market. Alternately, popular entertainments such as circuses helped establish the figure of the “strongman” as an icon representing the masculine virtue of strength, but excluded from the “profession” of physical education by his position as an entertainer.44 Additionally, it served physical education to distance itself from sport, an arena that though popular with college students was highly contested as a worthy practice within more elite institutions like Harvard.45 Riding a wave of endorsement from medical professionals as well as a popular gymnasium movement spurred on by organizations such as the YM and YWCA, physical culture made its way into the hallowed halls of America’s elite institutions of higher learning. However, its presumptive associations with popular entertainment and sport continued to make its permanence as a professional field anything but assured. Concurrently, universities like Harvard, now in competition with land-grant schools that required military physical training drills, and somewhat burdened by a rash of public discourse condemning the physically debilitating conditions of higher education, needed not only programs that would keep their students “fit,” but scientifically grounded demonstrations that were also accessible to a skeptical public which would contribute to rising power of the university as an institution responsible for bestowing “cultural capital” on its students.46 Sargent, an unlikely combination of entrepreneurial ambition, institutionally legitimized medical knowledge, performance savvy, and a walking example of physical 66 culture’s benefits, clearly addressed Harvard’s needs. Sargent began his work as the physical director at Harvard, a position he held for almost 40 years, but continued to be propelled and influenced by his manual labor roots, entrepreneurial drive, and performance background. These assets made his relationship with the institution tenuous at best, and hostile at its worst. With an intimate knowledge of physical culture’s struggle for legitimacy within higher education – a struggle deeply rooted in its association with lower classes – Sargent understood the need to justify mimetic exercise as an activity for the privileged classes and distance it from its working class connections, a conflict embodied within his own lifelong struggle for recognition.47 Sargent instituted a host of technological interventions in his gymnasium including exercise machines of his own design, a highly regulatory system of physical examinations and scientific measurements, and the transposition of individual physical progress onto anthropometric charts.48 Using science, technology, and medicine Sargent successfully distanced his physical culture, and by default himself, from their rural lower class foundations. Anthropometry and Sargent’s Wood-Chopping Exercise Sargent’s use of anthropometric measurements and charts further alienated his mimetic exercises from the actual practices they imitated by converting physical bodies into an accumulation of numbers. A student’s measurements were plotted against the bodily measurements in Sargent's collection which included tens of thousands of bodies from institutions as varied as Wellesley College, the Buffalo Industrial Gym, and a Boston Police Precinct.49 The center of the chart corresponded to the fiftieth percentile of 67 all his collected measurements, and differed according to age and gender. Thus the means on the chart (see fig. 2.1) of the male Harvard student were different from those on a chart for, say, an adolescent female. Sargent was adamant that his charts were figured according to the mean rather than the average. The mean, he argued, gave a better sense of the bodies of the typical figure in a population as it required the extremes to be excised from the final tabulation. Consequently, points to the right of center indicated where the student exceeded the mean, points to the left of center where the student was below mean. While these charts, according to Sargent, measured size, strength, development, and capacity, the ultimate goal of the chart and the mimetic exercises prescribed after examination was the achievement of symmetry, a near straight line preferably to the right of center. Undergirding this amassed information was a desire to shift the mean of the “typical” portions of the population upwards, thus increasing racial health. He argued in 1890 that “the only way to produce the highest specimens of the individual, improve the condition of the race and better the quality of future humanity, is to raise the normal or mean standard of mental and physical development” (“Physical Test” 51). This could not be accomplished by cultivating the very strong or the very weak, thus his erasure of those bodies from the overall calculation of the mean and the focus on the “standard” or “typical” bodies. The processes involved in the determination of the line included incredibly complex discursive and calculative techniques for measuring, organizing, and regulating bodies.50 Hence, no matter what the individual’s physique the Sargent system sought to bring “typical” student bodies into a highly regulated state of being that was paradoxically framed as the most “natural” way to be. Investigating his exercises and 68 written discourse exposes the incredibly complex task of constructing the physically fit bourgeois body as a natural body, disguising the labor involved in calibrating the measurements that fostered these charts with actual bodies. Therefore, physical culture exercises were crafted as inherently natural practices for upper class young urban men, more natural, in fact, than their rural predecessors. Nevertheless, much of the discourse and practice in Sargent’s gymnasium maintained its connection to a mythic construction of the rural as natural and pre- industrial, and hence closer to humanity’s more physical and therefore healthy past. As his client pool expanded he relegated classes to assistants, occupying a more managerial role in order to focus on his main passion for individual instruction, an exhausting task by his own admission due the fact that he had to perform all the workouts first in order to model them for the client with whom he was working, a practice in the same genealogical tree as the one described in the primary teacher’s handbook. Numerous requests for individual non-student consultations coupled with his duties at Harvard and his desire to spread the word of physical culture spawned his most well-known publication, Health, Strength, and Power, a book filled with his philosophies for healthy living, but also an exercise manual containing free exercises – those practiced without the use of additional equipment.51 Of the fifty-six exercises explained in both photographs and text at the end of the book, nineteen imitate athletic pursuits such as football, swimming, rowing, golf, and archery – all spectator sports intimately tied to an inherent assumption about the access to leisure time. The second largest group, containing eleven exercises, imitated actions carried out by the “muscular laboring class” including exercise number four, 69 wood-chopping (see fig. 2.2). While some of the exercises, such as rope pulling and archery contain instructions asking the practitioner to imagine the actual labor or move a body part “as if” doing the action itself, the instructions here make no reference to the actual physical labor the exercise is named for, directing the practitioner as follows: Position – Stand with the feet about eighteen inches apart and the hands clasped together over the right shoulder, as shown in Fig. 7. Movement – Swing the arms downward between the legs as indicated in Fig. 8. Now return to a similar position with the hands thrown over the left shoulder. Repeat, alternating right and left. [ . . . ] Caution – In executing this movement, do not swing the arms too far out from the side, or plunge the head too violently downward, but twist the body to the right or left with every upward movement. (172) The practitioner is asked to alternate sides, an action that might not occur if actually chopping wood. However, in order to achieve the symmetrical development desired by the Sargent method, the actions must work the different muscles equally. Consequently, Sargent suggested that his students engage in eighteen to twenty-five different exercises twice a day to ensure symmetrical development of not only the outside of the body, but also the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems as well. Furthermore, the actual act of wood chopping is erased from this performance. The practitioner is not asked to “imagine” chopping wood, but to focus on body position and movements – “do not swing the arms,” “twist the body.” The product of this action is not wood for fuel, but the toning and strengthening of the “muscles of the lower back, right and left abdominal 70 walls, and the upper arms and shoulders” (172). A symmetrical body, an emerging symbol of wealth and free time – became the product of this physical labor. Through this performance actual wood chopping itself became an unimaginable practice to engage in for this young, white, male, probably student body. Finally, the mere presence of manual labor tasks associated with the lower classes positioned alongside athletic movements involved in sporting activities, both classified as exercises, created an alignment between athletics and lower class physical occupations. Through their presence together on a list of free exercises meant to ensure a more natural physique, both became equated with leisure. I suggest that lower class “work” was reconstructed as bourgeois “leisure” for bodies practicing Sargent’s exercises. Habitus and Heredity This reconstruction and its fashioning as a natural practice for upper class young men can be more thoroughly investigated using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus which helps explain how biopolitical regulations were imbibed by these bodies and, through repetition, sedimented into the “naturalness” and “normalcy” of everyday life. As Bourdieu suggested, bodily practices serve as “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures,” or mechanisms that govern the body in such a way as to craft it to be an adept governor. If these structured, structuring structures generate and maintain a particular habitus then, placed within a biopolitical framework, this concept suggests that the regulated body is also a regulating body; it is constructed as the standard through subjection to a process of standardization, a central process in Sargent’s training 71 system. Additionally, Bourdieu suggests that the “products” manufactured by this body – from material possessions to cultivated physical attributes – Bourdieu believed spoke “inseparably and simultaneously of his/her class” (79). Following Bourdieu I argue that the forms of bodily maintenance and cultivation practiced by bodies engaged in Sargent’s mimetic exercises were imbibed by his students and (re)produced bourgeois masculinity as a circulated and circulatable habitus. Furthermore, the theory of habitus provides an explanation of how these regulations produced a sense of the natural as an “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history” (56). This concept in the context of Sargent’s practices manifested as an instance of surrogation where the embodied history represented by these mimetic exercises was remembered, performed, erased, and repositioned within physical education as a way to maintain a “natural” physique. Circulating theories on heredity reinforced the corporeal ingestion of these embodied practices, and Sargent’s promotion of them as a gateway to racial betterment. For much of the nineteenth century a Lamarckian version of hereditary natural selection held sway. Much like Sargent’s idea that exercise could markedly improve the race en masse throughout future generations, French naturalist Lamarck asserted that acquired characteristics enforced through the environment were inheritable. For example, a Lamarckian stance would argue that a giraffe’s neck is attributable to generations of stretching to reach leaves rather than only biologically determined.52 As a theory of habitus at work on actual bodies, Lamarckian genetics influenced the ideas of early eugenicists such as Galton whose work Sargent utilized extensively as a foundation for his anthropometry.53 However, by the 1880s Lamarckian genetics was being 72 debunked by biologists such as August Weismann whose experiments with germ cells suggested that hereditary material was passed on to subsequent generations regardless of outside influences (Wolff 2). By 1900 the rediscovery of Mendel’s experiments on peas rang the death knell for Lamarckian genetics and ushered in an era of biological determinism in the US.54 This shift seemed to undermine the eugenic foundations of Sargent’s argument. However, like other eugenicists, Sargent shifted his own ideas to incorporate biological determinism. Mendelian genetics, promoted as a version of natural selection by eugenicists, enabled Sargent to suggest that physical culture enabled bodies to work more adeptly with their environment rather than being determined by the environment. This justified Sargent’s focus on mean measurements as the numbers that best represented “those that are most in harmony with their circumstances and environments, and that the exceptionally large or exceptionally small persons have less chance of life than those of moderate size” (“Physical Test” 52). Consequently, Mendelian genetics gave a substantial boost to eugenic claims for intervention into human breeding by working in the interests of a majority of the population to ensure their superior adaptation to modern urban living. The innate aspect of human capital corresponds to the micro-level activity of biopolitics – the bodily material on which these practices took shape. It was here that eugenics took on its performative dimensions. As Tamsen Wolff states in her book Mendel’s Theatre, eugenics and performance shared a common concern with visibility and invisibility. Eugenics was specifically focused on the seen and unseen characteristics of heredity. In order to quell the suspicion aroused by hidden and allegedly dangerous 73 genetic traits, such as feeblemindedness, eugenics, I suggest, relied on fitness exhibitions to visually demonstrate inner genetic superiority. Additionally, Wolff suggests that both performance and eugenics were invested in the physical manifestations of the past in the present. In my project this manifestation occurred through mimetic performance of an imagined rural national past. However, following Wolff I also argue that those mimetic exercises were a performance of purportedly superior heredity. For instance, as much as Sargent was a staunch advocate of physical transformation – and its subsequent mental, economic, and social benefits – even physical culture was limited by the immobility of heritage, as suggested in “The Physical Proportions of the Typical Man,” where he examined three athletic physiques including an Englishman, an Irishman, and an American. After spending some time investigating a perplexing “peculiarity” in the marked difference between the Irishman’s small bone structure and large musculature, Sargent concluded that the subject “made the best of himself in point of development [ . . . ] but his ancestry and nurture prescribed the limit, and no amount of physical training at this late date could make up the deficiency (19). In other words, this young man might follow all of Sargent’s health prescriptions to the letter, but his physical fitness would always be deficient on account of his Irishness and the assumed lack of care from his parents. The bodily component of this young man’s human capital, in Sargent’s estimation would always be substandard. Additionally, the visibility of such defective heritage was often disguised and required the expertise of Sargent’s anthropometry, as a pseudo-scientific element of eugenics, to make the invisible visible using measurements and charts to reveal defects which might escape the average eye by putting that body on 74 display, in this case in drawings. A similar technique was used in reverse in order to embellish the visibility of allegedly innate superiority in the American whose inherited traits enabled him “through a judicious course of exercise [ . . . ] to approach near perfect symmetry” and thus achieve a higher capacity for human capital than the Irishman (20). The Irishman, according to Sargent, had already “made the best of himself” considering symmetry, and thus perfection, was unattainable for him. Hence, both in typicality, but also through their rapidly growing population, the American bourgeois exemplified the mean. Though “bourgeois” was visibly marked on these bodies through exercise – visibly vigorous health becoming a sign of leisure time and disposable income – the classing process, justified by scientific discourse, rendered it invisible and justified the physically fit bourgeois urbanite as more natural than the rural muscular physique. For instance, Sargent discussed the advantages of symmetry – closely associated with adherence to the mean – over general strength – exceeding the mean – in the following analogy from “The Physical Proportions of the Typical Man”: A small, well-made engine, with all parts adjusted, will do more work than a larger one with parts loosely constructed and a great disproportion between the important members. So a small man, compactly built, with symmetrical proportions and a well-balanced organism, can accomplish more than a larger man less solidly made, with all parts wanting in symmetry and shapeliness. This adjustment of parts prevails throughout the greater portion of the animal kingdom. (42) Here, a symmetrical body, constructed through precise exercises, physical habits and 75 highly codified calculations, was validated as the biologically natural state of being. Hence, the markers of high class present on bourgeois bodies with access to Sargent's system were rendered invisible by the universalization, scientization, and naturalization of these bodies as prime examples of the rule of symmetry in the animal kingdom. Sargent used this analogy to justify a social division of labor suggesting that society must have farmers, railroad men, and shoe salesman just as higher forms of animal life require “certain cells [to] have special work to do, some to form the skeleton, others the muscles, others the organs [ . . . ] and so on through all parts of the body” (Health 8). This analogy then effortlessly transitions to machinery in the previous quote, subjecting biological specialization, mechanization, and social stratification to the same force of nature. Moreover, Sargent’s analogy about the machine demonstrates Foucault’s argument about governmental naturalism where regulations are put in place to ensure that the “courses of things” are not impeded. In Sargent’s analogy even the mechanized engine can become “natural” as it ensures the “proper” functioning of a biological rule, but also increases the ability of individual bodies to effectively and efficiently win an industrial and commercial war. “To meet the competition growing out of this form of warfare, he argued in 1906, “not only implies improved implements and machinery and the best facilities for doing work and carrying on business, but it also implies [ . . ] the improved physical condition of the individual laborer” (Physical Education 29-30). While industry and urbanization, in Sargent's view, were responsible for the breakdown of bodies, they were an inevitable part of the natural progression of civilization toward ever increasing organization and specialization. Just as higher organization and greater diversity of cells 76 separated men from amoebas, the division of labor and professional/industrial specialization separated the “highly organized” American urban population from “more primitive forms of society [where] every man is sufficient to himself in so far as he can do his own hunting, fishing, planting, hut-building, tool-making, etc.” (Health 8). Urban industrialization and commercialization, therefore, required human adaptation, evolutionarily justified, and practiced through his system of mimetic exercises. However, even for Sargent this move to “naturalize” the individual bourgeois body carried a biopolitical impetus toward the economic productivity of the population as a whole, as this urban professional and industrial work, though individually detrimental would ultimately “serve to advance the condition of humanity as a whole” (Physical Education 78). Sargent meticulously regulated and monitored bodies on an individual basis to ensure the seemingly effortless and natural performance of student bodies about to enter into the professional sphere, simultaneously exercising the social control aspect of the professional managerial class, while also acting as an invisible agent of the production process: literally producing better bodies. For Sargent, the ultimate end to his highly codified system of training was the betterment of the emerging professional managerial class as a whole and, thus, the increased efficiency of the nation's economic system. In his 1906 publication Physical Education he continued to make connections between commerce and the importance of a good physique, returning again to the paradoxical relationship between the body and urbanization he argued that [w]here civilization is most advanced, business competition sharpest, and social life most intense there will be the greatest activity and destruction of the 77 population and the greatest demand for new people to take the place of those removed. He acknowledged the destructive force that corporate, industrial, and social life in the city exerted on the workers’ bodies.55 He went on to say that this “destructive tendency is admirably illustrated in our large cities, into which individuals enter as into a mighty furnace, and are consumed in order to generate the power that moves the machinery of the world and insures progress” (38). While city life was destructive Sargent viewed it is as a necessary phase in the advancement of civilization. Hence, the wood-chopping exercise and its conjuring of a pastoral past helped counter – physically, emotionally, and mentally – the corrosive effects of the urban landscape. Forging a Neoliberal Entrepreneur of the Self It is in this complex conceptualization of the urban environment, the condition of the individual body as constitutive of a “nation,” and the needed corrective provided by physical culture that Sargent’s rhetoric begins to expose the conditions for the emergence of a neoliberal idea of the subject and his/her relationship to the environment in which he lives. Sargent’s perception of the city as “destructive, filthy, noisy, and jarring” reflected a sense of environmental inevitability characteristic of economic liberalism (Physical Education 42). As part of the naturalistic quality of the population, Sargent viewed the city environment as a necessary side effect of a functioning economically viable population. While liberal governmentality sought to intervene in order to maintain the naturally productive activities of the marketplace, neoliberalism begins to “actively create 78 the conditions within which entrepreneurial and competitive conduct is possible” (A. Barry 10). Subsequently, Sargent’s system, while displaying the trappings of maintenance and intervention, strove to dislodge bodies from their environment and place them in a different space altogether. If, as sports historian Martha Verbrugge suggests, Sargent’s system served as a type of “recycling program” where physical culture worked to rejuvenate over-taxed bodies to ensure higher efficiency over an extended length of time, then the gymnasium, in Sargent’s view, was a space created to (re)create those bodies (131). After a lengthy discussion of all the detrimental forces at work on urban bodies Sargent turns primarily to the construction of gymnasiums not only as a means to solve the city’s taxing effect on bodies, but also as a way to measure the “country[‘s] awakening to the importance of this subject” (Physical Education 46). Additionally, working with Verbrugge’s metaphor, I suggest that Sargent's aims were even more global in scope, emphasizing his eugenic desire to “improve the race” as a whole. In response to the corrosive effects of the city, Sargent posed the space of the gymnasium not as a necessary corrective to the urban environment, but as separate from the noise, filth, and disease of city streets; a suitable laboratory in which to create the bodily building blocks of a superior race of (white) professional men. While Sargent believed the ultimate outcome of his system benefited the entire race, he understood that the key to this broad scheme rested on marketing the system to the individual. Accordingly, in connection with governmentality where the population is the ultimate target of biopolitical mechanisms, Sargent’s discourse and practices ultimately targeted the professional population, but in order to do this he had to also 79 modify the conduct of the individual both inside and outside of the gymnasium. It was this emphasis not only on the individual’s body inside the gym, but the material benefits these exercises bestowed on that individual outside the gym that also lends a neoliberal hue to Sargent's agenda. Foucault in his 1978-79 lectures on biopolitics discussed the emergence of neoliberalism in multiple contexts, such as Germany, France, and the United States, mapping out each trajectory. In discussing US Neoliberalism he suggested that one of its distinguishing features was its return to classical economics' “economic man” or homo economicus, the “man of exchange” (Birth 225). However, Foucault asserted, this new economic man is no longer a partner in an exchange, but an entrepreneur of the self, “being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings [ . . . ] what does he produce? Well, quite simply, his own satisfaction” (226). In conjunction with this idea, scholar Colin Gordon suggests that once the individual is conceived of as an enterprise, one's “business” becomes “the preservation, reproduction, and reconstruction of one's own human capital” (44). Hence, in a neoliberal economic system the individual becomes responsible for his own success as a business. As a result of this philosophy those who are unable to manufacture their own “satisfaction” are economically justified as failures, further solidifying economic, racial, and gendered stratifications and cementing the bourgeois business of living as the only acceptable and successful way to run the business of one's own life. While neoliberalism had yet to take hold at the beginning of the twentieth century, I suggest that exercises like the wood chop performed within Sargent’s system of training 80 enabled the emergence of the entrepreneur of the self and paved the way for a neoliberal subject. Sargent's extreme focus on the individual was relatively distinct at the time of his entry onto the national physical culture scene in the 1880s. At the time most schools and gymnasiums were adopting programs that produced the most good for the most people. In other words, early physical educators were looking for systems with fast, measurable results that could be taught to large groups of students at one time. While numerous practitioners employed many of the techniques Sargent used, few of them included the breadth of his system. By the late 1880s and early 1890s most colleges, universities, and YMCA gymnasiums were using a combination of multiple training “systems” including German (use of “heavy” apparatus such as horizontal bars, parallel, bars, vault, but also exercises with wands, dumbbells, and clubs most often to music focused on increased musculature), Swedish or Ling (“lighter” apparatus such as ropes and ladders, free-exercises with no hand apparatus and no music focused on increased circulatory and respiratory capacity), and toward the end of the century Delsarte (a series of gestures and poses focused on breath, and energizing and relaxing the body) (Lee 53- 8). In addition, anthropometric measurements were being used widely in primary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities.56 The depth and variety of techniques used in Sargent’s Harvard gymnasium required extreme personal attention to both individual needs and progress, necessitating the meticulous detail demonstrated by Sargent’s examination reports.57 Sargent's highly individualized methods were, it was argued, unsustainable in physical training programs with few staff on hand to perform the necessary individual measurements, assessments, and monitor individually prescribed 81 exercise regimens. While both Sargent's system and the more popular systems at the time pursued the same ends, it was Sargent's extreme focus on the individual and the marketing of the system on that basis that marked his concepts as unique.58 However, what was perhaps most unique about Sargent’s approach to physical culture was the philosophy regarding “the ends” of such training. As demonstrated throughout my argument, physical culture was a means to more efficient professional and industrial laborers, a way to strengthen bourgeois masculinity, and ensure the natural functions of humanity’s evolutionary progression. What ties Sargent implicitly to a neoliberal sense of the subject and the creation of human capital was his argument that a “strong physique” could be an end in itself. Throughout his narration of his boyhood, he continually marked his own efforts to turn his manual labor jobs from a means to accumulate a wage to a way to maintain his strong physique. For Sargent it was “the physical benefit derived, rather than the pecuniary reward” that fed his craving for physically demanding jobs in his youth. “My work,” he said, “instead of being a grind, became an actual opportunity and pleasure. [ . . . ]. To develop myself grew to be an obsession with me” (Autobiography 54). In this reminiscence Sargent himself makes the transition from understanding himself as a worker to viewing his body as the logical end of his work. In this imagery Sargent’s self-fashioning moves out of the liberal model of self-conduct as a “given of human nature” to a neoliberal “consciously contrived style of conduct” (Burchell, “Liberal Government” 24). The philosophy underlying this self- conduct reappeared as an argument in his later writings where he asserted that the national tendency to disregard the contribution of “physical vigor” to human progress had 82 “arisen from the tendency to consider the development of man as the means rather than the end of all endeavor” (Physical Education 20). Firmly rooted in Sargent’s own experience of manual labor, his mimetic exercises put this ideal into practice suggesting that one’s physical vigor and health were not merely means to a sustainable livelihood, but the ultimate payoff of his system of physical culture. For Sargent physical culture indeed made bodies more efficient professional laborers. However, the satisfaction derived not only from a sustainable wage, but from the “health” bestowed on physical culture practitioners was an equal if not superior perk to the exercises themselves. Consequently physical culture performance in this emergent form of (neo)liberal governmentality produced nature by using precisely calculated, repeatable, and narratively elaborated mimetic action to ensure a sustainable bourgeois habitus embodied in the “entrepreneur of the self.” Body-Builders: Sargent’s Reproductive Laborers However, the subject addressed by Sargent’s discourse and practices so far in this chapter has been male. The neoliberal incarnation of the “entrepreneur of the self” Foucault discussed is male, “being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer” (Birth 22, emphasis mine). The female subject in Foucault’s conception of human capital appears later in the discussion where he suggests that the function of the entrepreneur of the self is the production of human capital rather than wage, though income becomes integrated into human capital as a means of satisfaction. He moves on to discuss how (American) neoliberals explain the production of acquired human capital 83 through investments. Investments can happen in multiple arenas including education, professional training, mobility, and “nurture.” We know that the number of hours a mother spends with her child, even when it is still in the cradle, will be very important for the formation of a human capital, and that the child will be much more adaptive if in fact its parents or its mother spend more or less time with him or her. This means that it must be possible to analyze the simple time parents spend feeding their children, or giving them affection as investment which can form human capital (Birth 229). This quote demonstrates what I argue is a broader theme throughout Foucault’s discussion of governmentality generally and American neoliberalism specifically which is both systems’ foundation on the definition of the economy in terms of the social unit of the family and vice versa. The emergence of governmentality rested on the “family considered as an element internal to population and as a fundamental instrument of government” (“Governmentality” 99). This concept surfaces in American neoliberalism by “making the household a unit of production in the same way as a classical firm” (Birth 245). Consequently, neoliberal biopolitics addresses the female subject, as shown in the quote above, as a maternal one. Tracing Progressive Era conceptions of femininity, emergent medical treatments of pregnant and birthing women, and their connections to the biopolitical order, I will argue that Sargent’s exercises molded bourgeois femininity into a physical state of expectancy, repeatedly rehearsing women’s bodies physically for their definitive performance in reproducing other bodies. 84 Pelvic Production: Childbirth and Exercise The conflation of production and reproduction in female bodies can be traced in the divergent trajectories of physical training for women versus men in the nineteenth century US. While the push for institutionally sanctioned and practiced physical culture arose out of a military (the Civil War) and then an industrial (Reconstruction) need for strong, durable male bodies, the push for women’s physical culture arose out of similar circumstance that produced a different kind of problem.59 Industries and corporations had not only changed the landscape of the urban workplace, but had likewise transformed the domestic environment. Health advocates argued that bourgeois (white) women in the urban home worked in smaller indoor spaces that required less physical work than their rural counterparts. Additionally, the rise in the availability of consumer goods – especially food and clothing – increased their leisure time, a situation that was widely thought to contribute to the enfeebled condition of American housewives and, of greater concern, to infant and maternal mortality, and the decrease in overallwhite birth rates which fell from 7 to 3.5 children (Simmons 10).60 While nature, as Galton asserted, was necessarily present at birth, it was not necessarily fixed prior to birth. Consequently, as one of Galton’s students Caleb Saleeby pointed out, women’s health was of utmost importance to the infant, suggesting the “nurture of the future parent may affect the nature of the offspring” (19). The proliferation of this popular idea in the wake of the mid-century birth and mortality statistics drove an overall focus on women as mothers in numerous fields including medicine and physical education. To a certain extent women’s bodies literally 85 lay at the foundations of both of these now dominant institutions. Physical culture for women initially rose out of this concern over the female body as immanently failing in health. As sports historian Jan Todd has so meticulously chronicled, early and mid nineteenth century models of women’s physical culture such as Dio Lewis’s system, the early program at Mount Holyoke college, and Catharine Beecher’s popular exercise manuals for women focused on cure and correction through development and strengthening, rather than the latter two as the ultimate end. In other words, while the male body was viewed as “naturally” disposed toward strength and symmetry, the female body – urban, white, and bourgeois – was inherently in failing health.61 As a result, Sargent’s program for bourgeois women, while advocating all-around development of “[s]trong hearts, capacious lungs, and vigorous muscles” as it did with young men, emphasized certain body parts over others (Health 53).62 Girls, for example, benefitted most from exercises that “develop the muscles about the waist and abdomen, not alone because of the great muscular power in this region in required of women” (Health 9). This physical vigor in women was key to Sargent who asserted that “[g]iving birth to a child is a physical process in which muscular strength and vigor play a very important part.”63 This emphasis on reproductive productivity extended to Sargent’s specific exercise prescriptions for women. While Sargent’s wood-chopping exercise was not prescribed to women, only to young men, he did suggest they practice another mimetic action connected to rural labor: pitching hay. Additionally, this exercise was only suggested for women. Considering Sargent’s beliefs about women’s physical fitness, the 86 Pitching Hay exercise was a perfect match for his idea of bourgeois femininity based on the following description of the “parts affected” by the movements: “Stretches the muscles of the chest abdomen, and waist, opening up the thorax and increasing capacity” (204, see fig. 2.3).64 However, as with his wood-chopping exercise for men, pitching hay created problematic connections to rural productivity rooted in vigorous physical labor. As an 1892 description by wealthy Ohio businessman and beekeeper Amos Root demonstrated, the actual act of women pitching hay required separation from the bodies of bourgeois women. Written under the moniker “The Rambler” Root described his journey to Chicago and passing through the farmlands of Indiana where he saw the wheat harvest where [a]ll available help, including women, were at work, and here I first saw women engaged in the stalwart labor of pitching hay upon wagons, and they seemed to use the pitchfork as dexterously as any man. From appearances they were German families who had brought their fatherland love of work, strength, and thrift with them. The average American cannot endure to see a woman at work in the fields; the spectacle of the petticoats behind a pitchfork or a hoe is not very suggestive of a very gentle, refined lady, which an American loves to honor. The slavery of the kitchen is, however, quite as great, or even a greater barrier to refinement than a judicious amount of outdoor labor, and its attendant pure air and health giving exercise. (95) This description performatively constitutes a variety of bodies. First, the speaker constructs bourgeois masculinity as the subject of this brief sojourn and constitutor of 87 both physically vigorous foreign rural women and bourgeois housewives through his gaze. Second, the rural physically laboring female body was spectacularized by the author as an object of the bourgeois American male gaze with Root positioning himself as the “average American.” This body was “othered” not only because of her strength, but her Germaness. Third, the bourgeois female body was imagined pastorally as “gentle,” “refined,” and a body to be “honored” by the gaze of the bourgeois man, but also in need of a “judicious” amount of outdoor physical exercise. By using the physically laboring rural female body as the gateway for this moment of reflection on the physical needs of bourgeois ladies, the speaker performatively enacted an instance of surrogation, encouraging an imagined bourgeois womanhood to borrow “outdoor labor and its attendant pure air and health giving exercise” from the image of the woman in the fields. However, the author chastises that body to the margins of acceptability for its lack of Americaness, gentleness, and refinement. This connection to rural labor, the narrative placement of these gymnasium exercises in an imagined rural more physical past and its specific link to nationalist sentiment appeared in Sargent’s earliest gymnasium in Cambridge for women, a carriage house sandwiched between the stables and the blacksmith shop. Now I was perfectly aware of the fact that soft-coal smoke, the smells coming from our next door neighbor, the livery stable, and the odor of burning leather, of horses hoofs and of old paint pots from our handy blacksmith shop were not the most pleasant aromas in the world; nor did the noises rising from the machinists’ files, carpenter’s saw and smithy’s hammer form the most dulcet accompaniment 88 to my lectures. But all these incidentals of trade had a significant bearing on the work at hand. These young people were learning that all kinds of manual labor and various physical activities had been not only the foundation of the wealth of the republic, but also the health and development of the majority of our people. Modern civilization with its inventions and new machinery was changing all these old body-building occupations, and the intricate division of labor forced men to devote all their energy to their occupation, and to trust to other haphazard means of preserving their health and developing new vital power with which to carry on their work. The most important lesson I was teaching was the possibility of furnishing means not haphazard, but scientific and effective” (Autobiography 201-3). To prove the effectiveness of this manual labor, he claimed, he came up with his mimetic exercises for adults.65 This evolutionary narrative, a common occurrence in physical culture discourse, positioned rural-industrial lifestyles in a progressive trajectory as a stepping-stone on the way to “modern civilization.” Rather than taking it as a contemporaneous practice Sargent, through nostalgic imagery, placed it as a dying way of life neglecting how blacksmithing, carpentry, etc. contributed to the modern conveniences he spoke of, including the creation of the gymnasium in which these classes took place. Such a move enacted what Renato Rosaldo calls “salvage ethnography” where an ethnographer/colonizer attempts to “rescue” traces of what he or she terms a “dying” culture while simultaneously complicitly participating in the domination of that culture. In Rosaldo’s analysis explorers used a romanticized nostalgic vision of the 89 cultures they studied in order to mask their own complicity with imperialist agendas. Similarly, Sargent used a teleological trajectory and sensory-laden imagery to paint the picture of a shared rural national past that was “dying,” a maneuver that hinted at Sargent’s eugenic tendencies. Eugenically speaking, this move to distance manual labor from modernity glossed over current rural lives by (re)casting it as part of a physically vigorous national past. Combining this physicality with the benefits of urban modernity – science, education, and technology – was at the heart of “positive eugenics” a movement that in the United States developed out of a rapidly solidifying concept of a national identity, its alleged universality obscuring its wealthy white masculinity and subsequent ties to racial superiority. Medical texts concerned with women’s reproductive capacity also encouraged bourgeois women to adopt rural physical practices. As an example of the intertwining of social and economic fields, medical interventions into the processes of reproduction demonstrated similar biopolitical naturalizations as those occurring on a more national level during the Progressive Era. In a similar fashion, the rhetoric of reproduction – present in both manuals for the mother and texts for the doctor – revealed instructions for intervention in order to ensure the natural, therefore appropriate, performance of labor. Midwifery itself and the processes of labor were increasingly becoming institutionalized rather than taking place in the space of the home. With the emergence of gynecology and obstetrics in the medical field, an increasing number of men began to take an interest in midwifery, an area largely populated by women even through the mid-nineteenth century. The subsequent “discovery” and proliferation of gynecological diseases, deformities, and 90 dysfunctions enabled the movement of childbirth into lying-in hospitals, institutions that until the last two decades of the nineteenth century reserved for poor women and prostitutes. All these dramatic changes, I suggest, were propelled forward by a philosophy of “watchful expectancy” during women’s confinement. William Lusk’s The Science and Art of Midwifery (1882), a widely circulated text among physicians at the time, explains this state as follows: It is an old but always good rule not to meddle with the physiological performance of a function; but the rule, when applied to obstetrics, presupposes a thorough familiarity with the physical processes of childbirth and the contingencies to which women in parturition are exposed. There is no sense in reposing a blind, unreasonable confidence in the powers of Nature [ . . . ] [the attendant] should be ready, if needful, to assuage pain, to forestall dangers, and limit the duration of suffering. (206) Here, again, the laissez-faire economic philosophy served as an excuse to intervene. Nature, clearly imagined here as embodied in childbirth, must be able to function accordingly for the health and welfare of both child and mother. However, as numerous gynecological texts from the same time suggest, city living – the excesses of the newly rich, the stifling conditions of the middle class housewife – prevented Nature from ensuring the “normal” performance of childbirth. The midwife/physician, as constructed through this philosophy, was to take his cues from watching the process and, if/when necessary intervening in order to ensure the natural order was maintained. 91 Along with this prescription to intervene in order to ensure the natural labor process and practice, many texts also pastoralized the rural women’s performance of childbirth. Obstetrician and women’s rights advocate Alice Stockham opened her women’s 1883 handbook Tokology (Greek for “obstetrics”) with a promise that all women who followed her prescriptions which focused mainly on a physically active lifestyle would experience painless childbirth suggesting that the “peasantry” in all countries did not suffer in labor because of their continual physical activity.66 Following a similar argument Lusk suggested that rural neighborhoods were much more conducive to successful labors due to the “abundance of fresh, pure air” which accommodated the birthing woman’s increased consumption of oxygen. Citing a fellow obstetrician, Stockham also advocated for fresh air saying that women who bear children without pain “live much in the open air, take much exercise, and are physically active and healthy to a degree greatly beyond their more civilized sisters” (22). However, Stockham, did not advocate for a complete adoption of rural lifestyles. Like Root she admired and advocated for the benefits of a “civilized” education, dress, and manner of living. Rather, it was the modest use of the physical practices of rural laborers and the concomitant benefits of these physical movements on urban laboring women that Stockham promoted. The pastoralization of “women’s work” whether in the home or in childbirth as effortless and without pain not only upheld constructions of bourgeois femininity’s gentleness, civility, and refinement, but, as Boydston argues, justified women’s essential position as unpaid laborers. However, perhaps even more essential to an emerging concept of the entrepreneur of the self were the overall (socio)economic benefits that 92 were the result of such discourse centered on painless labor. Neoliberal economic concepts rely as heavily on time as they do on wage. As a limited resource, time becomes an asset that can be wasted. Consequently, efficiency is measured by the “cost- value of human beings;” maximizing the time and effort spent on rearing, training, and maintaining a human (Bröckling 250). Hence, key to a biopolitical agenda is “the calculation that motivates people to invest their scarce resources in pursuit of one goal rather than another” (Bröckling, et al. 7). With increasing access to higher education and the careers, Progressive Era bourgeois women had a variety of goal options on the table. Meanwhile, eugenicists, politicians, and doctors alike shared a common concern about the century’s declining birthrates and maternal mortality statistics. Thus, convincing women that labor could be painless enabled these now “experts” to suggest that motherhood was a more satisfying choice than, say, a career or life as a single woman. Consequently, in a latent neoliberal formation present in the emerging liberal welfare state in the US, painless labor became an incentive for women to invest in maternity. These new experts constructed women’s reproductive mechanisms – the physical traits that enabled the growth and bearing of an infant – as inherent biological characteristics that affected both their physical and mental development. Put in Galton’s terms they were an aspect of “nature” rather than “nurture.” The reproductive functions in women, according to Patrick Geddes (biologist), G. Stanley Hall (psychologist), and Herbert Spencer (sociologist) among others, necessarily hindered their ability to fully evolve both physically and mentally.67 Sargent’s rhetoric about women’s physical capacities echoed these popular thinkers. Following their assertions he suggested in an 93 1889 Scribner’s article “The Physical Development of Women” that the “earlier arrest of individual evolution in women [was] necessitated by the reservation of vital power to meet the cost of reproduction” (179). The difference in Sargent’s distillation of these biological arguments was conceiving of reproduction in economic terms of “cost.” Combining biology and economy offered a framework of physical efficiency for the female body. Communication studies scholar Majia Nadesan refers to this biopolitical compartmentalization of various biological functions like reproduction as the “molecularization of life” and argues that it “accords with neoliberal rationalities by transferring complex biological phenomena (e.g. human diversity and disease) into biological assets and costs that can be represented and manipulated within marketized calculi of value” (2). This conception utilized in regards to emerging ideas regarding reproduction in the Progressive Era defined reproduction as a “cost” the subsequent value being the infant. The Progressive Era witnessed a mounting emphasis on the well-being of the infant. As birth rates among the bourgeois and elite classes dropped, rhetoric surrounding reproduction began to shift from encouraging quantity to ensuring quality. In a shifting rationality of government the terms that defined the value of children began to shift. With urbanization the need for children to provide labor to the white bourgeois family changed. As Sargent argued at the 1914 Battle Creek Racial Betterment conference where children have a high economic value, where they can be reared cheaply and promise to prove a source of profit to their parents, the rule is that the birth-rate is 94 high. On the contrary among families of peoples where children have low economic value, where they are expensive to bear and rear and bid prospectively burdensome to their parents the birth rate will be low.68 While eugenicists like Sargent continued to argue that bourgeois women needed to have more children, there was a mounting call for better children. The 1908 Louisiana State Fair saw the country’s first “Better Baby Contest.” These pageants spread in popularity becoming most widespread around 1913 where contests were held at 40 state fairs (Dorey 1). Infant care in the Progressive Era balanced on what sociologist Lorna Weir describes as a massive shift in perceptions of the “threshold of the living subject” (1). Still viewing birth as the living subject’s entrance into social recognition, midwives, physicians, eugenicists, and also women’s right advocates focused chiefly on post-natal mortality – deaths occurring after the first month.69 These deaths, it was argued by William H. Welch at the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality conference in 1910 were due to maternal deficiencies and therefore mothers “must be instructed in the absolute necessity of providing [the child] during its dependent years with such food and surroundings as are compatible with health and life.”70 These moves to educate and improve maternal education and health worked to optimize the cost of reproduction to ensure a consistent and sustainable value in the living infant. To this end Sargent’s eugenic imperatives advocated for women’s health through physical culture as a method of racial betterment. Though viewed by many historians as a pioneer in physical education, enabling women to become more athletic and thus challenge trope of Victorian true womanhood, Sargent’s investment in his female 95 students’ and clients’ fitness had a very specific eugenic purpose. In his speech at Battle Creek he argued that for women [n]o amount of mental and moral education will ever take the place of a large well developed pelvis with plenty of muscular and organic power behind it. Indeed the mental capacity as well as physical proportions of the race are largely dependent on the size of the female pelvis. This is the gauge that eliminates the largest infants at birth and determines whether the large brainy children shall be born at all. He moved on to suggest that the problem of large heads was also an urban phenomenon associated with higher education and the subsequent reduction in physical activity. “Unless the bodies of our women are perfectly developed to meet the condition of our present civilization,” he warned, “it means immolation to the better class of women and deterioration of the race.”71 This speech centralized (middle class, white, native-born) women’s reproductive capacity in Sargent’s eugenic equation. To Sargent the acquired benefits of mental and moral education were negligible without their physical ability to reproduce and reproduce well – a key justification for the continued use of physical training in women’s colleges. His exercises for women made up for this gap by targeting pelvic development. Additionally, small pelvises and lack of muscular development meant the arrest of human evolution. Larger heads, at least in men, were necessary for “civilization” to adapt to the conditions of modernity. When the young women throughout the land shall have felt the influence of this new religion, and become thoroughly aroused to the importance of making the 96 most of themselves in body as well as mind we shall not only elevate the average mental and physical condition of the masses, and so raise the athletic standard, but we shall be much more likely than at the present time to produce a few of the intellectual giants that are needed to grapple with the great problems of our complex civilization. (“The Physical Development of Women” 185) Thus, Sargent positioned bourgeois female bodies, or at least their pelvises, as the gateway to both acquired and innate aspects of human capital. If higher intelligence, an acquired benefit of good education, was not passed on in larger heads – the inherited, physical manifestation of intelligence – then Sargent’s “race” would fall into ruin. Bourgeois women needed to cultivate their own bodies throughout their youth to ensure an adequately-sized pelvis in order to successfully cultivate the seedlings of racial progress. As a result, Sargent’s exercises and ideas hailed female bodies as cultivators of human capital. It was the early arrest of women’s development that affected the high cost of her physicality economically speaking and set her (re)production of human capital apart from bourgeois men. If men’s physically fit bodies, according to Sargent, were the fuel that stoked the fires of industry and progress, then women’s pelvises provided the mechanism for the (re)production of that fuel. As Foucault aptly argued, the entrepreneur of the self “produces his own satisfaction” by increasing his human capital and cashing it in, so to speak, for a living wage which provided access to wealth, health, and therefore happiness (Birth 226). Sargent echoed this economic philosophy in his exercises for young men, which focused on equally working and strengthening all parts of the body. As Sargent 97 himself suggested in contrast to women’s stunted evolution “in man evolution continues until the physiological cost of self-maintenance very nearly balances what nutrition supplies” (“The Physical Development of Women” 179). The resultant symmetry enabled the bourgeois male body an increased evolutionary capacity to fuel economic, scientific, and industrial progress, his ability to equally accumulate acquired benefits and improve on innate inherited characteristics making the American (white, middle class) man a superior entrepreneur; symmetrically developed and symmetrically consumed as demonstrated by the wood-chopping exercise. Functionally, chopping wood produced fuel for a fire, but that fuel was transformed into bodies of perfectly evolutionarily developed young bourgeois men in Sargent’s physical culture system. In the emergent biopolitical urban-industrial-corporate sphere, firewood was transformed into bodies, the fuel of capital, by physical culture. It was in this manner that Sargent’s physical culture for women, much more so than for men, functioned in terms of human capital by “operat[ing] between a grammar of care and one of toughness” (Bröckling 260). This discourse operated by “caring” for women’s bodies, restricting their physical engagement through different rules and modified exercises in order to reserve the energy the body supposedly needed for reproduction. However, it also enabled a physical culture practitioner like Sargent to advocate vigorous physicality if it increased a women’s capacity to reproduce. For Sargent physical culture was a way to off-set the cost of reproduction on the female body. Additionally, for Sargent women were more economically disposed to engage in physical culture due to their increased leisure time. He argued that “women as a class have more 98 leisure time than men for self-improvement, and we must look to them to help on the higher evolution of mind and body, not only in perfecting themselves, but in helping perfect others” (“The Physical Development of Women” 184). Helping others included not only mothers, but the teachers Sargent was training at his all-female Sargent School for Physical Education in Cambridge. Bourgeois women’s prescribed restraint also uniquely disposed them in Sargent’s view to an increased access to free time. As such, his ideas for women contained the seeds of a conception of human capital which relied on the idea that time, like money, was also a scarce resource which must be economized for maximum output. It was through this conception of time as not only “working time,” but also “consuming time” (part of bourgeois women’s leisure time) that allows a “theory of human capital [that] succeeds in drawing the entire spectrum of human activities into its analysis” (Bröckling 257). Hence, even more so than physical culture for men, physical culture for women in Sargent’s system was operating from an assumption that the entire sphere of “women’s work “ including career work, housework, child birth, parenting, and leisure time spend consuming could be conceived of in economic terms. Consequently, physical culture for women, as a productive consumption activity, produced bourgeois white women as both efficient (re)producers and consumers, collapsing distinctions between work and leisure. In the economics of human capital leisure is work and work is leisure. In addition to the Pitching Hay exercise, Sargent developed another exercise that even more pointedly helped his women students to increase their human capital by decreasing the impact of their natural deficiencies and consequently, at least in his mind, 99 lowering the cost of reproduction on the female body. His wall-scaling exercise exemplified and ethic of care and toughness, but also worked specifically to target women’s reproductive muscles, and hone maternal attributes centered on nurture. The wall-scaling game for women, like the rural exercises, needed to be justified by an expert like Sargent in order to displace its association with more masculine activities. It originated, according to Sargent, as a training drill for the army and navy and then made its way into men’s gymnasiums because, as he argued, “in our present civilization [it has] gone out of date.” Similarly to the rural exercises, military drill was imagined as a piece of national history and bodily memory. “That our young people still delight to do these things harks back to a time when life itself depended on one’s physical strength, skill, and alertness” (“Wall Scaling” C3). The physicality and desire to engage in such activities, Sargent of course argued, was an “inherited instinct.” In the exercise/game two teams of twelve competed against one another to get the entire team up and over a twelve foot high, eight foot wide wooden wall with a platform on the other side to hold the team once the scaling was accomplished. The methods used to accomplish the exercise were various, but the modes used in this particular instance for the reporter are shown in Figure 2.4 (see fig. 2.4). While Sargent used the exercise/game with both his male and female students he felt it was of particular use for women, an argument that was implicit in the questioning subtitle to the article, “Though at First Sight it Looks Not Only Difficult but Harmful, Dr. Dudley A. Sargent, Physical Director at Harvard. Who Teaches Gymnastics to Wellesley Girls, Declares It Is of the Greatest Benefit for Women.” 100 Towards the end of the article he addressed the specific benefits for women, framing the entire argument with the assertion that “[w]omen need to be made strong, especially about the region of the abdomen, back loins, and waist, for their life and that of their offspring of ten depend upon the muscular power of these parts.” Thus, he justified the exercise’s transition from military training camps into women’s gymnasiums by grounding its use-value in increasing women’s reproductive capabilities. Of all the exercises and athletics that Sargent promoted for women, he felt this one provided the best results for women in particular. Wall-scaling, “as a means of developing the back, arms, and abdominal walls” was especially well-suited for women given the need to develop these particular muscles. Sargent argued, “there are few exercises, except rowing, that can be compared with it” (C7). In addition to its reproductive benefits it also honed “mental and moral qualities” specific to women. While Sargent’s description of wall-scaling for men required and developed “responsibility,” “courage,” “strength,” and “agility” for women it fostered “courage,” “dependence,” and a “spirit of helpfulness” which justified, in Sargent’s opinion, the physical risk alluded to by the reporter’s subheading. Courage, a necessary trait for both men and women in this exercise, denoted the type of mental and moral toughness needed for Sargent’s physical training regimens. However, courage could not be gained at the expense of the morally appropriate nurturing characteristics of dependence on and caring for others. 101 Conclusion: Marking Human Capital on the Body As a result of this bifurcated rhetoric of toughness and care, physical culture as a biopolitical performance enabled both conservative psychologists and liberal feminists to advocate for its use with women. Sargent’s mimetic physical culture enabled an investment in the improved performance of child birth and helped bourgeois women shape themselves – physically, morally, and economically – into efficient (re)producers. Sargent’s methods for women thus ensured and insured their capacity as reproducers and facilitated their development into “ability-machines” whose main economic function was the production of “nature” in other human beings.72 While Sargent’s exercises helped shape women into more efficient reproducers they did so through a promise of less risk in the childbirth process. As physicians and physical culturists alike argued, exercise helped reduce the risk of maternal mortality, but also lessened the actual pain associated with birth. Consequently, as women’s historian Christina Simmons points out, “reducing women’s fear of pregnancy” eliminated “a major disincentive to sex outside marriage” (10). The alignment in biopolitics of seemingly disparate moral and political standpoints enables late nineteenth century women’s historiographers to view women as both disempowered consumers who “lost control of their households and, as isolated individuals were left to the mercy of organized capital,” but also as empowered self- producing agents choosing physical culture as a practice carrying “the implicit promise of improved appearance, the quest for better health, and the desire to feel stronger and more competent” (Frankel and Dye 3-4; Todd, Body Beautiful 3). At the center of such seemingly divergent viewpoints is a question of choice, especially as it corresponds to 102 “individuals’ approach to their own health as the consequence of decisions regarding investment and disinvestment” (Bröckling 261). This emphasis on choice also marks the implicit entanglement of politics and economics in the realm of human capital. As sociologist and governmentality scholar Ulrich Bröckling remarks, human capital’s starting point is “an identification of human life with the capability to choose, and with the necessity of doing so” (262). It is through these choices, and the necessity of making them, that a population’s “nature” can be determined and, thus subject to “deliberate direction” (Lemke, “Beyond” 176). Choice is also implicitly linked with agency – self-determination and self-direction – and constructed by a series of choices that constitute the self. If the question of agency is at the heart of feminist analysis, and especially feminist critiques of Foucault, then the economics of human capital are at the core of these politics, highlighting the embeddedness of biopolitics and a latent neoliberal agenda in the construction of feminist ideals. Whether inherited or not, Sargent claimed that the changes brought about for women who practiced physical culture could be read on their bodies. In 1910 a flurry of articles in various newspapers reported and responded to Sargent’s assertion that women’s bodies had drastically changed over the previous two decades.73 Using his accumulated measurements as the foundation for his assertions, Sargent argued women’s physique has been thoroughly made over. It is approximating that of a man. The sloping shoulders of her grandmother’s time have disappeared. [ . . . ] In their place we find well-knit, athletic shoulders – broad ones. Her back, 103 likewise, is better developed. Her hips, on the other hand, are not so large as they once were. The entire pelvic region has decreased in size, and the result has been an enlargement of the waist. The small waist is a thing of the past. (“Women Changing to Masculinity?” 1) He went on to suggest that these changes were brought about by dress reform (specifically abandoning the corset) and women’s increased involvement in sports and physical activity. While many critics took Sargent to task for these arguments, focusing on his suggestion that women were becoming more masculine, Sargent held strong and argued that the physical shift was necessary and brought women closer to their “natural” physique.74 Performing Sargent’s exercises enabled a visible marking of the economic choices of the entrepreneur of herself, ushering the modern maternal subject into being through a simultaneous adoption and disavowal of the past. If biological reproductive fitness, and its concurrent promise of economic productivity, was produced through Sargent’s system and displayed as a visible sign on the body, what might such physical characteristics reveal about a woman’s character? The next chapter explores this question in depth through an investigation of how physical culture in the Y.W.C.A. helped promote maternity as a reproductive conduct of social behavior within the reform movement. 104 Chapter 3 : “These Walls Could Not Contain Me”: YWCA Physical Culture, Abby Mayhew, and Social Maternity Social Maternity, Security, and Performance One element that marked Sargent’s physical culture as his system was his stubborn insistence that the real benefits of physical culture practice were only possible in his gymnasium.75 While he published an exercise manual that purportedly made his system readily accessible to all, he continued to advocate for his system as a package requiring an exam, individualized personal training, and specialized gymnasium equipment. Realizing the limitations of his own capacity to adhere to this pedagogy, he utilized his training school for women as a means to spread the maxims of his program through body-to-body encounters. Benefitting from the railroad boom in the US (1860- 1900), Sargent’s practices became mobile in a way not seen previously in the 19th century; teachers from his school were eagerly snatched up by colleges, and gymnasiums across the country. While Sargent viewed these physical culture exponents as a means to stabilize, control, and spread his system of practices throughout the country, this mobility and its reliance on the dissemination of multiple teaching bodies ultimately unseated his imperative for consistency in his brand of physical culture practices. Sargent’s biopolitical ideas and ideals shifted once they moved outside the borders of his 105 Cambridge gymnasiums, and especially when they moved outside the context of higher education. This chapter examines the transition of women’s physical culture into social welfare institutions by investigating how and why Sargent’s practices required translation once placed in the context of the Young Women’s Christian Association. Though this shift opened opportunities for physical culture work to expand beyond the higher educational sphere dominated by white bourgeois women, the YWCA boards, employees, and members (physical culture classes were restricted to members) in the Progressive Era were primarily white middle and upper class women.76 While many of Sargent’s female students continued to expand the proliferation of his practices in educational institutions by teaching physical culture in schools, many others, such as Abby Mayhew – physical director of the Minneapolis YWCA from 1891 to 1897 and the main subject of this chapter – took positions in social welfare institutions such as the WCA, YWCA, the playground movement and settlement houses where physical culture was being utilized as a means to reform not only physical bodies, but their mental capacity and moral character as well. As performance scholar Shannon Jackson suggests in Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity “[p]ublic recreation, quite literally, meant human-re-creation” (111). Such connections between reform and the physicality of settlement life lie at the heart of her central claim that “performance underscores the material acts of construction implicit in the term reform, elements that are often obscured when the Reform Period is wholly equated with a series of legislative and policy changes” (8). Following a similar methodological trajectory as 106 Jackson by seeking out “material acts of construction,” this chapter examines how the discourse and practices at work on women’s bodies in the Minneapolis YWCA, through equal parts physical, mental, moral, and spiritual (self)cultivation, hoped to produce not just biologically capable, but socially and economically reproductive maternal subjects. Key to the transition of women’s physical culture from higher education to social welfare institutions was the circulation of the concept of “civic housekeeping.” Coined in 1906 by Jane Addams at a speech at the National American Women’s Suffrage Association convention, the term “used the language of domesticity to rationalize women’s increased knowledge of municipal regulations” (Jackson, Lines 87). Broadly speaking, these civic housekeepers extended women’s domestic responsibilities from the home into the larger space of the city, justifying their participation in a bevy of civic projects such as child labor reform, immigrant education, physical health, and sewage regulation. Addams argued that civic problems such as “unsanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution and drunkenness” – problems implicitly linked to anxieties about poverty, immigration, and race – had been neglected because their solution lay outside the “military point of view” advocated by male city leaders. According to Addams these issues could be addressed more fully if male city leaders would consult (white bourgeois) women, whose minds were “accustomed to detail and variety of work, to a sense of obligation for the health and welfare of young children and to a responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of other people” (142-3). This 107 discourse “facilitated [white bourgeois] women’s participation in public life” enabling them to occupy positions related to the domestication of the urban environment (Jackson Lines, 87). While the discourse of civic housekeeping is an effective tool for discussing women’s increasing presence in civic affairs, particularly their ascent to positions of political and social prominence (Addams, Starr, Perkins Gilman, et al) the term tends to focus on the relationship between women and the city as a space. Civic housekeeping as a discourse not only expands the space of the home to encompass the city, but also magnifies that address to include individual’s minds and bodies. This intensification subsequently drove up demand for female physical educators whose work increasingly spoke to the mental and moral benefits of physical exercise. The frenzy of physical culture that swept the country between 1890 and 1910 also created a seemingly endless supply of positions in physical education, especially for women. Numerous normal schools centered on training physical educators were established during this period, fed by the explosion of women’s colleges, the admission of large numbers of women in male-dominated institutions of higher education, and the inclusion of physical culture classes for women in social welfare institutions such as the YWCA and settlement houses. As a result of this high demand, well-trained and experienced educators like Mayhew could choose to work in a variety of locations. The idea of civic housekeeping surfaced at a transitional time in ideologies of motherhood when, as historians assert, the “moral mother fell victim to the rise of ‘scientific motherhood’” (Plant 3). The task of moral motherhood, a deeply held 108 Victorian image of women’s central role for society, was “shoring up traditional values and traditional social arrangements,” a process that also granted women enormous authority in the family that had implicitly “broader social implications” (Rogers 92). “Scientific motherhood,” on the other hand, via eugenic discourse adamantly promoted biological reproduction as women’s primary duty to the race.77 As Rebecca Jo Plant argues, while Progressive Era reformers began to question the “adage ‘mother knows best’ and asserted their authority over childbearing practices” they stopped short of the “mother-blaming” attitudes that surfaced during the 1920s in connection with the expanding fields of social work and psychology (3). The idea of civic housekeeping provided a re-envisioning of women’s social roles in terms of their labor in the house, whether as domestic servants or mothers, while also deflecting the ambiguities attached to Progressive Era motherhood. However, following Plant who suggests that the ideology of moral motherhood continued well into the 1920s, this chapter argues that motherhood remained the central, albeit sometimes veiled, assumption in discussions surrounding women’s biological and social roles in the US. This chapter shifts the emphasis of reform away from space and the biological imperative to reproduce, in order to consider how white bourgeois female reformers enacted physical and moral reform through their maternal interactions with other bodies in the city, what I call the conduct of social maternity. Framing the operation of social welfare institutions like the YWCA through the conduct of social maternity reformulates Progressive Era conceptions of womanhood in several ways. First, social maternity considers civic housekeepers labor as care-takers whose conduct revolved around their 109 responsibility to reform bodies that were a “problem” in cities – young single women, seasonal male laborers, immigrants, prostitutes, the poor, and impressionable youth. Second, social maternity places the work of women reformers within the purview of an emerging biopolitical governmentality by framing them as governable by the YWCA as an institution, and governers of the Associations’ members. This dual role exemplified the “grammar of care and toughness” at the heart of human capital theory, especially evident in the discourse and practices of physical educators like Mayhew who chastised “delicate girls” to stop “dragging through life only half living” and learn to care for the body with “judicious exercise” (Bröckling 260, Mayhew, “Shall Delicate Girls” 6). Finally, social maternity demonstrates how Mayhew’s physical culture, though borrowing from it, ultimately modified Sargent’s system by transitioning from the primarily biologically reproductive scientific maternal model to one where maternity becomes primarily socially reproductive.78 In other words, as a combination of the production-focused civic housekeeping and the dutiful virtuousness of moral motherhood, social maternity ensured the continuity and reformation of white bourgeois women’s social roles. Hence, social maternity, especially through physical culture classes, ushered in (neo)liberal ideals that centered women’s duties in the family, but increasingly promoted the expansion of women’s labor and work outside of (but in addition to) the home. The extension of women’s labor to the city demanded equally pliable, maneuverable, and growth-oriented forms of governance to manage the nature of women as a population now on the move, and as individual moving bodies in public spaces. As 110 the “fundamental objective of governmentality” security has the “essential function of ensuring the security of the natural phenomena of economic processes or processes intrinsic to the population” (Security 353). In order to be governable, those intrinsic processes need to be thinkable, observable, and knowable, necessities that enabled the rise of scientific disciplines, like anthropology, bent on discovering the way populations conducted themselves. Such processes facilitated the idea of culture as a “particular way of life” (R. Williams 32). However, viewed through the lens of governmentality, this stasis or “nature” is constantly under threat from outside risks, or counter-conducts. This extrinsic excess produced a constant, yet necessary, tension in the governing structures of Progressive Era reform. As part of emerging modes of liberal governmentality these structures were “already in [themselves] ‘too much,’ ‘excessive’” (Foucault, Birth, 319). The assumed excessiveness of technologies of government requires flexible and mobile mechanisms of security to manage the anxieties produced by such tensions, but also to help cultivate certain forms of excess into innovations in biopolitical techniques. For Foucault, security “respect[s] these natural processes [ . . . ] get[s] them to work, or work[s] with them” (Security 352). The infinite productivity and mobility involved in such a system – the (re)forming, (re)fashioning, (re)creating – lies at the crux of biopolitics’ efficacy. The simultaneous anxiety and promise produced by these mechanisms of biopolitical governmentality positioned conducts like social maternity, and its exercise through physical culture, as a doubly performative form of security. First, to prove its legitimacy as a “natural” form of white bourgeois women’s conduct, the YWCA needed 111 to stage its social maternal skills. For example, physical culture exhibitions served as key sites to cite the continual practice and subsequent transformation of the bodies involved in Abby Mayhew’s classes for potential members and possible donors. Tied directly to the financial viability of the YWCA as an institutions, social maternity’s “naturalness” rested on the approval of elite donors, governing board members, eager young members, and a paying audience, forcing it to adjust to the fluctuations in economic trends. Second, social maternity was itself performative in that it “asserted and inscribed” particular conducts of gender, class, and race “through performance” on the bodies of performers, and in the minds of its audience, arguing for the efficacy of certain kinds of conducts while purporting to expose and correct the deviancy of others (Reinelt 202). Such assertions and inscriptions, and their acceptance by both performers and audience, provided the foundation for building social maternity’s viability as a form of social governance. However, the slipperiness of social maternity’s performativity, “the extent to which it consolidates the appearance of a natural or given identity through repetition” always threatened to reveal its own constructedness in performance, revealing its unnaturalness and potential links it to counter-conducts and excess (Pollock 268).79 This inherent instability was a necessary by-product of its ability renovate itself according to the shifting nature of the populations it governed and secured, an asset that facilitated its take-up in early neoliberal discourses that stressed investments in human capital. Using the theorizations of biopolitics, social maternity, security, and performance outlined above this chapter asks how the YWCA operated through a system of governmentality to encourage the women in its employ and under its care to engage in 112 conducts of social maternity. More specifically it asks how this was accomplished through bodily (re)routing performed under the auspices of social maternity at the population and individual levels. It begins with an investigation of the Travelers’ Aid program at the Minneapolis YWCA where the aid, Mrs. Boardman, stood on train platforms, facilitating the movements of women’s bodies through the city by directing them to spaces of stasis, performing her-self and her work through reports to the board of directors. The main portion of the chapter focuses on Abby Mayhew, who – armed with the tools of muscular Christianity and Delsarte – modified Sargent’s physical culture system in an effort to (re)route internal mechanisms of the soul and spirit to bring the body under the control of the self. While only Mayhew used physical culture as a way to govern and teach self-governance, an investigation of both women is required in order to fully grasp the culture of the YWCA as a whole, and how it worked with and on the bodies of women. Boardman and Mayhew operated on two different registers of biopolitical governmentality – one charged with securing a population the other charged with securing selves. However, the requirement (and with Mayhew the desire) to perform their work gave the lie to this façade of control, pushing the mobility of their own bodies, and those they worked with, to excess. While this excess may have placed the efficacy of the YWCA’s social maternity project in question, it was crucial to the heightened state of productivity central to biopolitical governmentality, and the later (re)imagining of Mayhew’s work as an innovation of social maternity. 113 Bodies in Need of a Place: Minneapolis, the YWCA, Traveler’s Aid, and Mobile Security Minneapolis, like many other cities on the fringes of Westward expansion, wanted to be considered a destination, a new home for workers and investors eager to tap into the city’s growing mill industry. To facilitate this growth local Minneapolis businessmen in the late 1870s and early 1880s “initiated unparalleled railroad construction, immigration expansion, and business consolidation in the region” (Wills 187). The first step in this project involved wrestling railroad supremacy away from St. Paul.80 St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, the only set of waterfalls along the Mississippi, pushed the city to its ascendancy as a world-renowned flour-milling center, hitting its zenith in 1880 when it began to be known as the “flour milling capital of the world.”81 However, the centrality of the mills marked the city as the working-class, “enterprising suburb” of its more aristocratic brother to the southeast (Qtd. in Hofsommer 21). Minneapolis’s true potential as an urban-industrial complex awaited the coming of the railroad. Continually by-passed in favor of the more attractive already established commercial interests in St. Paul, Minneapolis had to wait almost 15 years after St. Paul to get its own locally controlled railroad. However, in contrast to St. Paul’s steady stream of visitors and new residents, Minneapolis trains hauled away lumber, grain, flour, and later goods from factories and brought passengers who were often workers first and residents by accident to people its mills and factories. In the 1880s Minneapolis city leaders circulated advertisements for immigrants, enticing them to settle using slogans like “From the Fields of Dakota to the Markets of the World” to promote their mills to would-be workers 114 and investors (Wills 202). Calling for “the farmer, the stock grower, the artisan, and the tradesman,” circulars often included charts showing the cost of tickets from various places throughout the world to Minnesota. With listings for Berlin, Paris, Sweden, Ireland, England, Italy, Switzerland, Prague, Vienna, and Hungary it was clear who these advertisements were expected to reach (Meier 151). The advertisements and other inducements clearly had the desired effect as the Twin Cities’ population swelled from 100,000 in 1880 to 240,000 in 1885, telling figures that also marked a momentous occasion in the sibling rivalry between St. Paul and Minneapolis: in 1885 the population of Minneapolis had surpassed the population of St. Paul by a sound 18,000 people (Wills 189). Minneapolis also drew many single female workers mainly from rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, often first or second-generation German or Scandinavian immigrants searching for steady work in factories or as domestic servants.82 Textile factories were the biggest draw, where women assembled everything from woolen blankets, to overalls and shirts, to furs.83 Though employers readily hired women to work in the city, urban landlords saw to it that these women were not able to afford their properties. These landlords charged an average $6 per week - twice the average salary for working women at the time. As a result, working-class women were forced to occupy different spaces other than their upper and middle-class counterparts; either living just outside the city in less expensive neighborhoods, sharing small rooms in the city, going back to their farms, or resorting to a more steady flow of capital provided by prostitution. City ordinances provided little punishment for prostitution. Between 1870 and 1897, brothel keepers 115 came to court monthly and plead guilty to “keeping a house of ill fame,” a charge that incurred a fifty dollar fine plus five to ten dollars for each “inmate.”84 In fact, many of the only affordable women’s boarding houses for working women were situated next to brothels, spatially blurring the boundaries between “working girl” and sex worker.85 Consequently, while working-girls had a place in factories, they rarely called the city home. The Minneapolis YWCA Women freshly graduated from women’s colleges also began to look toward urban centers with the hope of employment in a rapidly expanding network of corporations, retail stores, and institutions in need of clerks, secretaries, nurses, and teachers. These “business women,” a term the YWCA frequently used, also felt they had no place within the city in which to gather - a need that prompted the initial call for the establishment of a city branch of the Minnesota YWCA.86 As Minneapolis YWCA Secretary M. Belle Jeffries pointed out in her reminiscences of the first twenty-five years of the Minneapolis YWCA: The need for a Young Women’s Christian Association was felt by a small group of business women, representatives of the Christian Endeavor Societies of a number of prominent churches, who were banded together to do interdenominational work, and to promote Christian culture among themselves. [ . . . ] There was no place downtown where a group of women could meet informally without trouble and previous arrangement. This idea suggested the 116 inconveniences and annoyances to which business women were submitted, and the realization of the need prepared them to become interested in a remedy.87 Two elements of this quote are key to the arguments made in subsequent pages. First, the sense that there was “no place” for these women to meet in the city “without trouble and previous arrangement” indicated the extent to which bourgeois women also struggled to find a place within the city outside of the workplace. Additionally, the use of the word “trouble” points to the potential risk involved for women who might gather in the city. Though the term is vague, it points to potential consequences for those who try to gather informally without previous arrangement. Second, as indicated by the statement that these women wanted to “promote Christian culture among themselves,” the beginnings of the YWCA in Minneapolis were rooted squarely in the aims and desires of the Christian bourgeois women credited with beginning the organization, who were already active in numerous city churches. This bourgeois foundation was also demonstrated by the frequent changes in location during the organization’s first decade that kept the YWCA a comfortable distance – one to two miles – from the poorer neighborhoods near the river.88 The five different moves in its first decade kept the organization near the burgeoning commercial and retail sections of Nicollet Avenue and within easy walking distance of the multiple churches on the city’s northeast end. This movement was not necessarily surprising, considering the majority of the YWCA board members were married and active members of many of these churches. While the Minneapolis YWCA eventually expanded programming and took on a more active role in reaching out to white working- 117 class, immigrant, and poorer women, at its inception it focused on the needs of middle and lower middle class “business women.”89 This focus was apparently incommensurate with both the national and international aims of the organization. The beginning of the movement in England grew out of a concern for the spiritual and social well-being of “women in industry” and particularly the influx of women to study nursing in London. In a similar vein the work of city YWCAs began in the US about ten years later centered primarily on housing and providing for “self supporting girls.”90 While it focused on a membership of working girls who could pay the small membership fees, it was run by manager boards populated by elite and upper middle class married women as financial backers for YWCA projects who used their social clout to garner generous contributions from local donors. Hence, despite broad claims by YWCA historiographers about the institution’s involvement in the origins or feminism and social justice in American democracy, conjuring unifying tropes about “social righteousness,” “Christian sisterhood,” and “cultural pluralism” – sentiments echoed by the YWCA’s current slogan, “Empowering Women, Eliminating Racism” – the YWCA was an institution run by bourgeois women focused on servicing women who could help themselves (Robertson 2, Mohl 111).91 Such readings necessarily gloss over the YWCA and other social welfare institutions’ complicity in upholding the very economic, cultural, and social divides they claim to bridge. The lack of acknowledgement of, and aid for, poorer women at the Minneapolis YWCA did push against the stated aims of the national organization, a tension seen in Elizabeth Wilson’s history of the first fifty years of the organization in the United States. 118 As she points out the Minneapolis YWCA was rather neglectful of “working girls,” citing as an example of this neglect a visit from a man to the YWCA rooms around 1892 to make out a donation check. As he was writing the check he asked the secretary, “Are you reaching the factory girls? [ . . . ] My sister went up to your rooms to entertain them one evening last week, and she said nobody came except some of the regular members for something else.” Wilson contended that the response to this “kindly criticism” was another move to a location on the street to which “one did not have to be personally conducted” (61).92 The answer to this problem, Wilson claimed, was hiring Abby Mayhew as instructress of physical culture. However, after only a year of Mayhew’s classes, the Traveler’s Aid was established, an outreach program that even more directly affected in-coming factory girls, as well as women in need who typically fell outside the view of the YWCA more generally. “Strangers in the City”: The Traveler’s Aid On any given day from 1893 to 1900 Mrs. E.M. Boardman, the program’s sole employee during those years, would make her way east across Washington Avenue in Minneapolis to get to the Milwaukee train depot by 6:30am. She’d calmly await the train arrivals, on the lookout for women and children who appeared lost or in need, or demonstrated physical attributes or conduct that marked them as “strangers” to the city.93 As a joint emissary of the local WCA and YWCA it was Boardman’s duty to “to accompany those who [were] strangers in the city to the right cars or RR stations, boarding houses and direct them to places where they may find employment, or shelter 119 until they find suitable houses or can go on their journey,” which most often meant back west across Washington Avenue towards the bourgeois commercial sector of the city.94 Occasionally, she’d glance down the platform, suspiciously eyeing small groups of men also waiting for young female strangers whom they would direct or escort to the east side of the tracks towards crammed textile factories, smoky saloons, hazardous rail yards, and seedy brothels. Boardman felt it was her mission to steer the influx of “young women, flocking from the country to the City for employment” away from these loitering men with questionable intentions.95 Throughout her day she’d assist a variety of people – a little girl whose relatives forgot to meet her, a pregnant girl looking for a Catholic family to care for her during her confinement, a recent immigrant from Sweden looking for work – often, as in the case of the little girl, escorting them west across Washington Avenue to a small set of rooms where she’d feed and house them until they were able to continue on or find suitable shelter.96 On such evenings when the rooms were occupied she’d reflect on the space gratefully, recalling times before the rooms had been secured by the YWCA when she’d bring stranded travelers to her own home. At the end of the day she’d open a small book to list the number of those she’d helped and the amount of money spent to assist them in order to economically justify and perform her work for the managing director boards of the WCA and YWCA, her co-sponsors.97 Both the YWCA and the Traveler’s Aid responded to the perceived problem of white business women as bodies in need of a place, and operated as a means of directing women, imagined as a population, to destinations. As institutions implementing social maternity, both the YWCA and Traveler’s Aid demonstrated a biopolitical investment in 120 the security of women’s bodies. Security, here, served as “forms of regulation which permit and facilitate natural regulation,” and operate as the dominant mechanism of government rationality (Gordon 19). Summarizing Foucault, Colin Gordon asserts that security, rather than targeting territory or the individual as the objects of sovereign or disciplinary power, “addresses itself distinctly to the ‘ensemble of the population’” (20). Subsequently, intervention becomes less visible often operating through myriad channels of institutional, social, and cultural practices. While the central “negative force” in this equation is the police, charged with “ensuring the prevention or repression of disorder, irregularity, illegality, and delinquency,” “positive” modes of intervention also work to manage and eliminate deviance ensuring “a respect for freedoms” (Foucault, Security 353-54). Additionally, Foucault notes that these positive forms, which had formerly been the purview of the police, were now “embodied in different institutions or mechanisms” charged with “increasing the states power while respecting the general order” (354). In the social maternal model forwarded here, management and respect served as central tenets of the care and direction provided by people like Boardman. As a security mechanism, Boardman relied on techniques of management and correction to combat the potential excess mobility produced by bodies in need of a destination. While she directed women and children to destinations – in homes outside the city, churches, employment agencies, immigrant service agencies – she was also directing them to places that ensured the continued productivity (and sometimes reproductivity) of those bodies. For example, one day in 1899, Boardman helped a pregnant woman, deserted by her husband, with a small child in tow. Rather than 121 sending the woman to a local charity organization (as she did numerous other times with unwed mothers) she gave the woman directions to a kindergarten near the woman’s lodgings for the care of her one child, so she might be able to “do what day work she could.”98 In this instance, social maternity, security, and civic responsibility combined to direct this woman to a place where she might produce more economic and human capital as a worker in the city. However, in another example from January 1899, a young girl approached Boardman about lodging and a job. Boardman ascertained that the girl was 14 year-old, procured information from her about local family, and took her to her sister’s house in St. Paul. Here, Boardman acted as a maternal surrogate, feeling the need to secure this young woman’s body outside of the city. Both placements directed these women to spaces where they might become productive civic citizens or be prevented from becoming non-productive citizens. By facilitating the movements of women in, out, and around the city, Boardman ensured the necessary mobility needed for populations – whether travelling women or city citizens – to increase their economic and human capital. In doing so she acted as a “positive” form of security, utilizing social maternity as a conduct of respect and the procurement of “freedoms” for those in her care. Conversely, she also served as a “negative” form of security akin to the modern form of the police by preventing potential excess mobility embodied in the figure of a wandering young girl at risk in the streets of the city. Boardman, then, demonstrated how social maternity, as a conduct, was charged with governing other bodies through the mechanism of security. 122 Abby Mayhew’s Physical Culture: Muscular Christianity, Classicism, and Delsarte YWCA physical director Abby Mayhew took up where Boardman left off, continuing to secure women’s bodies through social maternity once they reached their destinations like her physical culture classes. Additionally, Mayhew worked with Association members who paid dues that enabled the YWCA to function financially, while Boardman’s work as outreach did not involve members, and did not function as a revenue source, relying on donations to sustain itself. Abby Shaw Mayhew was most at home in the Upper Midwest.99 Born in 1864 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Mayhew was the daughter of a lumber manufacturer. Her family was wealthy enough to send their daughters to Wellesley College, founded in 1875 by the Durants, prominent Boston elites devoted to the furtherance of Christianity. Pauline Adeline Durant helped establish the Boston YWCA and her husband Henry Durant toured as a lay evangelist on occasion. Dedicated to “the glory of God and the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women” Wellesley’s emphasis on Christian ideals would have been a convenient fit for Mayhew’s strong Congregationalist family (Qtd. in Verbrugge 139, Cottrell 350). True to her background with the Boston YWCA Mrs. Durant promoted a program of physical education at Wellesley as a means of developing mind, body, and spirit. The focus on physical education at Wellesley also demonstrated the national concern about the physical toll higher education took on women’s bodies by incorporating - in fact, requiring - physical culture as part of the students’ daily lives. As if proving the national concerns about higher education, after Wellesley, Mayhew found herself frequently ill and weak - so much so that her health forced her to 123 close a private primary school she and her college roommate, Ellen Means, had opened in Eau Claire after only one year. Frustrated by her physical obstacles, Mayhew turned to another former classmate from Wellesley, Grace Marsh, who was teaching physical culture at Lake Minnetonka just outside Minneapolis. After a summer’s worth of classes, Mayhew became convinced of the power of physical culture to improve other women’s health as it had her own (Cottrell 347). It was at this point that Mayhew contacted Sargent, who was enrolling students in his school for women in Cambridge. Indicative of the high demand for female physical directors, it was after only a year of training with Sargent that Mayhew was offered the position as director at the Minneapolis YWCA. The position brought her closer to her home in Eau Claire and aligned more easily with her strong Christina beliefs than did Sargent’s program. Mayhew’s classes grew rapidly, their popularity and size continually pressing her to come up with new ideas for the work and new spaces that would accommodate the demand for the work. Mayhew used many of Sargent’s techniques in her classes, presenting herself on circulars in fall of 1892, her first season, as “Abby S. Mayhew, of Sargent’s Harvard School of Physical Training” even though the training school she attended was adamantly and forcibly kept separate from Harvard.100 She continued to use his measurement system, requiring it for new students and occasionally denying class participation based on the results.101 Like Sargent, she also took a broad approach to physical training. When she began her work in 1892 she was the second paid employee on the YWCA roster in Minneapolis, the other being the General Secretary. Starting at $350 a year, Mayhew offered classes for “ladies, juniors [girls], and teachers” in 124 Swedish, German, and Delsarte techniques.102 In addition she utilized various apparatuses including clubs, dumb bells, wands, and chest weights.103 For $5 a year, students could take classes in the gymnasium. The fee included regular membership in the YWCA – only $1 a year without the gym –making it easily accessible to working women who averaged $3 to $4 a week in wages.104 As the Association occupied only one room, all activities occurred in this space. Thus, gymnasium equipment was tucked into the walls and ceiling during the day when tables were out for business women to take their lunch, and the tables folded into the walls in the mornings and evenings when Mayhew taught her classes.105 The opening of the new gymnasium at 808 Nicollet Avenue in December 1893 allowed Mayhew to expand the work of the physical department exponentially in response to the enormous popularity of the classes. By 1894 the physical department dominated the YWCA class schedule, pressing Mayhew to find more teachers in order to keep the department financially sustainable and independent. That Spring the YWCA held 27 classes a week, 19 of which were Mayhew’s physical culture classes, divided into ladies beginner and advanced, girls, and beginner girls.106 That same Spring basketball was added to the schedule of activities. Initially games were “ladies-only” events, but by 1896 the Association held outdoor games for “large audiences.”107 By 1895 the physical department offered beginning, intermediate, and advanced classes for women, and beginning and advanced classes for girls, necessitating an assistant, Miss Katibel Chadbourne. That fall the gym was remodeled, classes expanded, and the fee structure separated according to time of day: morning classes were $7, afternoon classes were $5, and evening and girls’ classes were 125 $4.108 Mayhew also began offering private lessons and classes – one third of the proceeds were directed back to the Association – and added a 30 course normal class for $12 to train physical directors, most of whom then worked at YWCA branches and local churches.109 That summer the Outing Clubs were inaugurated, sending Mayhew’s students out into the city and beyond in rowing, bicycling, and tennis clubs.110 Mayhew’s 1896 salary, $675 a year, had almost doubled in four years.111 The work of the physical department continued in this vein until May 1897 when Mayhew surprisingly announced her departure.112 By the time of her departure the YWCA had become the centre for the dissemination of women’s physical culture discourse and practice in Minneapolis, and Mayhew herself began receiving increasing recognition from the YWCA at the national level through her contributions to their regular publication The Evangel. While it is tempting to take Elizabeth Wilson’s suggestion that Mayhew was employed in order to reach the “factory girls” as truth, several pieces of evidence make it doubtful that Mayhew’s classes were the “factory girl” draw that Wilson made them out to be. While the low class fees and evening class times make it possible that working- class women attended Mayhew’s classes, the accounts and descriptions of the classes themselves made it clear that the majority of those involved were “business women,” indicating in 1895 that classes were being scheduled to accommodate office workers and store clerks, probably working in nearby buildings on Nicollet Avenue.113 In much of the literature for the Minneapolis YWCA, as well as the national history of the institution written by Elizabeth Wilson, there was a marked distinction between the terms “working girl” and “business woman.” “Business women” were most often characterized by jobs 126 in offices or retail stores. Though they were often just as young as “working girls,” the infantilizing term for women employed as domestic servants or factory workers revealed an inherent class distinction. The term suggested an economic evolutionary ideology that characterized these women as more immature than women who worked for higher pay as cashiers or secretaries, occupations that would have required a solid grasp of English as well. For example, the 1888 Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that female factory workers and domestic servants made between $3 and $4 a week while an article in the St. Paul Globe from the same year stated that the average pay for female cashiers was between $6 and $8 a week (Qtd. in Meier 152). Additionally, by the time the Minneapolis YWCA opened an on-site gymnasium in 1895 – the same building that Wilson pointed to as having an easily accessible street entrance – the building was a significant distance (one mile) from the factories and working-class district. While not the elite bourgeois students populating Sargent’s gymnasiums, Mayhew’s classes still catered primarily to “business women” and excluded “working girls.” The establishment of Mayhew’s physical culture work in Minneapolis demonstrated the ways security as a state mechanism “presents itself as the referee in an ongoing transaction in which one partner strives to enhance the value of his or her life, while another endeavors to economize on the cost of that life” (Gordon 45). Mayhew’s physical culture, as portrayed in Minneapolis YWCA reports, intervened into the urban environment in response to the problem of out-of-place single women’s bodies in the city. The physical culture classes proposed a means for these women to increase their human capital by giving them a space to stay physically fit, but also engage in social 127 activities with other women, and be spiritually and morally cared for, thus providing the necessary satisfaction needed to continue to work productively. Subsequently, not only did Mayhew and the YWCA benefit from an increasing population of members that sustained their financial viability, but the population of white business women in the city would continue to grow and thrive, providing additional revenue. However, by excluding the factory girls (not to mention the Jewish and African American neighborhoods located north and south of town, respectively) from participating in the classes at an inconvenient location, under the guise of an “accessible” membership fee, Mayhew’s work nonetheless reinforced the ordering of bodies in the city space in a fashion similar to Boardman’s redirections. Additionally, as a mode of subjectification the physical culture practiced in her gymnasium was denied to non-white and/or poorer women, thus also denying them access to the human capital provided by the spiritual morality of the YWCA’s Christian culture. Muscular Christianity While Mayhew used many aspects of Sargent’s system in her gymnasium, her own Christian background and the all-female urban environment propelled her to use certain techniques that served as interventions into the models used in colleges and universities, specifically less emphasis on tracking progress and overall health through exams. Mayhew felt strongly that physical education could and should be a uniquely Christian endeavor. Forwarding such a view required Mayhew, and other physical directors of the YWCA, to adapt an already circulating discourse of muscular 128 Christianity. Initially a reaction against what Ann Douglas argues was a widely perceived “feminization of the American culture” by trends in sentimentalism, and the increasing power and presence of women in church leadership, muscular Christian discourse would have been a tough sell in the all-female controlled and populated YWCA (Douglas 3). The movement’s roots are most often historically positioned in the writings of nineteenth century British novelists Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes.114 Their novels, especially Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays promoted the idea that “participation in sport can contribute to the development of Christian morality, physical fitness, and ‘manly’ character” (Watson 80). The ideals espoused in their novels were readily incorporated into elite British boys schools, where, as sport historian William Joseph Baker asserts, the “games ethic” enabled the British to simultaneously address fears of the degeneration of the British stock and promote an imperialist spirit by producing the future leaders of the Empire carrying “the flag of muscular Christianity in the one hand and the Union Jack in the other” (30). The relative absence of private boys schools in the United States made muscular Christianity’s migration from the UK simultaneously more subtle, but more pervasive. John J. MacAloon, in an introduction to a special issue on muscular Christianity in the International Journal of the History of Sport suggests that this discourse is often marginalized into histories of the movement in “education, sports, and religion.” Such compartmentalizations, MacAloon argues, neglect the secular uptake of muscular Christian ethics in such widespread, so-called American, ideals of “school-spirit, teamwork, duty, protection of the weak, [and] individual virtue” that underpin not only the public school system, but also “outdoor 129 education, the playground movement [ . . . ] self-help practices, [and] volunteer movements.” Such a multilayered and inter-institutional framework is “broadly constitutive of life in American civil society” (692-3). Consequently, MacAloon’s introduction also serves as a call to scholars to address this gap in both historical and contemporary work in all disciplines. Physical culture in the YWCA, and in Mayhew’s classes in particular, demonstrates how Christian discourse became entwined with discourses of social service and maternity, and muscular Christian practices shifted into the aesthetic work of Delsarte. The emergence of biopolitical rationalities of governance in the States made Progressive Era physical culture a practice ripe for muscular Christian intervention, and enabled what MacAloon justifiably perceives as muscular Christianity’s “ethos and its reflections and representations [to be] all around us and so normalized.” In addition he suggests that it “fails to stand out as anything unusual” because of its absorption into conducts of the every day. In other words, muscular Christianity has become part of the “nature” of the American population where nature is understood in a biopolitical sense, not as “an autonomous domain that must be respected by governmental action but depends on the practices of government” (Lemke Biopolitics, 5). By pairing exercise with religion and social welfare, institutions such as the YW and YMCA blurred boundaries between Christian and social service, service to Christ and service to the self and community. More specifically, by working on one’s self, one was in fact working in service to Christ and the community. For example, Protestant clergyman Josiah Strong asserted that “[i]f the true Christian aim is service, not ecstasy, then that is the most 130 Christian treatment of the body which fits it for the most perfect, the most abounding, the longest-continued service in upbuilding the kingdom of God” (Qtd. in Putney 44). This quote suggested that the “true Christian aim” of the body should be service, not ecstasy, following a doctrine that resists the desire for earthly pleasures. Additionally, the quote suggested that this fit body, its muscular strength, would be essential for the endurance needed to build the “kingdom of God.” According to Luke 17:20-21, the kingdom of God is not heaven, but rather in and amongst the people of earth.115 Based on this, the “kingdom of God” could be a communal spiritual realm or something material made up of the people of earth. Consequently, the passage quite easily elided spiritual growth with physical growth, but also the spread of Christianity among the people of earth with the physical spread of Christian peoples on earth. Such elisions enabled discursive conflations of Christianity, imperialism, and eugenics on the population level, and strength, servitude, and sexual moderation at the level of the individual body. These alignments fit well with circulating ideologies of American democracy and Christian faith, and biopolitical practices of civic and national citizenship. The problem with using muscular Christian discourse and practices in the YWCA was the “muscular” part. If, as sports historian William J. Baker suggests muscular Christianity began to re-imagine Christ, not as a “meek-and-mild human figure, a sacrificial lamb strikingly similar to female victims,” but instead in “unmistakably male terms” then its transition to all-female spaces such as the YWCA required a careful negotiation of existing patriarchal power structures in both the church and the gym (45). While physical directors such as Mayhew readily incorporated muscular Christian values 131 that promoted “health” and “character-building” as aspects of exercise, they were forced into much more delicate territory when confronted with the assumed connections between “muscular” and “manly” (Putney 144). However, while the male body worked to attain physical Christ-likeness – where Christ was imagined in muscular terms – women could only work toward spiritual Christ-likeness. Phrases such as “Christ-like character” and “spiritual Christ-likeness” appear in several places in Minneapolis YWCA physical reports where Mayhew attempted to continually assert the “higher” aims of her work. In terms of physicality, Mayhew shifted from the imagery of strength and masculinity present in muscular Christian discourse to the idea of “bodily perfection.” For example, the end of Mayhew’s 1895 annual report attested that “[w]e are striving to make the bodies fit instruments for the mind and fit dwelling places for the Holy Spirit. As we work for the perfection of bodily development we also pray that they may be complete in Christ – our perfect pattern.”116 Underlying this discursive imagery of active, “striving,” and “fit” female bodies and minds, is an assumption that both the physical and spiritual labor is taking place on a body that is unfit. These bodies can only ever work toward and “pray” for “bodily perfection” without any indication that they might actually achieve the “perfect [male] pattern.” Additionally, the imagery figures the female body itself as a home, a “dwelling place” for an outside spirit, which fills it. Again, such imaginings assume the a priori emptiness of the female body, and reinforced symbolic links to Freudian conceptions of the feminine as lack. Furthermore, this lack operated as what cultural studies scholar Toby Miller refers to as an “ethical 132 incompleteness” that required intervention from governing mechanisms. Biopolitics’ incitement to productivity in this formulation is “premised on instilling a drive towards perfection,” a process that is endlessly deferred, and hence infinitely productive. This process “inscribes a radical indeterminacy in the subject” who continuously turns to “cultural regimens” to compensate for the feeling of lack in comparison to the “more complete entity – the nation” (Miller 15). The incompleteness of the female subject was a necessary (re)formulation in order for her to be articulated and articulate herself as a modern subject. In Mayhew’s classes physical culture instilled a simultaneous sense of individual agency while also binding members to the Association, and its spiritual, moral and physical values, through a feeling of belonging to something more complete and perfect. By invoking the implicit connection between giving their bodies to serve Christ, and by analogy to their husbands, this muscular Christian call also reiterated the eugenic imperative in physical culture for women. In a 1911 speech at the YWCA’s National Training School at Columbia University, Mayhew remarked that the overall good of physical culture was its benefit to the race as a whole. Above all it means an increase in racial health. To make the mothers of the race strong and to create such a desire in their hearts for strong and healthy children that they will see to it that the father as well as themselves are healthy, means a better type of man and woman in physique, in mental vigor, in moral force, and in spiritual understanding.117 133 Here Mayhew depicted physical culture, an endeavor she believed was a uniquely Christian project, as a central force in racial betterment, thus foregrounding the necessity of making women’s bodies better able to manage the physical demands of biological reproduction.118 Additionally, as a practice, it not only made women’s bodies strong, but also influenced the “soul” by implanting a desire for “better” children and fathers. Like Sargent’s secular individualizing techniques, the focus here for Mayhew was inspiring and strengthening bodies at the individual level in order to make a shift at the level of the population. Thus, Mayhew used the force of her Christian beliefs to forward physical culture as a biopolitical eugenic project, molding women’s bodies and minds to prepare them to be wives and mothers, alligning with the conduct of social maternity. However, physical training in Mayhew’s gymnasium countered this image of lack by gifting women with “a strength and freedom in her physicality which had been a dream before – and a control of her body so that she uses much less nervous force – and a power to relax – really rest.”119 This need to lessen “nervous force” and enable women to “rest” betrayed a fear of women’s tendency toward the grotesqueness of hysteria. Challenging Mikhail Baktin’s implication that the grotesque was a dying form, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, point towards the emergence of psychoanalysis to argue that the grotesque was not suppressed, but rather pushed to the margins and disconnected through “neurotic sublimations” from the emergent bourgeoisie. As a result of this separation, the carnivalesque and the grotesque body became associated with the other, and “all that which the proper bourgeois must strive not to be in order to preserve a stable and ‘correct’ sense of self” (290, emphasis in original). Thus, carnival became a short- 134 lived “sentimental spectacle” witnessed by the bourgeoisie in circuses, world’s fairs, and various forms of popular entertainment and perceived as abhorrent or even terrifying in order to reaffirm, on the psychological level, the relationship of power by an emerging middle class over the “low” in society. Following a similar trajectory, feminist scholar Mary Russo points out in her book The Female Grotesque, Bakhtin’s characterizations of the grotesque relied on an essential femaleness that, in the nineteenth century, forged ideological links between the grotesque and the hysteric body, both rooted in a morally deformed femininity and diseased sexuality, and most notably portrayed in Charcot’s images of swooning and flailing women in the midst of hysteric fits.120 This imagery of the grotesque body, like a demon infesting the otherwise calm visage of bourgeois womanhood, was a pervasive threat circulated by a growing (male) medical establishment that worked to control hysteria and other allegedly feminine maladies such as neurasthenia, nervousness, and consumption. Physical culture was often cited as a way to combat these dysfunctions and prevent a grotesque hysterical female body. Consequently, Mayhew’s physical culture discourse and techniques operated as a means to abate the moral, physical, and spiritual threat posed by hysteria, and secure women’s mobility from leaking into grotesque flailing hysterics through self-cultivation. Mayhew, furthermore, redirects this abatement of potential hysteria through the hope of bodily emancipation, “a strength and freedom in her body which had been a dream before.” In this articulation of physical culture, exercise became linked to the hope of strength and freedom, values that carried moral and social, as well as physical implications. In other words, Mayhew argued for physical culture not only as a mean of 135 self-cultivation, but also a means of self-possession and potential agency. Her discourse aligns with emerging liberal governmentality by articulating physical culture for her students as “ways in which they fashion themselves as subjects [ . . . ] ways in which they practice their freedom.” These practices, Graham Burchell argues, inextricably link “techniques of the self” to government by “making its [government’s] rationality the condition of their [subjects’] freedom” (“Liberal Government” 30, emphasis in original). In other words, the promise of freedom embodied in Mayhew’s methods brought with it the necessity of a certain loyalty or at least belief in the overall project of the work: social maternity. However, the key to the continued productivity of such discourse and practice lay in the repeated deferment of that strength and freedom, the need to continue to strive for an impossible perfection. Delsarte: “Classicism as Self-Culture” While women, in Mayhew’s Christian discourse, could never hope to achieve true physical Christ-likeness or masculine perfection, they could access another type of perfection: that of form, embodied in classical Greek statuary. In her article, “Shall Delicate Girls Take Physical Training?” Mayhew approvingly cited British doctor Morell McKenzie, who suggested that physical training had already affected women’s bodies by replacing the “limp anaemic maiden” with a “type more like the Greek ideal of healthy womanhood” (6). Much of physical culture generally was informed by the perception of the Greek body as ideal that, at least in Progressive Era trends, connected physical cultivation to loftier mental pursuits. This connection between the Greeks and the 136 elevation of the mind and body was indicative of a mid-nineteenth century shift in American thought from “classical texts as grammar lessons to classicism as self-culture, and from reverence for Rome to infatuation with Greece” (Winterer 50). This infatuation was also driven by a belief in “Athens as the cradle of democracy” and consequently a useful ancestor to claim in the genealogy of American democracy – a concept still under development in the work of Progressive Era reformers like John Dewey and Jane Addams (Winterer 49).121 The promotion of “classicism as self-culture” reflects Tony Bennett’s argument that “the improving force of culture” was used as a means of assimilating various marginalized groups in urban populations, especially the working classes, in order to avert the “threat of anarchy.” Thus, culture was utilized as a regulatory force of rational governance aimed at populations. At the level of the individual, culture, Bennett claims, was mobilized as a “moral force through which individuals might improve themselves to achieve the kinds of poise, balance, and self- reflection that Schiller spoke of” in 1795 when he suggested that people, when viewing a work of art, would strive to “close the gap between their rough empirical selves and the poise and harmony represented by the work of art” (Bennett, “Culture” 65-6). Delsarte’s work addressed this gap directly: a system of expressive movement, often embodying the poses of Greek statuary, and centered on “grace” as a composite triad of “ease, precision, and harmony” in the body “in order to express the highest phases of our being” (Bishop 31).122 Mayhew foregrounded the discourse and practices of Americanized Delsarte in much of her work, emphasizing the eclectic Americanized practices, while still 137 forwarding the central tenets of Delsarte’s philosophy. Francois Delsarte was a mid- nineteenth-century Parisian teacher and theorist of music, aesthetics, and acting. At the core of his work was a system of bodily gestures that corresponded to internal states of feeling, and a belief in the “fixed relationship between physical and vocal behavior” (Ross 20). Delsarte’s impact in the States was most keenly felt in the last two decades of the nineteenth century when, after his death, several of his students adapted his ideas for use in their classes. At this point Delsarte’s system and ideas became widely disseminated not only through his former students and their publications, but also in translations of other Delsartians across Europe. The result was a vastly differentiated network of practices all claimed under the flag of Delsarte. For example, Steele Mackaye, by far Delsarte’s most well-known pupil, claimed to adhere strictly to his former master’s teachings. Like Delsarte, he focused mainly on actors and taught specialized classes to elite (mostly female) students. Mackaye’s six-week Delsarte course in New York was $100 for two classes a week, making his reference to “nobility” more than merely a metaphor. However, between the vast array of books and the take-up and adaptation of both Delsarte’s and Mackaye’s methods, classes in American Delsarte were to be found in almost any place offering classes in women’s physical culture. While the methods ran a full spectrum of styles (some leaning more towards gymnastics, others emphasizing elocution, and still others germinating the seeds that would spawn modern dance) Delsarte’s fundamental premise maintained a “correspondence between the outer manifestation of movement and the inner character and ultimate worth of the person,” the 138 latter aspects often defined as spirit (82).123 Delsarte practices promoted a body whose movements were governed by the soul and spirit. It was this connection between the physical and the spiritual, and their combined ability to affect the construction of moral character, that positioned Delsarte as an effective means of physicalizing Mayhew’s Christian ideals and Grecian perfection of form. The broad range of American Delsartian techniques in use during the 1890s in the US enabled Mayhew to utilize a variety of strategies under the banner of Delsarte. First, the emphasis on movement as a manifestation of the spirit served a dual function: at the YWCA it allowed her to promote physical culture as a Christian practice while at the University of Wisconsin it allowed her to legitimize her Christian ideals through the already accepted use of physical culture.124 Second, she was able to justify a wide range of physical practices – lighter activities such as club swinging, Swedish gymnastics, and marching, but also the incorporation of pulley machines and eventually basketball – by foregrounding her methods with the acceptably feminized American Delsarte system. Consequently, by flying the Delsarte flag, she could incorporate heavy gymnastics (tumbling and apparatus work) that, in other contexts, might violate the stated goals for greater self-control and reduced nervous energy.125 Third, Americanized Delsarte, as an aesthetic art-form and a training system for actors, operated on the assumption that its vocal and gestural expressions were to be performed in front of an audience. Consequently, despite the distrust of theatricality permeating muscular Christianity, Mayhew utilized a system that promoted performance as a means of spreading its maxims and practices.126 Charged with the growth of her classes, financially supporting 139 the larger Association, and sustaining the financial independence her physical department as a whole, exhibitions became a crucial way to promote the work of physical culture. Through adapted muscular Christian discourse and “classicism as self-culture” embodied in flexible Delsartian techniques, Mayhew promoted and produced a complex and multilayered form of conduct for women. Her physical culture work sought to combine Christian, social, moral, and gender reform into desirable moral characteristics of service, social maternity, self-control, and aesthetic grace made realizable through physical practice. However, these modes of self-conduct also carried implicit strategies for assimilating bodies into a conduct of bourgeois white femininity. For example, the secretary for the Kansas City YWCA, Mary Dunn, characterized the girls she was looking for in 1895 as follows: Wanted, young women. What kind? Those to whom the Lord can say, “Do this or that for me,” and who can respond to the hardest command, the carrying out of which will mean endurance, a knowledge of the principles of the conservation of energy and the putting forth of will power through bodily power. It will mean the clear shining of a glowing soul through a transparent medium, instead of the cloudy glass of a dark lantern, an ill-used body. (Qtd. In Putney 144) This quotation paired symbolic associations between spiritual purity (“glowing soul”) and physical cleanliness (“clear, transparent”) with imagery that associated illness and disease with a “dark lantern” of a body. Consequently, spirituality, health, and purity were inscribed on a “clear shining” and “transparent medium,” while the body of “cloudy glass,” the “dark lantern” is necessarily an “ill-used body,” not indicative of an inner 140 “glowing soul.” As Richard Dyer points out, “white humanity” began to be coded in photography in the early twentieth century through the contrast between “substance and translucence,” the latter “allows the spiritual to be manifest in the material” (115-6).127 Hence, whiteness and health in this instance become desirable attributes that should be paired with a strong will to serve others – God and the YWCA, and by extension the husband and the city. Bodily control, exercised through “power,” but tempered by “energy conservation,” demonstrated spiritual, moral, and racial hygiene, and made “young women” fit to serve the self and others. This will to serve kept women’s work at the YWCA – whether in the gymnasium, the church, the home, or the city – comfortably embedded within the discourse of social maternity. However, Mayhew’s eclectic approach to physical culture also carried a myriad of oppositional modes and meanings that destabilized the desired fixity of Christianity, classicism, self-control, and the care of self and others, as demonstrated by the quotation above. While Delsarte and classicism made explicit connections between the mind, body, and spirit, they also had roots in mysticism and polytheism. And while Mayhew incorporated Delsartian ideals of grace, poise, harmony, and perfection into her discourse and practices, she also taught basketball and heavy gymnastics, activities associated with competition and masculinity. In performance – whether in Mayhew’s classes or exhibitions – this multitude of complex and contentious practices and meanings were brought to bear on the bodies of both performers and spectators. As a “doing and a thing done,” Mayhew’s physical culture performances “embed[ded] features of previous performances,” the “things done” before, often (re)inscribing and (re)enforcing these 141 discourses and practices. As “a doing” these same performances also “assert the possibility of materializing something that exceeds our knowledge, that alters the shape of sites and imagines other as yet unsuspected modes of being” (Diamond 1-2). Governing Through Mobility: Mayhew’s Classes Perform By April of 1893 Mayhew began having her classes give public exhibitions of their work – a common practice for physical culture at the time – in local churches, in the YMCA gymnasiums, and in 1896 and 1897, the Lyceum Theater downtown.128 The exhibitions provided revenue for the Association, but were one of the primary reasons that the physical department was able to be completely financially independent by the end of its first full year.129 Charging 25 cents a ticket, the department usually gave an exhibition at the end of each season, one in the winter and one in the spring.130 Audience sizes varied depending on the size of the venue, though a January 12th entertainment in 1895, given in the small YWCA gymnasium on the second floor of the 808 Nicollet location, brought in a crowd of 220.131 The next year with the addition of a Ling class touring group, another term for Swedish gymnastics named after its founder Per Henrik Ling, the department gave a total of 8 performances (including 6 on tour) in front of 568 people total, netting the department $142.132 The move to the Lyceum was probably indicative of a big growth in the audience sizes. In addition to the short newspaper articles published before performances in order to boost audiences, the department began selling tickets through a local department store as well. The movement from the privacy of women’s gymnasiums to public performance venues also marked physical culture’s 142 uptake of a different register of biopolitical power through “the utilization of private forms of power [ . . . ] for public ends – the good of society” (Burchell “Liberal Government” 25). Physical culture’s transition to the entertainment sphere facilitated the transformation of individual private bodies, into a public idea of the body, bodies knowable in a way that subjected them to increasingly complex modes of governance through the entertainment industry. However, the choice to move into the arena of theatrical performance also put the purity of physical culture as a form at risk by placing it in the same venues as other popular performance forms. As the city’s primary vaudeville house, the Lyceum was an interesting choice for YWCA physical culture performances, especially considering the local men’s gymnasium had utilized the city’s opera house for over a decade.133 Though certain types of more popularly circulating physical culture, such as those performed in circuses by strongmen and women were closely linked with vaudeville, this connection was certainly not one that would have been desirable for the YWCA. As a result of this “leak in diachronic interspatiality [ . . . ] [and the] marks of affect and emotion lingering” from previous vaudeville performances in the space, accounts of many of the physical culture performances labored to assert the non-spectacularity of the bodies involved (Jackson, Lines 125-6). Most descriptions of these exhibitions, especially the ones that took place in the Lyceum, operated to legitimate the bodies on stage and the movements they performed. Such accounts effectively argued that these performances demonstrated how physical culture could be used as a form of appropriate mobility that increased the “health” of 143 women, while also increasing their self-governance and ability to be governed. Performers demonstrated self-control by the degree to which they could make complex and difficult movements appear effortless. Although physical training was key to securing the body against the threats of feminine maladies, the process – the physical labor and repetition involved in transforming rebelling limbs into a controlled and corrected body – was erased through the performativity of Mayhew’s eclectic techniques and the performance of the exercises in exhibitions. I am relying on performativity here in its deconstructive, Derridean sense as “signal[ing] absorption” (Parker and Sedgwick 2). This absorption constituted the disappearance of visible signs of the effort involved in physical training, as demonstrated by the descriptions of the exhibition performances in articles and reminiscences of the physical department at the YWCA during Mayhew’s tenure. For example, numerous articles refer to the grace, ease, and “picturesque-ness” of the student/performers.134 This appearance of grace and ease, and its veiling of intense training, was recognized in the same article where the reporter admiringly remarked, “There were no drills requiring ungainly contortion or purely physical strength. While some of the exercise did not doubt imply the use of considerable strength, they had been so carefully practiced that the impression was one of ease and grace,” adding that any skeptics would have been converted.135 Such descriptions of the bodies of the performers as “supple,” “pleasing,” “graceful,” and “attractive” reinforced the verbiage of effortlessness used to describe the movements. Taken together these descriptions, I suggest, demonstrate a naturalization of conduct in process as well as demonstrating assumptions about the incompatibility of femininity and public displays of physical 144 exertion. By replacing the inherently deficient, urban female body – the result of urbanization, luxurious living, sedentary practices, and any number of other causes – with the “natural” ease and grace of the Americanized Delsartian movements, these performances argued for these physical practices as modes of “appropriate” mobility that increased the body’s governability. However, the physical repetition, training, and rehearsal required for the perception of “ease” imparted by these performances was often, through the necessity of advertising the exhibitions, put on display by reporters who witnessed Mayhew’s classes. Mayhew required a strong physical and mental commitment from her physical culture students. Students could not stop by and simply begin practicing Americanized Delsarte or walk over to the arm pulleys and get in a quick triceps workout. Her classes operated over a three-year sequence of theory and practice through a series of lectures from physicians and physical culturists on topics from self-control to correct dress. The first year of courses, much like the Christian discourse Mayhew used to describe her work, operated on an assumption of deficiency in the female body, teaching “correct poise, control of nervous system, strengthening vital organs, correct breathing, and corrective exercises.”136 As such, these exercises operated as what Foucault called “techniques of the self” or “intentional and voluntary acts by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oevre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (History, Volume 2 11). Thus, Mayhew system of courses, especially the first year, worked to increase the value of her students’ human capital, not 145 only by fostering in them a sense of individual freedom, but as a collective group helping them maintain and perhaps exceed the aesthetic values and criteria towards which they strived. As a means of constructing one’s life into an oevre, Mayhew’s curriculum moved on to ever-increasing levels of aesthetics and physical complexity. After a year of corrective work, Mayhew then introduced students to her specialty, Americanized Delsarte, as well as some Swedish exercises and the horizontal bar. It was not until the third year that students received the full gamut of club swinging, marching, heavy apparatus work (German), and fencing.137 A description of one of her classes around 1895 reflected this compartmentalized work, as well as the sense that women’s bodies came into the classes physically deficient. The reporter described a continuous flow of women from a circle of chairs around the main floor into the various exercises. For example, when the marching or “fancy steps” exercises began, certain women sat in the chairs while others left the chairs to join in the activity. Those joiners were most likely the most advanced students, as marching was a third year activity, a conclusion supported by the reporter’s description of the women’s movement in this particular exercise as “light as a dancer.” In contrast, the reporter described the class of beginners as struggling to get control of “certain sets of muscles,” as the “arms, for instance, want to move always in the same direction.” The confusion becoming even more extreme when they took up club swinging – exercises with equipment similar to small bowling pins, one held in each hand and then twirled around the body in a similar manner to today’s batons.138 However, the more advanced class of club swingers demonstrated “marvelous control 146 over their rebellious organisms.”139 Such wording positioned Mayhew’s physical culture classes as a central means of managing not just muscles, but an entire “organism,” one with a tendency towards rebellion. The dramatic framing of this internal and external struggle between the moral and physical order provided by Mayhew’s exercises, and the allegedly innate tendency of the female body toward chaos, positioned urban white single women as particular targets for biopolitical interventions through technologies of security. This mechanism of security worked at “achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole [population] from internal dangers” (Foucault, Society 249). In the case of Mayhew’s physical culture classes for women, her exercises served as a security mechanism against the latent rebelliousness of women’s bodies. Rebelliousness here was positioned as the threat to control and correction. Consequently, at least in the previous descriptions by reporters, physical culture operated as a means of securing the female body – through an eclectic conduct of Christianity, classicism, and service through social maternity – against the Progressive Era dangers of nervous disorders or, worse, hysteria. The “health” demonstrated by the performers further averted any suspicion of underlying sexual dysfunction by encouraging these bodies toward the approved conducts of social and biological maternity. As one reporter pointed out, the work aimed to “show the true relation of the body to the mind and spirit and to bring the body under the complete control of the higher natures.”140 147 Mobility: A Tactic and a Problem As demonstrated by the physical culture exhibitions, the YWCA’s performance of social maternity also demonstrated the capacity for the bodies in its employ and under its care to be governed, a management that required seemingly constant vigilance through the mobility of two of its governors: Mayhew and Boardman. The unison and uniformity of Mayhew’s drills in performance – often using up to 30 students simultaneously performing the same movements – served as a way of showcasing her effectiveness as a teacher and governor of a population of women.141 As one reporter admiringly commented at an exhibition, “The precision and perfect unison of their concerted movements compelled admiration and elicited applause” (“Blue Caps Won” 5). Part of this effectiveness seemed to be demonstrated by her own flexibility and mobility: a pedagogical omnipresence. This sense of Mayhew’s omnipresence was best demonstrated by an extended description of a class from 1893 focused specifically on Mayhew: In her jaunty Zouave costume of Syrian trousers, black silk blouse, black hose, and low shoes, she directs the movements of the drill from a low rostrum, at one end of the gymnasium hall [ . . . ] Miss Mayhew is now in the middle of the hall, her light, elastic carriage being an inspiration to all would-be healthy girls to imitate. Her head is well set, her body poised truly, and her feet seem to be shot with India rubber, so light and full of spring is her step.142 In this description Mayhew’s body takes on almost mythic proportions. The use of the term “Zouave” positions her in a military context as it was used to describe French 148 military outfits; this imagery placed Mayhew’s body in a position as a commander of these bodies, but also a theatrical cross-dresser. Contrasting the often awkward and unpracticed movement of the students, Mayhew’s fluid body seemed to shift as soon as the reporter pinned her down. Thus, she started as stabilized, at one end of the hall, but then quickly moved to the middle and appeared in constant motion, the “rubber” in her feet preventing her from ever fully affixing to the ground, as if in constant flight. Additionally, throughout the description Mayhew seemed to occupy every part of the space, filling it with her presence. A similar sense of omnipresence was performed in Boardman’s reports for the Traveler’s Aid. As the sole aid for the organization until 1899, Boardman had daily responsibility for both the Milwaukee Depot at 3rd and Washington, and the Union Depot, 4 blocks away at Hennepin and High Street. As her reports demonstrated, she did not merely stand on the platform and direct people to their destinations. While such a technique would have allowed her to reach a greater number of people, it would not have been commensurate with the care involved in the conduct of social maternity. Instead, Boardman often personally escorted her charges to their destinations, sometimes covering miles a day as she conducted travelers across the street to the room provided by the WCA and YWCA, to local churches on the west side of downtown, to doctors’ offices most likely near the Syndicate block of downtown, across the river to northeast Minneapolis, south across the river to St. Paul, and even further south to Groveland Avenue, seven miles away in southwest St. Paul.143 Such care for an individual is crucial to the operations of subjectification in biopolitics where “‘individuals can be brought to work 149 on themselves’ for the sake of individual or collective health” (Rabinow and Rose 3-4, Weir 8). From the standpoint of governance, Boardman’s social maternity acts as a form of pedagogy where she showed these wanderers how they might work for and on themselves by walking them through the process of finding their destinations. As a security mechanism charged with the protection of the “permanently endangered naturalness of the population,” in this case women, social maternity ultimately required both Mayhew and Boardman to be seemingly omnipresent in relationship to their charges (Lemke Biopolitics, 47). Excess Mobility: Grotesque Spectacles, and Elusive Spectres As a governing tactic mobility occupies an ambivalent space in Mayhew’s work, functioning as a performance of control in the exhibition performance, but also as potentially hysteric excess when her classes performances left the contained spaces of gymnasiums and performance venues. Once loose on the streets and parks of the city and the local environs, the effectiveness of Mayhew’s physical culture as a purveyor of social maternity is cast in doubt by several articles in local papers that seemed to question Mayhew’s methods. For example in a newspaper article from around 1897, the athletic female body is framed as deviant. The subtitle, “Sights Seen During a Visit Made to the Rooms of the Young Women’s Christian Association” was accompanied by several drawings throughout the article of women performing exercises in blouses, trousers gathered at the knee, stockings, and low shoes. Framed as “sights” these bodies become spectacularized, linguistically linked to the carnivalesque image one might have found on 150 display at the circus, a museum, or zoo. The author of the article, presumably a woman given the single-sex boundaries drawn at the YWCA, did not give the prototypical newspaper structure of “who, what when, where, and why.” Instead she takes the reader on an expedition into the YWCA space, giving a detailed description of the main entry room’s domesticity including a fire, two comfortable chairs, and a desk. To this domestic environment she added that the “chairs had a delightfully untidy air” and the office desk was “littered with papers.” This space of unkempt hominess was deserted, indicated by a “desk chair turned partly away” as if recently and swiftly abandoned by its occupant. The lights were on in this “homelike apartment” but no one was home. Consequently, the rest of the article was predicated on this abandoned domesticity and the failure of the “home’s” mistress to greet her guests. After waiting some time to be greeted, the reporter gave up and began exploring the space in search of people, but to no avail. Finally, a girl entered the building and escorted the visitor upstairs to the gym. The environment suddenly and radically shifted from silent waiting to watching a chaotic spectacle of “the most bewildering chatter of voices” belonging to bodies in the “oddest sort of attire” performing the “oddest sort of feats with arms, legs, and body.” Given the foregrounding of abandoned domesticity, it seemed as if these women had indeed abandoned the home and their duties for the circus-like atmosphere of the gym. As if to emphasize this point, the article ended with an inducement to come to an “informal entertainment” at which these women would perform their bodily feats. Consequently, the lack of domesticity demonstrated by the Association – no hostess to great guests, untidiness – led directly to the “sights” in the gymnasium. In other words, the YWCA’s social maternity failed to 151 model appropriate domesticity and failed to govern the tendency of women’s bodies toward chaos embodied by the hysteric.144 The vigorous movements of Mayhew’s classes caused further stir after the association moved to the 808 Nicollet location in 1893. At the time the gymnasium classes occupied the upper floor of the small two-story building (see fig. 3.1). As shown in the photograph, one defining feature of the building was the two large, plate glass windows on both the first and second floor. Apparently, one of Mayhew’s evening classes – by far the most popular and attended by the most students – was exercising so forcefully that the glass in the window of the first floor began to bulge and sway suspiciously. A passing police officer, concerned about the motion, entered the building and halted the class. They soon arranged to take over a large store room, being rented out at the back of the first floor and moved the gymnasium downstairs, painting “Y.W.C.A. Gymnasium” in gold letters on the big plate glass window. Such labeling not only served as an answer to concerned onlookers should the building shake again, but also apparently served as an excellent advertisement, causing the collective body of women inside to grow even more.145 In this example, the motion of the collective bodies inside the building was so excessive as to almost shake the foundations of the building itself. The bursting quality of this growth was noted in Helen Gardner’s nostalgic memory of the same building as “the centre of life and activity, until it literally bulged and cracked, and threatened to burst if we crowded anymore into it.”146 Mayhew’s 1895 report for the Physical Department echoed these sentiments: 152 As the warm weather came in I followed the laws laid down by scientists and began to expand with the heat until these walls could not contain me so I formed my pupils into Outing Clubs through which we were enabled to commune with nature and breathe in the pure air of the country and at the same time carry on the physical training.147 With this entry Mayhew formed what would become annual summer outing clubs for rowing, tennis, basketball, cycling, and walking, and the release of movements that, until that point, were restrained by the confines of the gymnasium. While most of the clubs did “commune with nature” outside of downtown proper – the rowing club at Cedar Lake, the other clubs at various parks outside of the city – the bicycle club took runs in and through both downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. On the same evening as the Outing Clubs, members of the cycling club would wear Mayhew’s divided skirts. Word hit local papers with the following headline: “SKIRTS, Those of the Bloomer Variety Are In Favor, The Lady Bicyclists of the Y.W.C.A. Pledge Themselves, To Make the Weekly Club Run in Divided Skirts” (see fig. 3.2).148 This local article went on to give details of the outfits, noting specifically that “bloomers will not be worn as long as those worn on the streets thus far,” marking the potential for these bodies to be sexually exciting. The date and time of the rides was also printed in the article, as were the names of all the club’s members (numbering single and married women as well as a few female doctors) serving as a spectacularizing advertisement. Such advertisements were effective and the display elicited a crowd, as one member recalled, “The sidewalks were lined with spectators to see those bold females 153 make the start.”149 Again, descriptions of the first run focused on the costumes as in another headline that shouted, “IN BLOOMER COSTUME, An Unusual Site Witnessed on Nicollet Avenue Last Evening When Members of the Newly Organized Cycle.” Twenty women gathered that evening at 6pm outside the YWCA rooms on Nicollet Avenue to start their ride which would take them down Hennepin Avenue to Lake Street, through the lakes district, and end at Lake Street and Park Avenue.”150 The reporter covering the event also mentioned specifically the one member who wore a full skirt rather than the bloomers. In the context of such a mass spectacle, the member who chose to adhere to convention became the one singled out. Before beginning their run, the women paused to pose for a picture (see fig. 2.3). While the quality of the archival copy is poor, the YWCA building can clearly be made out in the upper right hand corner with a “For Rent” sign hanging on the plate glass window on the first floor. Along the sidewalk stand spectators, witnessing the event as the women stand next to their bicycles in the middle of the street, their stockinged calves clearly visible, peaking out from behind the spokes and pedals. The lone skirt-wearer appears to be in the center of the photograph, (strategically?) positioned behind her fellows. This sense of continual movement, of growth and bodily excess, pushed Mayhew’s students’ bodies into the category of grotesque spectacle, and, especially through the Cycling Club, asserted their place within the masculinized commercial and industrial landscape of downtown Minneapolis’s city streets. Consequently, participants in Mayhew’s classes and outing clubs, by exceeding the boundaries of controlled grace, shaking the foundations of gymnasiums, and spilling out into city streets, presented the 154 possibility for carnivalesque dissent through a grotesque body. In opposition to the ease, grace, and controlled unison demonstrated in the exhibitions, the grotesque bodies in Mayhew’s gym were in a constant state of becoming, always remaking and remade. The grotesque body, according to Bakhtin, “outgrows itself, transgressing its own body, in which it conceives of a new, second body” (317). Here, the grotesque body is imagined in a constant state of motion, an idea grounded in Bakhtin’s theories of a popular performance (carnival) which (re)produce excess bodies as an imagined collective, social body. This carnivalesque collectivity has a fluid and evasive mobility, fixed for a moment in the image of women standing next to bicycles, but quickly unmoored in the flash of bodies pedaling past witnesses left in their wake. Left with nothing to gawk at, but the fading fannies of women on the move, spectators had no choice but to go about their business while the performance continued. The bicycle served as a common emblem of women’s physical culture as both a problematic and encouraged practice for women at the turn of the twentieth century, given the necessities of the device also placing their bodies on display in public spaces. Unlike Mayhew’s affordable physical culture classes, bicycles were only affordable to the middle and upper classes.151 Thus, riding through the streets on a bicycle was also a performance of what Thorstein Veblem would call “conspicuous consumption.”152 As a means of making women more visible, and open to governing apparatuses, medical discourses seized on women cycling in order to engage in a debate over its consequences for women’s reproductive capacities. As Vertinsky points out, the bicycle was pivotal in “expanding women’s views concerning their potential for mobility or in promoting a 155 stream of cautionary and often contradictory advice from establishment physicians” (76). This statement demonstrates how the bicycle was utilized to forward both biopolitical practices of freedom and governmental apparatuses of security. Like Mayhew’s emphasis on the freedom of bodily movement, Vertinsky stresses a similar emancipatory potential in the bicycle, a sentiment echoed by numerous women doctors, suffragists, and physical culturists at the time. On the other hand, as Vertinsky shows, the medical establishment used the bicycle as a reason to intervene in women’s lives, suggesting every woman should check with a doctor before cycling.153 As with the concerns about hysteria, the excess mobility provided by the bicycle also allegedly caused sexual excitement in women, a “problem” linked through medical discourse to numerous diseases of the reproductive organs. However, advocates also suggested that riding “fortif[ied] women during their childbearing years” (Vertinsky 78). Such debates foreground the ways that bicycling, whether viewed as a conduct or counter-conduct, nonetheless ensured the (re)creation of reproductively capable female bodies. Mayhew: Social Mother or New Woman? A similar elusiveness characterized many descriptions and representations of Abby Mayhew, reflecting some ambiguity about the constant mobility required by the sense of her omnipresence, and suggesting that such constant motion placed her in compromised and compromising positions. As a young single woman in the city (rather than married and deemed a “matron” like Boardman), in charge of other women much like her, Abby Mayhew’s mobile body destabilized social maternity’s equilibrium. 156 Suspicion of Mayhew’s mobility – around the city, in the gymnasium, performing exercises – was betrayed by a certain over-representation in the local press. Especially in the early years of the YWCA in Minneapolis, it almost appears as if the only newsworthy subject to cover at the YWCA was Miss Mayhew. She was depicted – in drawings or photographs – more than any other employee of the YWCA in the newspapers during her tenure.154 Furthermore, textual descriptions of her body and personality abound in both newspaper articles and reminiscences of other YWCA employees. For example newspaper articles described her body as “a pleasing picture,” “light, elastic,” and “poised truly.”155 Association members’ reminiscences tended to focus on her personality and character describing her as “a magnetic personality,” possessing “energy and a fine Christian character,” a “beautiful Christian character [with] ever ready helpfulness,” and “a teacher of ability.”156 This need to pin down Mayhew’s body and soul, by her associates, newspaper reporters, and later scholars, indicates to me an acknowledgement of a gap, a general unease about the mobility of Mayhew’s body. This sense of transience was deeply rooted not only in her body’s travels around the globe and her navigation of multiple class sites in the city, but also the motion of her body in its practice as a physical culturist. The insistent display of Mayhew’s body exposes an inability to comprehend her subjectivity, the depictions acting as a determined (re)presentation of “we know this body” in order to cover up the “we don’t know this body at all.” Most of these depictions didn’t show Mayhew’s body, but rather, like most portraiture of the time, focused on the face (see figs. 3.4 and 3.5). While at least two 157 articles covering the class work included illustrations of women (entire bodies) doing the exercises, the faces are anonymous, the focus on the bodies (see figs. 3.6 and 3.7). The one notable exception is an 1893 full-body illustration from the Minneapolis Journal of Mayhew in a Delsarte statue pose, an illustration that was as much about displaying the gym costume as it was about the pose (see fig. 3.8). At first glance the pose reaffirms the imagery of ease, grace, and harmony expressed about many of the class exhibitions. She was drawn as if in motion, but not necessarily exercising, her stance a pose. The unconventional nature of the costume and, perhaps, Mayhew’s own unconventional being is off-set by the femininity of the pose itself. While she looks as if she might take a step forward, the position of her hand also seems to be suspended, as if about to go to her forehead in a swoon. Suspended between athletic motion and feminine over-activity, this drawing embodied the competing discourses in women’s athletics at the time, working to symbolically contain the excesses of the active female body. However, viewed in the context of the Americanized Delsartian statue poses, the image takes on much more complicated connotations. While Americanized Delsarte utilized a series of statue poses for women, such as the various poses of Niobe, Mayhew’s pose was a modified version of a Borghese gladiator, a pose “especially suited to young men” and made famous by strongmen like Eugen Sandow (see figs. 3.9 and 3.10).157 Whether Mayhew or the illustrator modified the pose is unknown, but that it needed to be modified indicates some acknowledgement that a woman posing as a gladiator was excessive. Additionally, Mayhew’s choice to pose as the gladiator pushed against the boundaries of acceptable representations of social maternity and, in a fully 158 realized mimicry of the original pose, would have violated the parameters of ease and femininity established by Mayhew’s physical culture techniques. The 1895 exhibition at the Lyceum seemed to acknowledge such boundary-pushing as Mayhew performed the poses of the gladiator for the ladies-only matinee, but chose solo club swinging for the co-ed evening performance. Mayhew’s afternoon performance was described ambiguously by a (female) reporter as “a pleasing picture.”158 Such ambiguity about the type of mobility performed by Mayhew’s body not only troubled Mayhew’s position as a purveyor of social maternity, but also problematized the adamant assertions from witnesses, students, and YWCA employees of physical culture’s efficacy as a governing technique for women. Given these examples of grotesque excessive physicality, Mayhew’s physical culture for her students and her self also operated as a counter-conduct to conducts of ease, control, and grace (re)presented in the exhibitions. As a counter-conduct these grotesque performances, utilizing “elements familiar [ . . . ] which had nevertheless been marginalized” by central currents of physical culture for women, sought “not to overthrow but to influence the society of which they are a part” (Death 31, Dean 21). In other words, by adopting more physically vigorous practices that countered the overly feminized images at work in Delsarte, Mayhew hoped to influence, rather than challenge the social maternal aims of the YWCA. Performance provided the foundation upon which Mayhew made her forms of physical culture both do-able and thinkable to those responsible for the broader management of the YWCA. As Diamond suggests, performance asserts “the possibility of materializing something that exceeds our 159 knowledge, that alters the shape of sites and imagines other as yet unsuspected modes of being” (2). For Mayhew the different modes of embodiment, (re)presented by her practices, needed not only to be imaginable through performing bodies, but also made thinkable within the YWCA’s given frame of moral and spiritual uplift, and social maternity. Thus, her director reports constantly asserted her department’s “right to be” a part of the Minneapolis YWCA, an assertion that was often accompanied not only by references to the work’s ability to “glorify God” and “obey the laws of hygienic living,” but also a reminder that the physical department was completely “financially independent.”159 Such attempts at performatively made her department a new, but necessary part of the YWCA’s overall mission. Rather than a competing mechanism of security, physical culture in Mayhew’s time at the YWCA operated variously and simultaneously as both conduct and counter- conduct. As the arbiter of such a paradoxical practice, and hence more valuable in terms of governmentality, perhaps Mayhew’s time at the Minneapolis YWCA can be seen as (re)imagining, (re)invigorating, and (re)materializing the possibilities of social maternity as a conduct through her eclectic system of physical culture. When the grotesqueries of her students, and her-self, are (re)positioned as counter-conducts and resistance, Mayhew’s performance becomes a refashioning in response. She becomes in this context, Foucault’s homo economicus, or the manipulable (wo)man, “perpetually responsive to modifications in her environment,” the desires and needs of her students, her self, and the institutions for whom she works. As an arbiter of both conducts and counter-conducts, Mayhew embodies the paradox of governmentality in that “the 160 counter-conducts that develop in correlation with modern governmentality are the same elements as for that governmentality” (Foucault, Birth, 355, emphasis mine). The result of these seeming diametrically opposed soul-mates was the shared foundation in civil society, economic truth, and the interests of all. Hence, while governmentality’s “conduct of conduct” and the resultant counter-conducts are opposed in regard to methods, they are essentially working towards the same ends. Subsequently, the grotesque as counter-conduct nonetheless ensures the management of the natural functioning of the population. Conclusion: A Neoliberal Remembering and Reclaiming Mayhew’s as the manipulable (wo)man becomes not a failure of social maternity, but one of its most viable and effective advocates, helping to facilitate not only its movement into multiple contexts, but also its responsiveness to the counter-conducts of excess mobility embodied by the grotesque spectacles of the classes and outing clubs. Furthermore, Mayhew’s often unorthodox practices of governance, of herself and others, demonstrate the responsiveness of governing structures, like the YWCA, and governing conducts, like social maternity. Counter-conducts as resistance are essential to biopolitics because they indicate a shift in the nature of a population, alerting governing structures that they need to shift their security mechanisms. The dynamic flexibility of governmentality, particularly within the context of the YWCA, an institution which continues to thrive in Minneapolis almost 125 years after its founding, demonstrates the increasing presence and efficacy of biopolitics and governmentality within social welfare 161 institutions, most especially the ways in which figures like Mayhew become (re)claimed as part of neoliberal innovation, and an example of the productive, competitive, and necessary agonism between conduct and counter-conduct, excess and grace. Social maternity, reconfigured through Mayhew’s use of physical culture as a biopolitical tactic of that governmentalizing project, could be redeployed under the banner of democracy, morality, and freedom. While Mayhew’s eclectic mix of grotesque excess and refined grace in her performances did not seem to draw the particular ire of her employers, there is evidence of an effort to drastically shift the methods of the physical department after her departure. Mayhew’s successors seemed to temper the scope and athleticism of the original program, emphasizing “expression” over athletics, by axing large-scale exhibitions, and reducing the size and significance of the outing clubs. However, the images of Mayhew’s classes from newspapers and reports – bodies sticking out at odd angles into space, a growing collective body of women forcing buildings to bulge and crack, and the whoosh of whirring cloth and spinning air as limbs pedaled past – fit quite comfortably into the progressive, liberatory nostalgia present in reminiscences of her work more than twenty five years after she began her work for the YWCA. Mrs. Charles Wallace, member and eventual president of the Minneapolis YWCA, recalled that the outing clubs were a “means of startling the staid citizens by the daring of the costumes adopted, and the vigor with which the various sports were pursued.”160 In retrospect, activities which brought some measure of censure and sexualized the bodies of YWCA members were (re)routed into conducts that showcased the YWCA as a forward-moving, and 162 progressive institution. A few sentences later, Wallace’s memory of the of the now famous bicycle ride through the city made a crucial turn toward the nostalgic, musing that “[s]ome of us now sigh for the good old days when bloomers and knickers were so uncommon as feminine street attire, as to startle the natives.”161 Her statement not only (re)positions the bicycle ride in a more conservative light, casting it as ironically startling in her contemporary context, but also showed concern about current trends in feminine street attire. In this instance, Wallace’s performance of remembrance took a performative turn, using the bicycle ride – a “thing done” now absorbed into the collective body of the Minneapolis YWCA – as an incitement for current “doing” by the YWCA’s members in 1920.162 These reminiscences demonstrated how the YWCA’s continued promotion of social maternity as a form of governance, and its claims to efficacy, relied on the continued presence of female bodies in need of management, willing and able to be made as pliable and responsive as possible. In other words, as an instrument of governmentality, using the biopolitics of physical culture as a mode of governance, the YWCA required resistance in order to justify its existence as a social welfare institution. As Foucault argued, “[i]f there was no resistance, there would be no power relations. Because it would simply be a matter of obedience. So resistance comes first, and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change with resistance” (Foucault “Subjectivity”, 167). In the context of the arguments in this chapter, social maternity functions to manage, regulate, and govern the bodies 163 under its care, ever-aiming towards total obedience, the achievement of which would render social maternity unnecessary. Furthermore, Mayhew’s constantly shifting pedagogical methods, practices, and performances marked her as the manipulable (wo)man, able to shift shapes according to governing structures, but also able to push those structures to shift in return. The mutual constitutiveness of this relationship is suggested by biopolitics’ assumption of an always incomplete subject. Hence, individuals needed to turn to mechanisms of “culture” for completion. However, culture as a “technology of government [ . . . ] is already in itself ‘too much,’ ‘excessive’” (Foucault, Birth 319). As a biopolitical governing force Mayhew’s physical culture had to produce both conducts and counter-conducts to ensure the flexibility of social maternity – its ability to adapt to the changing “nature” of its population – as a governing and securing mechanism. In this scenario grotesque mobility became a counter-conduct that produced a shift in the governing structure of social maternity (Mayhew left and a different system was implemented), and was eventually assimilated and (re)presented as innovation (the vigor of the women’s physicality, the daring of their costumes). Finally, the easy incorporation of Mayhew as a pioneer of physical culture in the 1920 narrative of the Minneapolis YWCA demonstrated the critical role physical culture would play in the early emergence of neoliberal systems of thought. Foucault suggests following Schumpeter that innovation under capitalism comes to be perceived in economic terms; it prevents “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” In the neoliberal take-up of this idea, Foucault argues innovation is the result of the “boldness of 164 capitalism” and “the permanent stimulation of competition” that results from “human capital [ . . . ] the set of investments we [the neoliberals] have made at the level of man himself” (Birth 231). Even in her reports, which primarily dealt in budgets and figures, Mayhew grounded her work in its soundness as an investment. After only one year, she alleviated her department’s potential financial risk by marking its complete “financial independence.” This claim demonstrated physical culture’s status as an innovation, an endlessly lucrative, and in terms of human capital perpetually productive, investment at the level of the body. Physical culture performance provided a means for the body to become the site for the reproduction of human capital in American neoliberal thought, and the continual reflection and renovation entailed in governmentality. Returning again to Mayhew’s speech at the National Training School, she maintained the Sargent paradigm that the ultimate end of physical culture was “[t]o make the mothers of the race strong.” However, as I assert throughout this chapter, Mayhew’s practices and discourses imparted equal weight to physical, moral, mental, and spiritual strength all embodied in the overall conduct of social maternity. To this end, social maternity operated as an even more dynamic force for the reproduction of human capital than Sargent’s methods. By combining physical reproductive capability with the production of the self-satisfaction, self-control, and freedom, Mayhew’s physical culture laid pivotal groundwork for the emergence of neoliberal orders that collapsed boundaries between the economic and the social, and contributed to the rising popularity of the physical fitness/training wing of the YWCA throughout the twentieth century. Additionally, performativity (as epitomized in 165 Mayhew’s reports, clsses, exhibitions, and outing clubs) becomes a central aspect of physical culture’s productivity, serving as a dynamic force of reinforcement and reformation. Operating, like Mayhew, as a conduct and counter-conduct, performativity as a citational practice opened a space for staging the as-yet-unimaginable. Hence, Mayhew’s physical culture practices reinvigorated the YWCA’s form (neo)liberal governmentality as a “‘way of doing things’ directed towards objectives and regulating itself by continuous reflection” by reproducing (counter)conducts that facilitated the institutions social maternal aims, reflected on them, contested them, and reinvented them (Foucault, Birth 318). 166 Chapter 4 : Leotards and Leopard Print: White Motherhood and “Savage” Surrogates in Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture The savage mother knows but little of those terrors that are so agonizing to the civilized mother. The body of the savage mother has been prepared for motherhood. It is strong, vital, splendid. The same cannot be said of the civilized mother. This book attempts to bring the vitality and vigor of savage life to civilized life. (Bernarr Macfadden. Preparing for Motherhood vi) Introduction: White Maternity, Surrogation, and Excess The self-proclaimed “Father of Physical Culture” Bernarr Macfadden, like Abby Mayhew and Dudley Allen Sargent, was deeply invested in how physical culture for women would shape them to become stronger (white) mothers. Like Sargent, he utilized pseudo-scientific discourse from both physiognomy and phrenology to reinforce women’s biological role as reproducers, and like the YWCA, he envisioned maternity as social behavior produced by women’s “natural” instincts.163 Following the alleged scientific logic of eugenic discourses gaining traction in the American imagination at the beginning of the twentieth century, Macfadden echoed Mayhew and Sargent’s concerns about racial deterioration. He capitalized on (white) fears of falling (white) birth rates – heightened by widespread assertions from population experts that immigrant birth rates 167 were on the rise – in order to promote maternal fitness and sell his physical culture exercises, books, photographs, exhibitions, equipment, and magazines to a now blossoming popular consumer market. What set him even further apart from the likes of Sargent and Mayhew, was the platform he used to disseminate his often contradictory beliefs and physical culture methods; primarily his magazines Physical Culture, Women’s Physical Development, and Beauty and Health. Through this media he focused on modes of addressing a public audience rather than students through classroom pedagogy.164 Physical Culture, Macfadden’s flagship for over half a century, contained everything from editorials and advice columns, to romance fiction and advertisements for myriad consumer products, all accompanied by drawings and photographs of often semi-nude or nude men (usually Macfadden himself) and women.165 Through these magazines, as well as other media (including books, lecture tours, and exhibitions) Macfadden’s physical culture ethic operated on a much larger scale than his predecessors’, complicating scholarly investigations of his physical culture ethic with a dense and often contradictory context of images – flexing muscular women, paintings of naked nymphs, photographs of wrestling servants in India, and advertisements against vaccinations showing emaciated children.166 This poly-form content complicated and often contested the tireless promotion of domestic maternity Macfadden promoted, layering in connotations of excessive sexuality, white superiority, and commodity consumption. As Ann Fabian asserts in her article addressing the intertwining of class and sexuality in the magazine’s visual imagery, “an unstable world of bodily pleasure” remained implicit, but contained (51). 168 That unstable world broke through when the bodies on display and the audience addressed by Macfadden became interactive participants in performance. In 1903-04, and 1905 Macfadden staged what arguably became his most well-known exhibitions, the Mammoth Physical Culture Shows due to the most advertised and popular events, the “Most Well Developed Man and Woman” physique contests, which became centerpieces in Macfadden’s arrest in 1905 on obscenity charges.167 The main offender was a poster of the female competitors in white body stockings with sashes about the hips from the 1903-04 exhibition (see fig. 4.1).168 Unfortunately for Comstock, the arrests and subsequent outrage expressed by the outspoken Macfadden – who argued that the good of physical culture could not be displayed if the exhibitors were clothed – only served to further sensationalize the event, drawing a crowd of 25,000 people.169 Sports scholars and cultural historians often use the exhibitions as the inciting incident in Macfadden’s lifelong struggle against censorship (as his hand-picked biographers Fulton Oursler and Clement Wood saw it) or as an early example of Macfadden’s love of publicity and scandal.170 However, most recently scholars like historians Ann Fabian, Greg Mullins, Margaret Marsh, sports historian Jan Todd, and cultural studies scholar Simon During attempt to complicate the story of Bernarr Macfadden by investigating how class, sexuality, and gender operated in performances and through his publications. Todd suggests that the Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions were not solely precursors to the modern objectifying beauty pageants that some scholars suggest, but rather venues for Macfadden to express his admiration for and promotion of a “stronger, fitter, and more vigorous womanhood” in opposition to nineteenth century beauty “ideals of neo- 169 classicism and naturalism” (7). During strives to make a similar intervention in terms of mass culture and class, but also positions the Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions as performances on the cusp of a massive shift in conceptions of health in the US, discussing how those conceptions were framed through visual and mass culture.171 He suggests that, in these particular sites, traditional conceptions of grace and strength combined with the scientific and economic value attached to stronger bodies, creating a subsequent correlation between healthy bodies and sexually attractive bodies. The work of these scholars suggests that the Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibition of 1905 exceeded the limits of the Macfadden/Comstock debates about prudery and obscenity, signaling a radical diversification of physical culture practices and discourses. Through both his magazines and his physical culture shows, Macfadden’s physical culture forms, modes of address, and mass circulation facilitated the weaving of physical fitness into the tapestry American democracy and, eventually, neoliberalism. I suggest that it is at this point, where Macfadden’s display of “healthy” bodies became a tactic to encourage conducts of consumption (buying tickets, the magazine, the products advertised in both) and production (more efficient workers, better mothers, a stronger race), that a consideration of performance and biopolitical governmentality become crucial scholarly interventions. More specifically, as consumption fed production it enabled governing structures increasingly intimate modes of intervening into the population’s individual lives, while simultaneously giving such interventions the sheen of individual agency and choice. Following this logic, Bernarr Macfadden’s publications and exhibitions become a critical site to investigate physical culture as a 170 commercial venture. How this sphere, and its complex interplay of competing and contrasting incitements to particular forms of bodily conduct, nonetheless forwarded an overall project of racial reproduction focused primarily on the governance of the white female body, is the central focus of this chapter. To make this argument, I interrogate Macfadden’s magazines and performances suggesting that they served as scientific and aesthetic proof of the benefits of Macfadden’s physical culture lifestyle for those who practiced what he preached. That lifestyle included not only daily physical practices of often obsessive self-maintenance, but also the continued purchase of Macfadden’s magazines and products, and those sold by his advertisers, an alternate though nonetheless potent form of governance by others. As publications and performances bent on “show[ing] how the spread of physical culture has improved the human body,” Macfadden’s work sought to make his own practices and those he opposed hyper-visible to his audiences.172 This included the rescue and (re)invigoration of a “strong, vital, splendid” (white) maternity – a concept for Macfadden deeply embedded in racial and sexual instincts that had been “shrouded [ . . . ] in what might be termed ‘vulgar mystery’” by the forces of “prudery.”173 The result was a seemingly endless stream of visual images and discourse meant to incite both men, but especially women to engage in procreative sex with “fit” mates, eventually leading to parenthood. This imperative necessarily created a controversial pairing of two terms and images – maternity and sexuality – that carried often directly opposing implications for early twentieth century Americans, and subsequently became a problematic combination in Macfadden’s magazines and performances. 171 The exaggeration implied by this hyper-visibility was a necessary by-product of an attempt to make visible in a moment – the flash of the camera, the flipping on of a light – the efficacy of physical culture as a daily, individual, and most often private practice, an attempt most vividly demonstrated by Macfadden’s prolific use of before and after photographs. The strenuousness of this drive to show (the visible proof of the subject’s physical improvement), this will to know (what hidden inherited traits contributed to the subject’s ill health), to see what could/should not be seen (all appearing on the subject’s nude body) necessarily brought with it the ever-present ghosts of unintended visual excess – a barely contained world of bodily pleasure, desire, disease, and degeneracy “that lurked just beneath the surface of his publications” (Fabian 51).174 These depictions induced readers to conduct themselves in a manner commensurate with Macfadden’s practices, and thus to a certain extent as counter-conducts in defiance of rapidly expanding institutions of “official knowledge” and their concomitant characterizations of physical culture so capably rendered by figures like Sargent.175 Macfadden’s fierce promotion of self-management sought to challenge the practices of semi-established medical, educational, and government institutions, but nevertheless reinforced systems of governmentality. The ever-present excess – threats that could not be seen like degeneracy and feeble-mindedness – mobilized the individual as its own security mechanism, poised to intervene into his or her own body to manage the cryptic unknowability of threats that could not be seen. As a cheap, readily accessible, and popular magazine, Physical Culture made its way into readers’ most private spaces, inviting physical culture’s governing practices into the detailed level of an individual’s 172 moment-to-moment daily choices. Furthermore, by advocating for the agency and privacy of individual forms of self-management through the pages and performances of physical culture, Bernarr Macfadden made the practices of his readers and himself visible to a multiplicity of governing structures. As part of this systematic proliferation of “health” discourse, Macfadden’s attempts to rescue (white) maternity from what he saw as the physically dangerous and morally suspect medical establishment facilitated the emergence of the pregnant and birthing female body in the realm of public discourse. Such a transition made women’s reproductivity an issue of public health rather than a private familial and/or medically mediated life event. Macfadden’s work is, then, a fertile site in which to examine the ways that conducts and counter-conducts work in relationship to the larger project of governmentality. Despite his overall anti-establishment stance, Macfadden’s publications and performances interlaced multiple layers of conducts that followed mainstream physical culture (abandoning the corset, exercise in the open air, discouraging alcohol and tobacco use), and counter-conducts that contested it (fasting cures, milk diets, hydropathy), creating a constant and dynamic tension of competing ways of conducting bodies on a daily basis. The dramatic atmosphere evoked by such a constant agonism drew in millions of readers, and put Macfadden in the public eye on a regular basis. Additionally, as a business, Macfadden’s world of physical culture brandished a veritable “frenzy of the visible” to incite the reader’s/audience’s capacity for infinite improvement, a cornerstone of biopolitical governmentality’s rationality, and Progressive Era eugenic policies.176 173 As part of his overall eugenic project of racial improvement, I investigate how Macfadden utilized the imagery of the so-called “savage” in photographs and narrative descriptions as a basis for numerous acts of surrogation in his promotion of certain bodily (counter) conducts. Macfadden’s representations of “savages” in his publications appropriated their physical practices for the use of white female bodies in order to co-opt the physical culture of allegedly “dying races,” but in doing so made these practices and bodies visible in a way that problematized the very idea that they were dying. This process produced a performative excess by instructing female readers on how to make childbirth painless through the adoption of the physically vigorous practices of “squaws,” “negresses,” and “working class” women. Examining the images and narratives Macfadden used in his magazines, and utilizing Roach, I argue that although surrogation often operated in his discourses as “militant racism [ . . . ] that conceptually erase[d] indigenous cultures,” it also “raise[d] the possibility of replacement of the authors of representations by those whom they imagined into existence as their definitive opposites” (Roach 4, 6). Through surrogation female readers could appropriate the physical culture of “savages” in order to facilitate white racial improvement, but the very necessity of doing so cast both their whiteness and reproductivity in doubt. In Macfadden’s publications the doubt aroused by this act of surrogation could be displaced as visual excess, but in performance this maneuver was substantially destabilized by its own “doingness” – by the possibility of reverting back to a previous (savage, rural, primitive) (re)iteration, or even more radically becoming the next (re)iteration. 174 As the hand-picked physical embodiments of Macfadden’s ideal white womanhood, the young white fit female competitors in the physique contests, “could not perform themselves [ . . . ] unless they also performed what and who they were not,” thus conjuring racial histories and bodies in order to construct whiteness as a conduct (Roach 5). In staging the physical culture exhibitions, Macfadden clearly hoped to frame the white bodies in the physique competitions in a similar way as his publications by minimizing their movement, posing them against a black background, and keeping the competitors at some distance from the crowd. Additionally, Macfadden intended to draw a largely male, working class audience, thus potentially proposing the women as suitable mates. However, the instability of performance as a medium, what Elin Diamond calls its manifestation as a “doing” (bodily actions occurring live) and “a thing done” (the embodied history carried by those actions), created openings for that world contained by print to burst out (1-2). I focus on a moment from the first exhibition where, despite Macfadden’s choreographed poses that emulated the high class living statues of the Delsartians – all pose shifts occurred during blackouts to push the authenticity of the models’ statuesqueness – the female competitors began to “wiggle” and “gyrate” in response to the hoots and calls of their working class male audience/judges. This moment not only lays bare the sometimes indecipherable difference between conducts and counter-conducts, but exposes both the promise and threat of numerous acts of surrogation. The fluidity between conduct (Delsartian statue posing) and counter conducts (burlesque spectacle) in the moment of the “wiggling” contestants nonetheless forwarded 175 the ultimate goal of centralizing white reproduction. By crafting a constant tension between conducts and counter-conducts, governmentality ensures the continuous productivity of populations. This idea problematizes the Foucaultian formulations of race and racism centered around a modern form of sovereignty that saw racism as “an ongoing and always incomplete cleansing of the social body” implying techniques of repression, prohibition, and regulation (Lemke, Biopolitics 43). Instead, biopolitics opens a space for a racial analytics of liberal governmentality that organizes populations racially and incites them to particular forms of productivity. For Macfadden the primary productive practice he hoped his readers/audiences might adopt was a reproductive whiteness. In order to incite this type of conduct in his female readers he (and his contributors) utilized “savage” surrogates. The bodies of these Native American, Chinese, black, working class, and rural laborers provided the physical lifestyle models upon which Macfadden hoped to incite his female readers toward their “natural” impulses for reproduction. Thus, the competition provided by the contradictory fabric of Macfadden’s publications and performances spurred on continual production. Bernarr Macfadden: Weakling to Strongman The majority of the information about Macfadden’s early life and career come from two self-commissioned biographies written in 1929 in anticipation of what he hoped would be a fruitful political career. The biography authors, Clement Wood and Fulton Oursler, received their information directly from Macfadden (Oursler having served for some time as Macfadden’s chief editor) making both works almost autobiographical, and certainly self-promotional.177 At first glance the narrative of Macfadden’s youth appears 176 similar, uncannily so at times, to Dudley Allen Sargent’s autobiography. Almost two decades Sargent’s junior, Macfadden was born in a small poor home in Missouri’s Ozarks in 1868. Like Sargent, Macfadden’s father died when he was young and he was soon sent him off to a boarding school, where he was apparently virtually starved by the proprietors. Unlike Sargent whose self-narrated story of his youth showed a physically vigorous, if restless spirit, Macfadden continuously battled ill-health and a body that refused to cooperate with his demands, struggling in school, and moving back and forth between various relatives and employers. After his mother died of tuberculosis in 1879 MacFadden left his Illinois relatives to work as a farmer, and a grocer’s assistant. In 1883 he visited a German turnverein (a building that served as both a gymnasium and social club for many German immigrants) and a circus, vowing to turn himself into something like the physical specimens of manhood he saw working in both environments. Determined to become, of all things, a tightrope walker for the circus, he built a gymnasium in his uncle’s basement (Sargent, of course, wowed audiences when he balanced himself in a rocking chair on the high wire, and built his own gymnasium in his uncle’s barn). While strikingly similar at times, the divergent paths taken by these two men were most clearly demonstrated by their participation in the 1893 Columbian Expo in Chicago. Sargent’s installation in the anthropology building showcased two statues that represented the accumulation of thousands of students’ measurements rendered into stone, accompanied by photographs and charts explaining his medico-scientific methods. Meanwhile, on the Midway a shirtless Macfadden demonstrated a friend’s exercise 177 machine.178 Housed in a large brick building with arched entrances, and embedded amongst exhibits of everything from a prehistoric mastodon to stelas from Central American pyramids, Sargent’s displayed sculpted statues of students’ bodies, emblematic of the links between science, higher education, and physical culture as an embodiment of the “best that man had thought,” showcasing its culturalizing imperative (Fabian 57). Alternately, squeezed in the midst of a Ferris wheel, an ostrich farm, and displays of recently colonized peoples, Macfadden exhibited his own body, advertising proof of the effectiveness of someone else’s machine, and showcasing physical culture as “the best that man had looked,” foreshadowing the commercial motive behind much of his future work (ibid.). Though both men’s passion for physical culture was rooted in popular forms like the circus and vaudeville, Sargent strove to distinguish himself in medicine and higher education despite his humble roots, while Macfadden’s fierce ownership of his roots, and use of personal experience as a grounds for expertise set him apart as a hero of the working class. Additionally, as Michaela Di Leonardo and Robert Rydell have pointed out, the 1893 Expo in Chicago served as a microcosm of late nineteenth century American racial consciousness.179 As historian Robert Rydell asserts the “Midway provided visitors with ethnological, scientific sanction for the American view of the nonwhite world as barbaric and childlike and gave a scientific basis to the racial blueprint for building a utopia,” embodied by the fair’s “White City” (67). Physical culture’s presence in both spaces pointed to physicality’s conflicted status within emerging American understandings of race, and in particular whiteness. 178 Emblematic of his place on the Midway, Macfadden positioned his work as an adamant counter-conduct to mainstream physical culture practices promoted by the likes of Sargent and Mayhew. However, Macfadden was deeply suspicious of the institutions that both Mayhew and Sargent so devotedly attached themselves to, an attitude that enabled him to direct his female followers away from colleges and universities, and gymnasiums, and back toward the traditional sphere of the home. In his publications, through household chores, and exercises that utilized household objects (chairs, side- tables, beds), Macfadden laid the rhetorical, ideological, and visual foundation for a “strong, vital, splendid” civilized (white) motherhood gained not through classes or in gymnasiums, but intimate private self-training. While Macfadden’s magazine Physical Culture approvingly covered Sargent’s work with both Harvard students and women, he roundly criticized the intellectual elitism of higher education, particularly for women, arguing that colleges were more likely to turn out “pig-headed freaks” than “womenly women.”180 He similarly criticized both the YM and YWCA for “prudish restrictions” that prevented men and women from interacting socially, calling for them to become co- educational institutions.181 Such examples highlighted Macfadden’s reputation as an equal opportunity offender, often criticizing the very people and programs from which he prodigiously borrowed. As cultural studies scholar Simon During suggests, Macfadden was “defiantly on the side of self-management, as against governmental pastoral agencies and professions” epitomized by physical culture in higher education and social welfare institutions (829). 179 Despite his anti-establishment stance, his publications demonstrated a much more striated universe of conducts and counter-conducts. His editorials in the 1901 volume of Physical Culture, for example, railed against the “six curses of humanity: prudishness, corsets, muscular inactivity, gluttony, drugs, and alcohol.”182 While he utilized these curses as a means to critique middle-class values, his editorial rants against bourgeois fashion and prudery linked him discursively with an ascetic moralism against the “seven deadly sins.” Here, Macfadden’s firm oppositional stance became complicated by the nuanced biopolitical flows of power at work in his mass circulated magazine. As governmentality and development scholar Carl Death points out, counter-conducts pose “no grand refusal, only dispersed and shifting points of resistance,” an argument clearly at play in the pages of Physical Culture magazine (32).183 Conducts, then, operate as dispersed and shifting points of reinforcement. The resultant instability and fluidity created a dynamic and dramatic site of constant, but indefinable tension (Gordon’s “moral judo”) that addressed itself to an audience with a presumably infinite capacity to freely choose between conducts and counter-conducts. By addressing themselves to the readers’ agency, Macfadden’s magazines expressed a budding neoliberal governmentality. Physical Culture: Mating and Maternity Through the pages of Physical Culture, as well as its brief sister publications Women’s Physical Development and Beauty and Health, Macfadden, and the magazines’ advertisers and contributors forwarded a bevy of “technologies of the self” aimed at 180 specific governmental ends. Technologies (sometimes translated as “techniques”) of the self, Foucault suggested, permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Technologies 18) The neoliberal bent of such techniques lies in the outcome, a sense of fulfillment with life that bears shades of Foucault’s discussions of the “entrepreneur of the self” that I discussed in chapter one. Techniques of the self operated as a mean’s of securing one’s own “naturalness,” but especially improvements to that nature; one could always be more productive, prettier, whiter, and richer. The discourse and imagery in Macfadden’s magazines demonstrated how these techniques coalesced to facilitate broader conducts, such as mating habits and maternal strategies that lay at the heart of a sweeping eugenic project for white racial supremacy. Adopting techniques at the daily level (walking, drinking milk, stretching) enabled individuals to construct larger conducts over time (mating routines and raising children). Macfadden hoped that the end result of these techniques, when practiced on a mass scale by even a fraction of his readership, would be a stronger (white) race. However, perpetuating this message carried a whole set of problems. The first was the nuance of Macfadden’s beliefs: white people didn’t need to have more sex with each other, just more reproductive sex; and they didn’t need to have more children just better children. The second was a persistent Progressive Era ambiguity about whiteness: Who was white? What constituted whiteness? How did one 181 become white? These problems were further complicated by the uneasy pairing of visual culture with the “techniques of the self” promoted by the discourse of Physical Culture magazine. Macfadden began publishing Physical Culture magazine in 1899, initially using it as a means to circulate his own writings on health as well as his forays into fiction writing, and to advertise his exerciser.184 By the end of the magazine’s first year it began to attract more contributors and an increasing pool of advertisers; its clever use of articles, editorials, reader responses, and especially photographic images helped propel the subscriber base to 150,000 in about two years.185 While much of the material came from Macfadden, he also used a regular cadre of writers, some of whom co-authored books with him including Felix Oswald, M.D. in Fasting, Hydropathy, and Exercise, and John Coryell who helped Macfadden write some of his short fiction stories.186 In addition, Macfadden cited from other publications in the earliest issues, mainly other newspapers and magazines like Health Journal, and Mother’s Journal, though in later years his wife Mary suggested that Bernarr was militantly against reading anything but his own work.187 As Physical Culture’s circulation grew, it began to attract more notable writers like Upton Sinclair, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Booker T. Washington.188 However, Physical Culture’s most unique feature, the one that would spawn Macfadden’s future more lucrative publications, was its incorporation of reader feedback. Beyond just the “Question Department,” Macfadden regularly published reader’s letters of gratitude, their stories of self-transformation (often accompanied by pictures), ran fiction and essay contests, and eventually began publishing self-transformation and confessional articles 182 submitted by readers. It was this innovation, suggests Ann Fabian, that set Macfadden apart by “offer[ring] his readers a hand in the production of the artifacts they so happily consumed, to urge them at every turn to become writers as well as readers, producers as well as consumers” (52). In other words, Macfadden encouraged his readers toward self- management, and allowed them the space to represent themselves as the fruition of that management. This mechanism propelled the operation of Macfadden’s publications as biopolitical tools of governmentality forward by endowing readers/practitioners with a sense of individual agency – that was rewarded by self-representation in a magazine – and increasing the capacity and scope of physical culture as a governing mechanism reliant on the magazine’s popularity. The dramatic impetus behind the narrativity of self-transformation through self- management found particular currency among the urban working class, an increasingly diverse and diversified population in terms of nationality, ethnicity, and gender. The central message of Macfadden’s publications, Fabian suggests, was that “physical transformation [ . . . ] made all social mobility possible,” a belief echoed in Macfadden’s continual references to his own poor weakling to millionaire strongman story (52-3).189 As During points out, Physical Culture addressed its readers as working class, suggesting that “training the body appeals powerfully to those whose bodies are their main resource – for whom spectacularization and confession testimony across distance provide a means for self-articulation,” a key aspect of During’s argument for imagining a global popular (833). The products, pictures, and narratives in his publication’s pages held the promise of a social transformation that would result in various forms of physical, mental, and 183 moral improvement, subtle gestures toward the possibility of transitioning to a more privileged class and/or racial status. Though he primarily addressed the working class, Macfadden did on occasion address bourgeois readers, suggesting it was never too late to renounce their luxury and vanity.190 The implicit promise that certain conducts – exercising, fasting, and eating vegetables – might make his urban working class reader more attractive and healthier, and thus richer and/or whiter permeated the discourses and images meant to incite his female readers – whether middle class housewives or working class Irish immigrants – towards mating and maternity. Hence, mating and maternity in this equation would encourage the bourgeois to be even whiter, and incite the “not-quite- white” poor and working classes to become as white as possible.191 As a civilizing and morally driven force, the maternity Macfadden promoted acted as an implicit whitening mechanism, both biologically and socially. For Bernarr Macfadden, physical culture ensured the proper functioning of the “sex instinct,” an innate drive to reproduce the species, demonstrating its biopolitical function as a mechanism of security (Encyclopedia 2444). This need for routinized bodily management was especially important for women whose sexuality, Macfadden suggested, was akin to a female lion or tiger. These animals’ instincts, he argued, “absolutely dictate the time when she may be approached by the male species, and this is only at the particular period when she is in a condition to conceive,” a mating dance Macfadden felt humans would do well to imitate (2460). However, for Macfadden sex was only appropriate for procreative purposes, and he encouraged couples to refrain from physical affection outside of procreative sex and to sleep in separate beds. He 184 approvingly cited Dr. T.R. Nicholas who suggested that a woman was so full of passion during ovulation that she “is seldom satisfied with a single sexual act” and therefore may desire multiple sexual encounters (2464). But, Macfadden and Nicholas argued, man must maintain his will and reserve his “energy” in order to ensure the ultimate outcome of sex as a conduct in strong offspring. These arguments discursively linked women’s “sex instinct” to lower animals, a move also utilized to link “bad savage” races to the lower end of the evolutionary chain, and justify white colonial dominance. Additionally, this behavior was perceived as innate in this narrative, and something to not be snuffed out or repressed. Instead, Macfadden’s asserted, women’s sex instinct should be carefully guided by the ideal mate (Macfadden often served as this model), and the woman’s own ability to govern her own sexual impulses, towards reproductive ends. It was white women’s “capacity to serve as mothers of civilization” that Robert Rydell, in reference to the border position of the Women’s Building at the 1893 Expo, suggests prevented them from “slipping into the category of ‘otherness’ reserved for ‘savages,’ and ‘exotics.’” (Qtd. in Di Leonardo 8). Though reproduction was a central goal, if not the ultimate goal, of all forms of physical self-cultivation, Macfadden directed his parenting advice toward women from the time of conception, through pregnancy, and well into the first several years of parenthood. Macfadden, like many of his contemporaries, seemed obsessed with the health of mothers and potential mothers. Perhaps due in part to his own mother’s tuberculosis and a Lamarckian belief that his illnesses in youth were the result of his genetic inheritance from his mother, Macfadden wrote extensively about preserving 185 maternal energies, strengthening the body for childbirth, and newborn care. By 1905 he began publishing numerous pictures in Physical Culture of what he labeled “physical culture babies,” a convention he’d been using in Beauty and Health/Women’s Physical Development from their inception. Additionally, he published profiles of women who raised their babies according to his precepts, including one mother who proudly claimed to have let her newborn sleep next to an open window even in winter to receive the respiratory and circulatory benefits of fresh cold air; a practice regularly suggested by Macfadden. He also enforced an intense regimen of diet and exercise for his third wife Mary during her seven pregnancies including a strict vegetarian diet, two hundred knee bends a day, a daily fifteen mile walk, and in her sixth month a 64-foot dive off a pier into the ocean as a demonstration of her vigorous pregnant womanhood (M.W. Macfadden 15, 17). True to his own beliefs he banned doctors from his wife’s childbed, begrudgingly allowing her a midwife at her insistence (19).192 For Macfadden the link between the women’s sexual and maternal conduct lay at the heart of all possibilities for their transformation, and demonstrated the multiple layers of individual conducts promoted by Physical Culture. According to Macfadden, if you exercise, eliminate alcohol and tobacco use, eat vegetables, drink milk, abandon the corset, bathe every day, massage your scalp, you will be a fitter and more attractive person making you more likely and better able to engage in procreative sex, have an uncomplicated pregnancy and labor, make stronger healthier babies. 186 Before and After Photographs: Visual Excess, Pleasure, and the Will to Know Though Macfadden’s discourse provided the basis for his pairing of sexual and maternal conducts, the available conventions of visual culture at the turn of the century made the communication of this message through magazines a complicated venture. Physical Culture was most infamous for images: cartoons, reproductions of famous works of art, and especially photographs of nude and semi-nude men and women. In the magazine’s first year photographs of both Macfadden and strongman Eugen Sandow (Macfadden facing the camera against a black background in bikini briefs, Sandow facing away from the camera, looking over his shoulder, nude) appeared on the cover.193 These types of renderings occurred on almost every page of the magazine whether popularly circulating images of famous strongmen or actors, and reader submitted photographs. Macfadden frequently (and often nude) served as the main model for the exercises outlined in various issues. Thus, readers could practice these exercises without necessarily reading the text. While the cover photographs were mainly men – a woman did not appear in this prime location until 1904 – drawings and photographs of semi-nude women appeared regularly within the magazine’s pages, demonstrating exercises as well as poses of famous actresses and circus performers. Fully nude women were always shown in reproductions of classical statuary or paintings, such as George Frederick Watts’ “Psyche,” and Emile Munier’s “At the Bath.”194 In almost all cases, including the two listed here, the nudes appeared completely separate from the articles on the same page. For example, the Watts piece is placed at the end of Macfadden’s article “Health Home Cures” and the Munier next to a short column called “The Curative Power of 187 Exercise” by Dr. George H. Taylor. The muscle-bound men, exercising women, and lounging nudes were sandwiched in between two advertising sections at the beginning and end of each issue initially containing promotions of products and books written by Macfadden and his contributors, but eventually expanding to include ads for products such as bicycles, girdles, and punching bags; the services of hypnotists, character readers, and psychics; and more outrageous products like an internal bath, vibrating electric massagers, and whirling spray douches.195 This complex interplay of text and image, editorials, advice, and advertising positioned Physical Culture on the precarious cusp of a rising tide of mass produced cultural commodities, blurring lines between the messages of “buy me” and “be like me” emanating from the magazine’s images. Utilizing the photograph as a scientific tool to document nature, or a representation of “truth,” Macfadden used before and after photographs in his magazines to document individual deficiencies and to demonstrate the effectiveness of Macfadden’s methods as they manifested themselves physically on the body. In other words, Macfadden utilized these images as a way to visibly render the practices of “technologies of the self” visible on the body. These subjects – both male and female – were often photographed semi-naked, most often showcasing their torso, with their before and after measurements often listed below the photos.196 In one example from Women’s Physical Development in 1901 titled “Our Thin Subject” Macfadden chose a woman from over one hundred applications to demonstrate the effectiveness of his methods, focusing in this particular case on “efforts to add flesh” to the patient.197 The first article in April displayed a faceless naked torso, the body on which Macfadden would prove the efficacy 188 of his physical and nutritional work. A few months later, claiming to have cured her of “insomnia, serious nervous and digestive troubles” and bad kidneys, Macfadden posted the previous pictures next to new pictures, both now accompanied by the woman’s face (98). Her physical change, most notably the “marked improvement [ . . . ] in the general shape and contour of her bust,” Macfadden argued, proved that “most any woman can accomplish similar improvement” by following the advice in his magazine (see fig. 4.2). The first change Macfadden noted in the accompanying write-up was her “brighter and more satisfied expression,” as if she was already reaping the benefits of her transformation in terms of personal satisfaction. Here, Macfadden participated in a neoliberal project “to privatize all aspects of public good” by shifting the responsibility for widespread problems like poverty, disease, and criminality to the individual, and his or her capacity to self-manage and self-discipline. Hence, the only person responsible for Read’s initial weakened state was Read (Giroux 156). However, the attempt to utilize photography to show the ways self-management marked itself on the body was inevitably undermined by well-circulated photographic conventions of the time that carried both explicit and implicit symbolic weight with the magazine’s Progressive Era audience. The burgeoning use of photographs to document, question, and discover “truth” added an additional layer of meaning to the contextual mire of Physical Culture’s pictures. Arising concurrently with scientific theories bent on categorization and artistic practices in search of verisimilitude, photography earned a label as an “art-science” in the mid-nineteenth century.198 To many, especially in the scientific community, the photograph was a way to document nature as reality, “a 189 physical process which gives [nature] the power to reproduce herself.”199 By the last decades of the 19th century biologists, ethnologists, and anthropologists used photographs to document and categorize plants, animals, and human beings, especially criminals and the so-called savage races in ethnographic photography. These ethnographic photographs are often framed as further means of domination, through surveillance, gazing structures, and objectification, in narratives of colonial domination. However, recent scholars in anthropology – most notably Alan Sekula, Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton, and Deborah Poole – have challenged this dominant disciplinary conception. Instead, Edwards and Morton suggest, photographs operate “as contested sites of encounter and cultural exchange even within asymmetrical power relations” (4). As Poole points out, the anthropological need to document nature – the will to know it – and the “quest for order” in the late nineteenth century that “made it possible to imagine a utopia of complete transparency also introduced the twin menace of intimacy and contingency” (164). Edwards speaks of the transparency as “visual excess,” the “random inclusiveness of photographic inscription” (4). In other words, the intangibles within photographs of people – the facial expression, the staging of an intimate encounter between the subject and the (absent) presence of the photographer, the “infinite recodability” of the image by the viewer – all threatened to disrupt the scientific hierarchies of race, class, and gender that photography was meant to construct and solidify (Edwards and Morton 4). Utilizing the documentary and “truth” trope of scientific photography, Macfadden could give his practices (and magazine) the appearance of scientific rigor. By miming scientific conventions Macfadden claimed a type of governmental authority asserting 190 through these photographs to have a “specific knowledge of the object of governmental practice [ . . . ] and stipulate suitable ways of managing them” (Inda 8). Rose Read, as a woman in failing health and possibly a working class reader (she responded to the magazine’s call for patients), provided an apt target for intervention from an “expert” like Macfadden, and hence also the self-management techniques he so vigorously promoted. This mimetic device enabled Macfadden to demonstrate expertise not through degrees and institutional affiliation, but using the photograph as proof of his expertise. In other words, before and after photographs were used to verify the effectiveness of a set of physical practices of both self-government, and in Rose Read’s case, her capacity to be governed effectively by Macfadden, the ideal mate. Photographs proved visible improvement on the body through techniques of the self. Additionally, the “after” photograph – Read’s fuller breasts, styled hair, and slight smile – further solidified implicit connections between health, beauty, and happiness. These implicit connections were reinforced by Read’s performance of appropriate femininity (her armpits had been shaved), and class (she or someone else spent time styling her hair), thus elevating her appeal as a mate, and her whiteness (her skin appears whiter in the after photos). Ultimately these tropes, the ability to self-govern and be governed by a man, and their implicit connection to health, beauty, and happiness, constituted the overall general theme of Macfadden’s advice for women:crafting behaviors that promoted maternity as the central pivot point around which women’s sexuality, physical fitness, and ultimate satisfaction revolved. 191 Though Macfadden used photography in its scientific form to validate his practices in before and after photographs, the visual excess of these images often cast doubt upon Macfadden’s correlations between mating, maternity, and whiteness. Part of photography’s appeal to both scientific disciplines and the popular imagination at the time was its ability to challenge the vision of the naked eye by capturing moments and objects heretofore relegated to the world of the invisible and unseen, creating “doubt as to the ability of the human eye to observe accurately the mechanics of the human body” (L. Williams 38). In 1873 former California governor Leland Stanford hired photographer Eadweard Muybridge to capture his prize winning racing horse in motion in order to provide proof of his hunch that at some point in the horse’s gait all four legs would be off the ground at the same time. Muybridge did in fact capture an image on film proving the former politician’s hunch, and use the notoriety gained from the experience to launch not only more motion studies, but also a national lecture tour. This example, Williams suggests, “illustrate[s] a peculiarly American mixture of applied science, sportsmanship, and pleasure” in photography, a combination that she argues lies at the foundation of visual pleasure in cinema which drives the production and consumption of hard core pornography (37). Citing Foucault, she argues that embedded in the prehistory of hard- core pornography is a “drive for knowledge [through] the principle of maximum visibility” (48, emphasis in original). Accompanying this “frenzy of the visible” was a will to know, understand, and make visible the invisible. Drawing connections between Charcot’s photographs of female hysterics and hard-core pornography’s depiction of 192 women’s orgasms, Williams argues that at the heart of the porn genre is the visible manifestation of “the out-of-control confession of pleasure” in the female body (50). Taking Williams’ assertions into account, and considering the broader context of the magazines visual images, Read’s knowing smile, bright eyes, and glowing skin might have been representative of a different kind of visual excess – an out-of-frame physical practice suddenly caught by the camera’s eye. In Physical Culture visible confessions of women’s inner pleasure were often played out in the conventions of the images of women throughout the magazine. While many photographs of actual women depicted them demonstrating exercises (see fig. 4.3) or posing for the camera as in the photos of actresses (see fig. 4.4), the majority of the artistic reproduction showed women in various states of collapse or semi-collapse, as shown from the cover of the November 1902 issue (see fig. 4.5). Images, like Figure 4.5, provided a counter-narrative to the images of women’s bodies exercising, as well as giving the majority male readership a less threatening image of women to consume. As Bram Dijkstra points out in his exhaustive survey of nineteenth century conventions of images of women in art, the theme of the collapsing woman demonstrated her sexual excess. This excess was often embodied as an illness that was the result “what would happen to a woman – indeed her whole family – if her sexual impulses were not nipped in the bud,” or a “deliberate depiction by the artist of a woman in the throes of overindulgence in autoerotic pleasures,” an idea supported by a wealth of medical discourse concerned with the problem of female masturbation (65, 79). Additionally, the image on the 1903 cover demonstrated the “woman as clinging vine” theme that Dijkstra argues made visible the fear of racial 193 degeneration. In these images women embodied the “massive spectre of degeneration hovering just above the horizon, ready to drag the gloriously evolving species of man back into the jungle” (212). Dijkstra, like Rydell, positions white women as liminal figures capable of comprising white men’s whiteness by the savagery of her sexual impulses and allure. In the context of Physical Culture this imagery on the 1903 cover centralized the importance of a strong male mate (the tensing muscles of the male figure) as compensation for women’s inner savage. Though Macfadden promoted strong male mates as mechanisms for governing women’s savage yet exciting sexuality, he centralized individual’s responsibility for their own physical conditions. Touting the slogan, “Weakness is a Crime, Don’t Be a Criminal,” Macfadden continually placed the blame for poor physical condition in the laps of his readers. Above the first headless, nameless torso of Rose read he quipped, “every woman who does not possess physical perfection has no one to blame but the ignorance of herself or her advisers.”200 Such tropes of criminality, especially when given visual form in the starkness of Read’s before photographs, participated in broader attempts in racial science to make visible the signs of criminality, particularly on white bodies. The visual excess of Read’s before photographs, the implication that her visible physical weaknesses were a sign of a hidden criminality, compromised her degree of whiteness. Subsequently, Macfadden’s work with the “patient” and her own work on herself brought not only a visible physical improvement, but also a transformation in the attendant implications of criminality and its not-quite-whiteness. Through the Macfadden’s techniques of the self Read not only dispensed with her many illnesses, but 194 also shed the criminality associated with those illnesses via Macfadden’s well-known mantra, “Weakness is a Crime.” The outcome, then, was not just a “brightening” of Read’s suspiciously shadowed skin, but a shift to a higher degree of inner whiteness as indicated by her ability to discard the criminality of weakness. Suspicious Whiteness and “Savage” Surrogates The ambiguity of whiteness caused eugenicists at the beginning of the twentieth century to focus not on what could be seen (skin color, for example, partially because darker skinned people’s inferiority was already considered an established fact), but on what could not be seen: varying degrees of whiteness. As Matt Wray has pointed out in his historical survey of the term “white trash,” the “racial inferiority of people of color was seldom in doubt” for eugenicists at the end of the nineteenth century. However, “[p]oor whites” he suggests, “posed a serious problem of classification and categorization [ . . . ] how could authorities distinguish between a white person who was merely poor by circumstance and one who was biologically predisposed to poverty, crime, and low social standing?” (73). As a result, Wray argues, eugenicists began to obsess over categorizing different degrees of whiteness through field studies. This anxiety produced by the unknowability of the degree of whiteness was staged at the end of the nineteenth century in a variety of ways. As Eric Lott has suggested, blackface minstrelsy was as much about engaging in racial fantasies through “playing at” blackness in order to quell white (working class) anxieties about their place in the emerging class/race hierarchy as it was about demeaning and stereotyping blacks. As Wray has pointed out, the initial field 195 studies of the Eugenic Records Office (ERO) catalogued white degeneracy in an effort to “delineate [the professional managerial class’s] class status, and encourage and ensure their social growth and reproduction” (74). He suggests that this attempt to “discover” degeneracy within the seeming unmarkedness of whiteness culminated in the forced sterilization of “feeble-minded” women whose questionable “sexual histories, reputations, and crimes” lead to the “imposition of coercive policies of reproductive control” (Wray 93). The fact that these women appeared “normal” presented the threat that men could easily and unknowingly plant their precious seeds in morally and mentally suspect ground. Macfadden’s photographs of Read, viewed through Wray’s arguments, become verifications of her ability to transform, thus suggesting the conditionality of her physical state (and its visual assumptions about her criminality, whiteness, poverty) and dispel any question of the innateness of her criminality. If she can overcome her weakness, she is no longer a criminal. These fears of an innate, unseen, and inheritable degeneracy on white bodies found currency on the bodies of childbearing women in gynecological texts and anthropological field studies. The process of birth itself was laden with visual and discursive connections to the Other. Marked by deviance of ethnic heritage or sexual aberrance, and forced into the spotlight by science, these birthing bodies served as the foundation upon which obstetrics and gynecology were built. For example, the “models” used in medical text illustrations, as well as the first patients upon which new methods were tested were most often prostitutes and slaves. Lying-in hospitals were not frequented by the upper classes until late in the nineteenth century. For most of the century only the very poor, the 196 unwed, and prostitutes used hospitals as places to give birth, further entrenching connections between the lower degrees of whiteness, and poverty and sexual depravity.201 In another example from medical texts, the “maladies” of birth and disease of the reproductive organs were linked, either directly through photographs or indirectly through text, to poor, often immigrant, black, or foreign bodies. As performance scholar Terri Kapsalis points out in her book Public Privates the “father of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, perfected his surgical techniques on the bodies of slave women, making his fame “as indebted to slavery and racism as [it] was to innovation, insight, and persistence, and he has left behind a frightening legacy of medical attitudes toward and treatments of women, particularly women of color” (31-2). Finally, the proliferation of anthropological field studies, their staging of the fascination with foreign bodies as “curiosities” in world expos and fairs, led many to detail the “uncivilized” birthing practices of “savages.”202 In an effort to subject these victims of colonial expansion to the de-humanizing gaze of science, and use their mythically painless births as a way to bully bourgeois women into physical exercise, anthropologists detailed every aspect of birth in these cultures. Hence, the grotesqueries of the reproductive organs and birth were stitched into a narrative of disease and deviance. Again, gynecology, like eugenic photography, sought to “expose what is normally hidden,” attempting to mark and categorize the visual excess of sexuality (Kapsalis 7). As an outspoken enemy of the shaming forces of prudery, Macfadden showcased deviance in order to expose it to the light and truth of his own methods of transformation through self-management. 197 These implicit associations between non-whiteness and/or sexual promiscuity and the medicalization of women’s reproductive organs helped facilitate the modern construction of pregnancy as a gateway to numerous health problems. As a result of these images of disease and “otherness” in gynecological texts and practices, the use and display of pregnant and/or birthing white bourgeois women seemed to become problematic. The fractured images of white womanhood in medical texts and popular handbooks demonstrated the illegibility of the white birthing body. Unable to (re)present these bodies as whole, specifically the face and eyes which indicated a person’s humanity, these texts showed laboring women as an assemblage of body parts. In one drawing from a nineteenth century medical text in Richard and Dorothy Wertz’s Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America showed the laboring woman’s face obscured by the frills on her bonnet. Even in descriptions and depictions of laboring women in newly printed medical textbooks in obstetrics and gynecology were minimal and limited to physical descriptions of the pelvic area, avoiding explanations of women’s behaviors or appearances above the waist. In an even stranger example from an 1897 midwifery text, the woman, demonstrating examples of post-natal sterile dressings, has her entire head covered by a sheet (see fig. 4.6). As shown in Figure 4.6, perhaps due in part to extra photographic effects, she actually appeared headless. In fact, as Wertz and Wertz point out, the late nineteenth century witnessed an array of seemingly odd conventions brought on by the entrance of men into midwifery. In many cases the male midwife was completely covered by a sheet that shielded him and his work from the patient, but, perhaps more importantly, shielding the patient from the gaze of the doctor. Even in medical texts the 198 laboring bourgeois white woman was concealed, her images stashed somewhere in the privacy of the home, an invisible enigma even to the doctors witnessing the birthing body. Following his efforts to expose the “truth” of women’s savage sexuality in order to guide it towards an appropriate reproductive outcome, Macfadden also promoted white childbirthing practices that embraced the grotesqueness of birth under the auspices of a “natural process,” and referring to the effectiveness of “savage” birth practices. In his 1901 publication The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood: How They are Lost and How They May Be Regained and Developed to the Highest Degree of Attainable Perfection Macfadden positioned himself as a benevolent advocate for women’s health and beauty, adopting attitudes of fierce derision, but also kind understanding for those willing to take his advice to heart. The book contained thirty-seven chapters, seven about the evils of the corset, six about exercise, three about bathing, and one titled “Childbirth Made Painless by Exercise.” After a brief introductory quote about healthy motherhood by phrenologist O.S. Fowler, Macfadden made his central albeit brief argument: The agony usually borne by women in childbirth can in nearly every case, be largely avoided by beginning in the early stages of pregnancy to strengthen all the muscles of the abdominal region. A perfectly normal, strong, and well-sexed woman should have but little pain under such circumstances, and among the savages and vigorous lower classes the truth of this statement is very emphatically proven. (205) In addition he claimed vigorous exercise would also minimize the size of the pregnancy belly. He did allow that though labor should be “absolutely painless” there would be pain 199 caused by bearing-down, but those pains were “induced merely to force the expulsion of the child” (206). What followed, rather than a series of practical pieces of advice, were numerous vignettes and quotes from experts in midwifery and phrenology, and descriptions from both fiction and non-fiction extolling the miraculous births by non- white women, especially Native Americans. Of the nine passages six focus primarily on Native American women. For example, one story told of a “squaw” travelling with Lewis and Clark stopping a mile behind the party to give birth, passing the party an hour and a half later with the newborn strapped to her back. Another quoted from Rush’s midwifery text claimed Native American women had shorter labors, enduring them alone in a cabin with no pain, and washing up both themselves and the baby when done, before returning to their work.203 The stories include assertions that “negresses,” the not-quite- white Irish, German farmers, and lower classes were equally blessed with painless births. However, the final passage from O.S. Fowler included a statement clearly meant to reassure Macfadden’s presumably white female readers by claiming that even though non-white women’s babies had smaller heads, “consequent on the deficient mentality of both parents,” this was off-set by larger shoulders and chest. Thus, the easy labor could not be attributed to smaller (less intelligent) heads, as their shoulders apparently made up for the smaller head size. However, Native Americans were popularly believed to be a “dying race.” Hence, citing their birthing practices, couched in the general belief, was yet another form of salvage ethnography, as attested by numerous pieces in Physical Culture mourning the loss of the “Indian” way of life, and criticizing the “civilizing” of so-called savage races. 200 Several articles in the magazine’s early years told stories of “natives” in their “natural” environments ruined by the influences of civilization, including cooked food and cotton clothing. Such imaginings, however, continued to uphold the idea that these “noble savage” races were on the decline. Numerous articles chronicled the physical prowess and healthy lives of Native Americans before the evils of civilizations intruded upon their natural lifestyle. “Why were our Indians in the West a much stronger people a hundred years ago than they ate now, and what is the reason for their gradual disappearance?” asked one article in April 1903.204 Though accompanying stories all heralded the subjects’ athletic feats, they spoke to the idea that the non-whites were of a past era, an idea cemented by the image’s caption of a group of American Indians outside a teepee that read: “Indian Life in the Open in the Healthy Conditions which Prevailed in Days of Old.”205 While Native American practices were pastoralized, the perceived threat to the bourgeois white population from an influx of Irish, Italian, and Southeastern European immigrants and poor whites was much more imminent. Thus, much of the early twentieth century eugenics’ rhetoric focused not on ethnicity or even nation, but “degeneracy” and “criminality” as hidden white characteristics, made all the more troublesome because they might not be readily visible. Macfadden’s insistent reliance on stories of Native American women’s painless births and stories of the physical prowess of other primitive noble races (he apparently regaled his pregnant wife with similar stories) demonstrated what Renato Rosaldo calls imperialist nostalgia. Growing up as he did in Missouri and Illinois Macfadden was also referring to his own roots when he mythologized Native Americans. As Rosaldo points 201 out “imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (108). That yearning, Rosaldo argues, is most often for youth, as in Macfadden’s case, or a time when the ethnographer first encountered the usually non-white subjects of his or her research. Hence, Macfadden not only focused on Native Americans, symbols of his youth as well as his individualistic ethic, but also cited sources written decades before the publication of his advice book for women.206 Additionally, by citing Native Americans’ experience Macfadden conjured what Philip Deloria argues was a deep “American ambivalence” towards Native Americans in the late nineteenth century. Caught between the “instinct and freedom” white Americans felt Indians represented, and the need to set up “noble savage” Indians as “oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self,” white Americans viewed Native Americans with a mixture of “desire and repulsion” (Deloria 3). The desire was often embodied in the myth of the “vanishing primitive,” an idea that Rosaldo argues missionaries, military officers, and ethnographers utilized in order to couch their colonizing actions as benevolent attempts to salvage aspects of the culture before it “disappeared.” Macfadden, on the other hand, ended his nostalgic vignettes by invoking the racism of eugenics and phrenology, concluding by citing the mental deficiency of the women involved in such stories. In this manner, salvage ethnography in Macfadden’s birth narratives served to gloss over the anxieties produced by a falling white birth rate and demonstrated a deep-seated anxiety that other races closer to home (the Chinese, African Americans, and the problematically 202 less white Irish and Jews) were not dying, but more prolific reproducers than white native-born women.207 The prolifically reproductive races were neither noble nor dying, but most often characterized in relationship to their connection with the “barbarism” of their race. This theme combined with moment of more competitively driven “savage” surrogation in a June 1901 article by Eva Godley Rolfe entitled “Physical Culture in the Home.” In an effort to lecture to her readers on the evils of daily at-home use of the corset the author opined: I agree with the Chinese woman who said: Mellican womans think Chinese womans velly velly bad because she pinch feet. Chinese womans think Mellican womans velly velly much worse because she pinch waist where life lives. (107) In this quote race as a discourse became even more complex, especially considering the conducts such discourse was meant to incite. Native Americans were often elevated above the Chinese in racial hierarchies even though both were considered part of the Mongol race. Native Americans, as F.L. Oswald asserted in an article in Women’s Physical Development on natural cosmetics, were the “tall comely cousins of the squat and hideously ugly Chinese coast-dweller” (54). Such racial hierarchies, as Micaela Di Leonardo points out, suggested that “some barbarians are more barbaric than others” (6). In order to highlight the evils of corset-wearing to an audience of presumably white housewives the author equated it with Chinese foot-binding, a practice widely considered to be testament to the barbarity of the Chinese culture. By putting these words in the mouth of a Chinese woman, a figure that the presumably white reader would consider 203 beneath her (as indicated by the stereotypical “yellow-face” implied by the dialect), it becomes a moment of chastisement that bullies corset-wearers by equating them with the hapless “waddling damsel” victims of Chinese barbarism (Oswald 54). Here, the implication was that Chinese women in the US, as those who did not pinch the seat of all life, reproduced more successfully than white women. Hence, it served as a biopolitical incitement for white American women to abandon the corset in order to be better reproducers or risk of being outpaced by the Chinese. Thus, surrogacy acted as a borrowing from a noble, distanced (by space or time), dying (in the forward pull of white technological progress) savage in order to out reproduce the inheritors of barbarism walking the New York City streets. In the case of “savage” surrogates, miming the pre-pregnancy, and pre-birth practices of “others” implicitly questioned the fitness of white motherhood. In this case, “savage” women’s ability to effectively and efficiently give birth became construed as an ability lost by urban white women. That loss is then surrogated as a performative excess, and reinscribed as fit, white maternity. For example, by performing the physical practices of Native Americans, Macfadden’s white female readers “raise the possibility of the replacement of the authors of representations by those whom they imagined into existence as their definitive opposites” through “savage” surrogation (Roach 6). Hence, the unseeable, unknowable excess is nonetheless implied in the doingness of the thing (the action of taking a photograph, or a quick painless childbirth, for example). The result of these methods was a paradoxical colonization of “noble savage” physical practices by white women, but also casting the “savage” as a better reproducer, thus 204 throwing doubt on the fitness of the white female body. Imagined as an endlessly productive competition, these acts of reproductive surrogation laid the foundation for a neoliberal economization of the social. In other words, this discourse imagined reproduction through the lens of a market economy driven by the free play of competing modes of production characterized by the incitement towards efficiency (painless birth), improvement (better white babies), and accumulation (more white babies). Performing White Maternity Bernarr Macfadden hoped to rescue white women from the ills of an increasingly medicalized birthing process, and restore birth as a “natural” process most clearly embodied in the lives of less evolved, but healthier lives of the savage races. Additionally, by imagining the lifestyle of “savages” as disappearing, Macfadden placed white women at the pinnacle of a revival of a “strong, vital, splendid” white race. As Lisa Grunberger argues, for Macfadden “a strong athletic woman was a sign of a potential mother, an external mark distinguishing her capacity to breed children, deemed of far greater value (for both self and society) than her capacity to throw a football or lead a corporation” (128). The physical manifestation of vitality revealed women as simultaneously “well-sexed” and fertile, rerouting women’s sexuality into the service of reproduction. In other words, a “strong woman desired sex in order to have children. In this way Macfadden transformed sexual desire into maternal desire, defusing the fears of female sexuality through this reproductive order” (Grunberger 129). This image of a “fully sexed, fertile” white woman was marketed in his physical culture exhibitions, as 205 well as a monumentalization of the civilized white female body, and thus erasure of the “savage life.” Read’s transformation was the first step in this process. Her photographs served to incite his female readers to adopt, in this case, his bust development exercises to be more attractive to potential mates and husbands, and hence gain happiness and satisfaction by fulfilling woman’s natural instinct for sex. However, Macfadden used slightly different visual techniques to demonstrate proof of maternal fitness in photographs. Proof of white maternal fitness surfaced in the proliferation of “physical culture babies” throughout the magazines, but especially Women’s Physical Development and Beauty and Health. The conventions for this technique remained consistent for at least a decade long span beginning around 1900. Readers sent in photographs of babies (mostly their own, but often a relative’s) with a narrative explaining the mother’s pre-natal physical culture regimen: “she took morning and evening walks, and did housework, exercised, ate her meals regularly, kept her bowel regular, read good elevating books, practiced music each day, and attended good, interesting lectures and attended concerts whenever possible.” The narrative continued with exclamations about unbelievably short and painless labors: “she suffered only two hours, and during the labor made only one audible cry.” Large glowingly white babies were proof of health, and the effectiveness of these practices elaborated through the accompanying narrative. In these examples the mothers’ bodies were surrogated by the baby. Additionally, babies served as incitements for women to reproduce, and in Macfadden’s visual and discursive universe to their subsequent satisfaction with life. Consequently, techniques of the self transformed the woman’s body into the 206 manifestation of a different being altogether. This maneuver compounded neoliberal conceptions of the privatization of social responsibility through individual self- maintenance by suggesting that the true beneficiaries of women’s fitness, and the true victims of their lack fitness, were their innocent offspring. This form of governance – encouraging readers through before and after photographs to engage in self-management in order to be more efficient and effective mates and mothers – encountered serious problems when Macfadden attempted to translate it into live performance. First, performance stages photography’s visual excess, the intimate and contingent encounter between the person behind the camera and the subject is centralized rather than excised. In performance excess constantly threatens to appear in the flesh in that “the unspeakable cannot be rendered forever inexpressible” (Roach 4). Second, self-management – the way Macfadden imagined it – was impossible to stage due to the absence of one half of the “before and after” technique he relied on so heavily in his magazines. Without the visualized (or narrativized) proof of self-transformation, Macfadden’s trajectory for women – weak ugly body to strong attractive body to wife to mother – fell apart, breaking the necessary connection between women’s sexuality and maternity. Third, performance, as surrogation, stages a simultaneous erasure and reconceptualization of the histories, ghosts, and ideologies it (re)presents, putting conducts and counter-conducts into the same space and time. The subsequent infinity of choices produced by this tension and placed before the audience marks staged performance as a key site for maintaining the flexibility and receptivity of biopolitical governmentality. 207 The Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions: Contestants, Contexts, and Performance The sexual charge was an essential aspect of physical culture for women in Macfadden’s estimation, but the potential threat posed by the women’s splendid physiques was carefully couched in their moral capabilities of self-control, and possession, shot with enough naiveté to dispel any anxieties in their working class male audience. While the New York Times talked about the initial candidates for the New York representatives as curiosities – a forty-three year-old “short, wide woman [ . . . ] assuming the pose of ‘Ajax Defying the Lightning,’” a “big broad shouldered woman of fifty,” a “black-eyed sylph with muscles of steel, a fighting eye and a brogue,” and a “chunk of a woman with muscles like those of a man” – the final competitors for the 1903-4 show, perhaps because of the presence of such curiosities in the show’s build-up, were adamantly portrayed as those from “the higher walks of life.”208 Of the candidates discussed from the preliminary rounds only two actually passed muster: a “timid little girl whose friends declared her to be the belle of Flatbush,” and “little Beatrice Marshall” accompanied by her mother.209 Similar descriptions surfaced in the Art Book Macfadden sold (and wrote the preface and descriptions in) after the initial exhibition that showcased photographs, descriptions, and measurements of all the contestants, including the “refined quiet personality” of Bertha Mabell Catrell, and Annie Oxley, the “little Englishwoman.”210 Such descriptors not only tempered the women’s impressive physicality in docility, but left little doubt about their sexual sanctity and whiteness by 208 utilizing the familiar imagery of little Eva. Positioned as what Adrienne Munich calls “foundational virgins,” or Linda Williams argues as “terminally innocent,” their virginity becomes inviolable, like little Eva’s, and thus by association a crucial aspect of their whiteness (Munich 147, L. Williams 89.) Furthermore, as both Munich and Kathleen Woodward suggest, that childlike innocence can “survive childbearing” through its incarnation in the image of the Virgin Mary, as Eva gives Topsy a kind of “salvation through [ . . . ] motherly love” (147, 63).211 Consequently, couching their splendid physiques in infantilizing language did not necessarily preclude them from being potential mothers. New York City at the Turn of the Century However, the exhibitions also highlighted numerous gaps between Macfadden’s ideas about what he was staging, and the public perception of the various contextual, performative, and visual conventions that this performance necessarily traded in. The complicated integuments of sexuality, class, and race at play on these women’s bodies automatically cast their very whiteness in doubt. Though Newkirk embodied this ideal white maternal figure for Macfadden, the context in which his exhibitions took place, as well as the range of bodies involved in the women’s physique competitions threatened to undo that stability of that ideal. His polemics against New York City stood in sharp contrast to Macfadden’s reliance on the city’s blossoming commercial appeal. It was perhaps due to this need to drive both the sales of his publications as well as lure vendors to the exhibition that Macfadden chose Madison Square Garden. In 1903 Madison 209 Square Garden occupied space within a progressively northward moving Tenderloin district. As historian Timothy Gilfoyle points out, the “quiet surroundings of this [once] elite community were shattered by the forces of commerce and entertainment” (203). By day the Tenderloin was home to the city’s main commercial district of department stores, factories, carpenter shops, lumberyards, and warehouses. By night it was the city’s central entertainment district, witnessing an avalanche of theater building between 1870 and 1900 (Gilfoyle 203-4). As such, it was also the premier site for the commercial sex industry, thus “the most famous sex district in New York City history” (Gilfoyle 203). As prosperity grew in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and rents soared, landlords of the once aristocratic brownstones that lined many blocks accepted the only tenants who could afford their prices: prostitutes. During this time, Gilfoyle states, “as many as twenty [brothels] could be counted in each block” (208). While the center of the sex industry had shifted towards the now burgeoning entertainment venues in and around Times Square by 1901, Madison Square Garden remained within a block of close to twenty different houses of prostitution (199-202). Though not explicitly, Macfadden implied that the class of women who did not love children were prostitutes, suggesting, “[t]here are some creatures who do not love children. But they are not women, and admit their total lack of the first and truest instinct that indicates true womanhood.”212 As people who did not engage in sex in order to have children, prostitutes embodied the category on non-woman for Macfadden. However, by staging his women’s physique competition at ten o’clock at night, after shows at the “legitimate” theaters had let out, Macfadden brought his competitors into direct competition and association with the 210 prostitutes plying their trade outside.213 As sexually suspect, but nonetheless appearing white, New York prostitutes fell into the category of “not quite white” that was subject to enforced sterilization only a couple decades later. Hence, the desire to engage in non- procreative sex was a conduct that marked the seemingly unmarked whiteness of the prostitute’s appearance with the stamp of “degeneracy,” In addition to its position within in New York’s premiere sex district, Madison Square Garden was not intended to house high class entertainment like those staged at the Metropolitan Opera House, or even the Steele Mackaye’s Delsarte theatre across the park from the Garden, but rather events on a more massive and therefore more popular, and often more trade related scale. The scale of the venue suited Macfadden, who hoped to align the exhibitions more closely with the nineteenth century’s mega-events. Emphasizing the scope and significance of such shows, he crafted the events in a three- ring circus fashion that he hoped would rival the Olympics, with multiple events occurring over several days that were in his opinion the “greatest exhibition[s] of the kind given under one roof.”214 Madison Square Garden literally sat on top of the bones of Barnum’s Hippodrome. Hence, it was a massive space (19,000 person capacity) that for Macfadden’s event housed an indoor track, dozens of vendors, and an audience witnessing events taking place at both ends, as well as the center, of the track.215 Originally built to house horse shows, the venue, over its over thirty year history, hosted events as varied as poultry shows, circuses, prize fights, orchestral performances, French Balls, and the city’s first auto show.216 While the trade-based environment of the Garden certainly catered to Macfadden’s commercial needs, its main purpose as a space to 211 display and trade animal bodies also aligned with his view that humans were essentially “beautiful animals.” In a 1906 editorial in Physical Culture, Macfadden evoked the atmosphere of the horse market asking “[w]hat would the average man or women, as an animal, bring on the horse market? Buyers would hardly consider them worth the feed” (emphasis in the original 96). He used this as an incitement to the reader to “be a beautiful animal” through adopting his physical culture habits. This imagery combined with the bodies of the contestants inside Madison Square Garden, and the tradespeople outside the venue – both merchants and sex workers – to create a context laden by trade in various commodities (lumber, refrigerators, entertainment, prostitutes, and horses). Furthermore, it forged connections between the more “primitive,” but vigorous state of the animal body, and the white female bodies on stage, once again lending their muscles a sexual charge based in the appropriation of “savage” attributes. Added to this context was a largely, working-class, male audience. It seemed this was precisely the crowd Macfadden hoped to draw as he used large billboards “portraying larger numbers of women in suits not unlike the ‘union underwear’ familiar to readers of magazines” for the 1903-4 exhibition, and of course the infamous picture of the twelve female contestants from the 1903-4 contest as a poster to advertise the 1905 contest.217 While census figures show the gender percentages for New York City in 1900 were almost equal at 49.6 male to 50.4 female, such numbers did not account for further categorizations according to age, marital status, or nationality, nor the over 70,000 itinerant male workers.218 In one article about the 1903-4 show the Chicago reporter made a direct reference to the “floating population of the tenderloin” moving into the 212 Garden to watch the “shape shows.”219 As elites moved further out of the city into ritzy suburbs, tenements stretched toward the sky to house almost two thirds of the city’s population by 1903, of which almost half were foreign born. In his effort to produce on a massive scale, Macfadden hoped to attract this large population of working class men through the billboards and posters, but also price. At twenty five cents, a ticket to the Mammoth Physical Culture Show in 1903 was half the price of cheap seat tickets for most theatre shows, including vaudeville and burlesque.220 The advertisements and price were effective in drawing large crowds of working class men to the shows; the Chicago reporter spoke of “hundreds” in the “mass of men” gathered to watch the women, while a New York Times reporter discussed the crowd of men harassing a red-haired female usher at the 1905 show. This large working class male crowd was captured in a photograph of the women’s 50-yard dash from the 1903-4 show (see fig. 4.7). In this picture eleven young women are poised at the start, standing on the track. Next to the track is large crowd of men, a seeming sea of endless bowler hats stretching as far as the eye can see, packed in so close they are pushing up against the small fence along the boundary of the track. Consequently, while Macfadden sought to place these women above the crowd both literally and figuratively, he was unable to extricate their bodies from the implicit assumptions of non-whiteness and excessive sexuality attributable to the venue, the neighborhood, the gazes of hundreds and hundreds of men, and the popular performance forms his stagings necessarily conjured.221 213 Living Statues and Burlesque Perhaps following techniques utilized for framing women in his magazines, Macfadden employed a variety of popular theatrical forms in order to stage the women’s bodies in the physique competitions. Following his assertions that the contestants “came not to exploit themselves, but rather as representatives of that scientific physical culture [ . . . ] with the hope that they might assist in the work of education in the body beautiful” Macfadden had them use what he called “Delsarte poses.” Following the trend in Delsarte for statue posing, he had his female competitors adopt six different statue poses like the Venus pose of Beatrice Marshall in Figure 4.8 (see fig. 4.8).222 Marshall’s Venus was emblematic of Macfadden’s attempt to rescue sexuality from its vulgar status as she embodied a Greek statue, an emblem of art and high culture, and the goddess of love. Such doubled imagery masked Venus’s (and Marshall’s) latent eroticism in a thin layer of an elitist drive toward the “purity of soul and nobility of spirit.”223 Additionally, by miming a statue Marshall became Macfadden’s ideal embodiment of whiteness. As Jennifer Brody asserts, “when most Victorians [ . . . ] spoke about the beauty of sculpture – of its pure white forms, smooth unblemished surfaces, and unchanging solid structure – they spoke simultaneously of an idealized form of white beauty that complimented their racialized nationalistic ethos” (69). This ideal whiteness in performance – both Delsarte and tableau vivants, or living pictures – was imbued with Victorian commercial flare by draping the bodies of the performers miming the naked statues of classic antiquity in flowing “draperies.”224 Hence, these performances implicitly connected the idealized 214 whiteness of classic statuary with the Victorian material consumption of the upper classes, and its performative expression in the clothing of elite women. A Burlesque Counter-Conduct However, not all audience members read the performance as Delsarte. A New York Times reporter noted the potential for sexual excess embodied in the women’s outfits that he said were “costumes such as are worn by the burlesquers seen nightly at Tim Sullivan’s Dewey Theatre.”225 While burlesque had been at one point in the nineteenth century a space for transgressive female sexuality, as cultural historian Robert Allen notes by the 1890s, after the appearance of Little Egypt at the Columbian Exhibition, burlesque began to take on its more modern equation with sexual commodification.226 According to a Chicago Tribune reporter the first night of the 1903-4 show did more than resemble burlesque in the costuming. After a few minutes of the men’s portion someone from the crowd shouted, “Bring on the women!” The men moved through their final poses and the curtain fell. The spectators, of course, were to select their favorite by number, write it down and deposit the vote in a box near the stage and after a week of performances the votes would be tallied and a winner determined. Immediately the crowd of mostly men began cheering for their favorite numbers. After a few moments “appreciative wiggles were observed to wander over the frames of the union suited persons whose numbers were called.” In summary, the reporter described the show as follows: “Nineteen women, some of whom were young, stood on pedestals and gyrated until there was some fear the blue ribbons tied none too securely in a single 215 breadth about their waists might fall off” (“Beauty Display Draws Big Crowd”). In this moment the “repressed eroticism” of the Greek statuary, and the barely contained world of bodily pleasure that lurked beneath the surface of Macfadden’s publications burst forth in performance. The wiggling and gyrating in response to the men’s cat-calls problematized the façade of pure virgin whiteness Macfadden had worked so hard to construct. Simultaneously, the grace and poise of Delsartian statue posing became a parody of the very high art forms Macfadden and some of the contestants hoped to embody.227 As Fabian points out, Macfadden’s work constantly “gestured at the middle- class forms they were not” (59). However, as Roach suggests, “even as parody, [surrogation] performances propose possible candidates for succession” (6). Following on this assertion this performance operated as both middle class and working class, whiter-than-white and not-quite-white rather than either bourgeois or low-class, Delsarte or burlesque. This lapse into unrestrained burlesque also let loose the repressed sexual savage associative proxies at play on the women’s white bodies. In other words, the barely contained world of pleasure, degeneracy, and sex of Macfadden’s publication suddenly let loose in a moment of unrestrained (albeit distanced) moment of eroticized intimacy. This moment, by shifting into burlesque, followed through on the promise of the images in Macfadden’s publications, giving the audience a momentary glimpse of physical abandon from the women. As Dijkstra asks, “What could be more intriguing than to watch a woman, safely isolated from the audience, revert publicly to the ‘savage’ source of her being” (246). Thus, the wiggling and gyrating combined both sexual and savage 216 excess that directly challenged the self-management style of physical culture attested to by the before and after photographs. Moreover, by addressing this performance to a male working class audience rather than female readers, it becomes crucial to question what conducts this performance was intended to incite. Macfadden, understanding only too well the draw of semi-naked female bodies, brought those “physical selves into the scope of commercial culture” (Fabian 56). By drawing in the unmarried and often itinerant working class male population with the promise of female forms, Macfadden’s shows also demonstrated how the flow of print media might be used as a governmental tactic to whiten the tenuous whiteness of New York’s working class men. To do so for the 1905 show, he utilized not only the scantily clad figures in the photograph of the contestants from the year before, but capitalized on the promise implicit in the photo’s latent sexuality (see fig. 4.1). While most of the contestants are either standing or sitting erect, the first row is lounging against one another on pillows on the floor. Returning once again to Dijikstra’s analysis of nineteenth century symbolism in female images in art, these lounging women, in their implication of post-autoerotic bliss, invite the viewers to witness a “show,” once again pointing to the excess not quite explicit in the image. Will the physical culture show show how these women came to the point of collapse? Macfadden was banking on that question in order to get his target audience. However, for Macfadden the athleticism of the women held the reproductive promise of a stronger white race and he framed the contestants like snapshots from his magazines. They stood on raised pedestals with numbers at the bottom, inside large cabinets lined 217 with black fabric and electric lights that were illuminated after each position change, the flickering lights acting almost as camera flashes. Dressed in the white body stockings provided by Macfadden, these images framed white womanhood in reproductive terms, the primary labor expected of contestants’ bodies indicated by the blue sash resting upon their hips, where their contribution to racial betterment lay. Their reproductive core was tied up with a bow as if it were a gift, or they were prize-winning horses, the poses – Venuses, Aphrodites, and Atalantas – an advertisement of their procreative capacity, and suitability as potential mates.228 However, without the implicit trajectory provided by the narrativity and imagery of the magazines this performance became difficult to attach to specific forms of conduct because of its address to working class men. Was Macfadden encouraging them to lift their thoughts through the culture of Delsarte to seek out women like the whiter than white women performing on stage, therefore becoming good family men? Was he conflating the consumption of the products on sale at the exhibition with the visual, but inaccessible, pleasure aroused by the not quite white burlesquers that might incite them to seek out the more easily accessible women outside the Garden? Were the women a rouse to cover an incitement for men to turn to one another in response to the desire aroused by the copious amount of male flesh on display?229 Conclusion: Racial Reproductivity It is the infiniteness of choice given to the audience in this moment – the variety of possible conducts and counter-conducts – that bestows on performance it simultaneous promise and threat to governmental structures. The doing of performance becomes a 218 flash point for taking the pulse of a population, in this case working class men, and a critical means of “discovering” their nature. In this scenario the simultaneous erasure of the “savage” surrogates, and reconceptualization of white maternity posed the possibility of its opposite, the erasure of whiter than white women and a reconceptualization of a not quite white, non-reproductive sexuality. These performative practices in Macfadden’s physical culture unhinge Foucaultian concepts of the exercise of modern sovereignty through racism, in favor of the biopolitics of governmentality. In is 1976 lectures, Foucault asserted that while the power of sovereignty was increasingly on the retreat with the rise of biopower, the power of death became manifest as State racism, its “basic mechanism of power” (“Society” 254). He moved on to suggest that race provides the basis upon which “others” are viewed as “threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population.” Consequently, the State can then justify either direct extinction through exercising the right to kill the threats – war, the death penalty – or by “exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on” (256). The ultimate outcome of such tactics and strategies is “improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race [ . . . ] but also as a way of regenerating one’s own race” (257). However, the visual and performative excess produced by acts of surrogation problematizes this formula. Rather than suggesting that “savages” be flushed out, Macfadden’s physical culture practices propose that the “savage” – not merely a person or a body, but instead a series of physical movements and characteristics that, nonetheless, indicate particular moral qualities – be something that is put on.230 This sort 219 of cannibalism was prevalent in “discourses of self-mastery” such as physical culture and, as Ann Stoler points out, “productive of racial distinctions and clarified notions of ‘whiteness’” (8). In this imagining governmentality doesn’t strive to eliminate race, but to proliferate it as an incentive to engage in particular forms of practice. For example, rather than simply (re)presenting “savage” races as lesser beings in need of civilizing by white female readers, Macfadden (re)presented them as thriving, viable competitors to his white female readers on the terrain of racial reproduction, persuading white women to reproduce more and better babies. While the ultimate goal of such an aim might be the eventual extinction of those other “savage” races, that extinction, according to a biopolitical governmental strategy, would occur by out reproducing the Other. Hence, the need for a continual proliferation of conducts and counter-conducts, in order to ensure the productive, competitive tension provided by a dispersed form of power targeting the individual, and meant to influence the population as a whole. Moreover, by posing an infinite field of possible conduct choices, performance like the Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions further increased the sensitivity of governing mechanisms like Macfadden’s physical culture enterprise by inciting them to free will, and following and responding to their future choices. Though Macfadden’s instigations to particular techniques of the self – mating and maternity – break down in the moment of the wiggling, in the end we’ll still buy the ticket to see the show. 220 Conclusion: The Forgotten in Physical Fitness It is Jack LaLanne you can thank, or curse, for all the gyms [ . . . ] That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These too, are his doing, at least in part. [ . . . ] For Mr. LaLanne, proper, physical stewardship involved not ascetic denial so much as activity, activity, activity. [ . . . ] To be unfit is to be unfit: a villain of culture indeed. (Bruni, The Ripped and the Righteous) The above sentiments came from an article in The New York Times shortly after the death of fitness guru, Jack LaLanne on January 23rd, 2011. LaLanne rocketed to fitness fame primarily via his television show, “The Jack LaLanne Show,” where, dressed in a short-sleeved navy blue jumpsuit that made his biceps look epic, he exhorted his viewers to get up of the couch, grab a chair and a broomstick, and exercise their way to better health. However, his death also offered an opportunity for some critique of what has now become a veritable Starbucks-effect with gymnasiums seemingly sprouting up everywhere. As Frank Bruni, in his insightful “The Ripped and the Righteous” suggests, LaLanne’s more “insidious” legacy may be “a potent, and in some cases, immobilizing, strain of contemporary guilt” rooted in physical fitness’s foundation in the morality of the 221 American Protestant ethic. Linked to the article online is a multimedia chart/timeline with an image of LaLanne stretching his arms toward the sky, conveniently positioned, in the 1950s, at the beginning of a timeline of the physical fitness movement. Various figures follow further down the timeline, Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda, a jogging George W. Bush, and a bicep-flexing Michelle Obama.231 Placed discreetly above the timeline are two line graphs, the first showing a somewhat steady line of percentages of overweight, but not obese persons in the US, the second a steep, steadily climbing line showing the percentages of obese Americans from the 1950s to today. Following the somewhat critical slant of Bruni’s article, the image provides a sharp critique of the effectiveness of the implementation of various physical fitness regimes in the US, particularly the life’s work of the man it places as the “Founder of [the] Modern Fitness Movement.”232 What is striking to me about the picture painted by these three segments in the New York Times is that despite the implied, and less than subtle critique, the authors operate on numerous unspoken assumptions about Lalanne’s, and therefore physical fitness’s, primary audience. The central aspect glossed over in the timeline is the “who” of the story. To whom does physical fitness address itself? Following an analytics of governmentality, what populations were/are the target of these fitness interventions? LaLanne’s show, beginning as it did in the 1950s and stretching into the 1980s, aired in the morning time slot, targeted at a demographic primarily comprised of housewives. LaLanne was well aware of his audience, utilizing his dog, Happy, to attract kids to the show and then saying, “Now go get Mommy.” The implicitness of LaLanne’s female 222 audience coupled with the obesity percentages for “Americans Age 20-74” from 1960- 2006 construct an implicit link between the physical fitness of LaLanne’s audience and the overall unfitness of the population as a whole. Standing next to other allegedly pivotal figures in physical fitness – Madonna, Olivia Newton John, and Rachel Welch – LaLanne’s project becomes about making female bodies fit. The unnamed connection is that failing to make women fit results in an increasingly obese – the central marker of unfitness – population. Overall, these mechanisms, representations, ideologies, and discourses present in the media blitz surrounding LaLanne’s death demonstrate that the concerns presented in the previous chapters are all still alive, and in fact thriving in our modern democracy. While the articles in the New York Times after his death make visible the connections between physical fitness commercialism, the religious fervor of the American work ethic, and morality, they operate on invisible assumptions about the linkages between physical well-being and whiteness, gender, and reproduction. In order for the assumptions to seem like “common sense,” the bodily practices promoted by the figures I discuss in my project, that worked to differentiate bodies by their conduct, necessarily had to be subsumed within pluralism of contemporary physical culture practices. To return to Bourdieu, the practices that made visible the transformation of physical culture from a set of bodily practices most often utilized by rural, non-white, and/or imagined past cultures like the Greeks into an unquestioned part of the American habitus required that physical culture be “forgotten as history” (56).233 The physical culture I’ve discussed emerged as part of an ensemble of practices that served to construct our contemporary notions of 223 health. By interrogating the work of these crucial figures in physical culture in biopolitical terms I hope my work perturbs the idea that “health” is a thing someone does or doesn’t possess. Instead, as I hope the people, topics, and arguments presented suggest, health is a meticulously constructed ideal, forged through the performance of daily physical movements, routines, and habits, that are linked to producing whiteness, gender, class, and sexuality on a population of bodies. Macfadden: The Cultist When Bernarr Macfadden died in 1955 at the ripe old age of 87, The New York Times framed him as a “health cultist,” “known for picturesque feats,” and a “colorful exponent of strenuous exercise and periodic fasting,” the latter which contributed directly to his demise from jaundice. When placing this type of coverage next his complete absence from the physical fitness timeline constructed in the wake of LaLanne’s death, it seems to me that disappearance might be preferable to the utter condescension expressed in his obituary that abandoned Macfadden to the realm of odd curiosity.234 But what if we snuck him into that problematic timeline from the Times? What might his presence force us to recognize about the affect of physical culture on our bodies and our lives? What does it mean that Bruni seemingly unknowingly calls upon Macfadden’s most infamous motto, “Weakness is a Crime, Don’t Be a Criminal?”235 To begin with, the unconscious citation of Macfadden’s most well-known mantra provides an apt example of how much his philosophies permeate that underlying thrust of physical fitness rhetoric. “To be unfit, is to be unfit; a villain of culture indeed” makes visible, albeit briefly, not 224 only the latent eugenicism of physical culture, but the bourgeois antipathy packed into such statements. To claim Macfadden as a foundational figure in modern modalities of physical fitness would mean acknowledging all of the visual and performative excess of his work, including, but certainly not limited to, its implicit eroticism and whiteness, as attested to by the numerous scantily clad white women in his publications and performances. Doing so would also more forcefully address the gendered associations at play in the term “physical fitness” and “physical culture,” as indicated by the assumed audience for LaLanne’s, Simmons’s, and Fonda’s daytime television fitness shows: stay- at-home mothers.236 As the preceding chapters point out, it was through the biopolitical and governmental structures of Progressive Era physical culture that maternity was articulated as both a conduct and necessity of racial reproduction, hence requiring constant intervention from numerous mechanisms in order to incite (white bourgeois) women to cultivate human capital, both in themselves and others. Sargent: The Relic While certainly not an orphan of history, Sargent’s legacy is tucked into the institutional attic of Boston University. Sargent’s school for women, known at the time as the Sargent School, like many other normal schools that operated as stand-alone institutions that trained physical educators, was integrated into Boston University shortly after Sargent’s death. These moves demonstrated the relative vulnerability of physical education’s position within higher education curriculum, a fact attested to not only by Sargent’s continual struggle to justify his existence at Harvard, but also by contemporary 225 examples of physical education program’s “expansion” and “building” into broad-based areas that will be marketable to a larger group. For instance, Sargent’s school is now Boston University’s College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College. On the college’s webpage, under the “Our History” tab, Sargent’s burial behind the colon becomes clearer: Imagine a time when building or stretching the body was considered beneath the dignity of educated men – much less women, who rarely received higher education. Dr. Dudley Allen Sargent, a 19th century educator, visionary, and inventor, helped change that belief for good. By emphasizing training for all students, not just athletes, he virtually created the discipline of physical education.237 Here, Sargent’s career is whittled down to a vague time, where people’s thoughts about physical culture were so backward as to seem unimaginable. Once again, the broad acceptance of physical culture as a taken-for-granted part of daily life becomes clear. Putting Sargent back into the physical culture timeline forces a consideration of how higher education, symmetrical physiques, and class became intertwined through his methods. Especially salient were the ways his practices highlighted anxieties about college-educated women neglecting their “duty” to reproduce, an area ripe for further exploration. Furthermore, putting Sargent next to Macfadden forces closer scrutiny of the ways in which they were similar. Sargent also photographed hundreds of naked bodies, but kept them to himself for research purposes. While I was able to look at the measurement cards, the anthropometric photographs that accompany some of the 226 measurements – specifically the ones of Harvard students – are marked as “restricted” by the archives.238 Their restrictedness in some measure makes visible what their in accessibility hides: the potential indecency of not only the naked subjects, but the intentions of their photographer and producer, Sargent. In other words, the potential excess produced by the intimacy of the moment of the photograph is questionable as an item of the official public Harvard archive, but remains a part of the Harvard archive, nonetheless. Hence, while Sargent’s subjects remain anonymous, disguised as numbers on a chart, or remembered only according to their size, medical histories, and parentage, Rose Read’s naked torso is excessively visible, her body infinitely accessible to anyone who picks up Physical Culture in any number of archives across the country. Who’s preventing me from putting photographs of Rose Read in my dissertation? Upon completing my argument from chapter three it seems that perhaps my own assumptions about the different kinds of practices and audiences addressed by Macfadden and Sargent might be even more fruitfully explored by investigating how Sargent’s work, like the work of the Eugenics Records Office, worked to conduct a kind of ethnographic study of whiteness. For instance, the Harvard University Archives has thousands of measurement cards sent to Sargent from across the country, though mainly the mid- Atlantic and New England, containing the measurements of men and women from schools, gymnasiums, and fairs. I remember being taken aback when I returned them and the archivist said, “Anything interesting? No one’s ever looked at those before.” The thing was, I hadn’t really found anything interesting. I’d scoured hundreds of cards and other than notes on women’s cards as to the age of their first menstruation, and a few 227 cards noting men of Jewish, Italian, and Irish descent, I felt in my archival fever that they were a bit of a bust. In retrospect, this experience in the archive revealed my own assumptions about the unremarkability of whiteness, and a desire to “discover” difference, therefore find something “interesting.” After hashing out my arguments regarding whiteness in chapter three, I think it would be important to revisit Sargent’s work with an eye to how he was cataloguing, synthesizing, and constructing stronger healthier white bodies, thus helping construct whiteness as a Progressive Era concept directly attached to physical fitness. Of particular note were his set of cards from the Columbian Exposition of 1893 (measurements taken by Franz Boas, no less) where he would have had a much more diverse population than those afforded by colleges, and YM and YWCA gymnasiums.239 However, almost all the cards noted the people measured were native-born Americans and white. Hence, how might Sargent’s project, following Wray’s arguments about eugenics and whiteness, have worked to identify, correct, understand, know, and proliferate whiteness? Mayhew: The Failure Based on Mayhew’s small presence in the archive, her main contribution is framed by most accounts as her work for the YWCA in China. In a retrospective of important female figures in physical education in The Journal for Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance the entry on Mayhew begins with the following extended sentence: 228 After graduating from Wellesley College, receiving a degree from the Sargent Normal School of Physical Education in Boston, directing the physical work at the Y.W.C.A. in Minneapolis, and serving as physical director at the University of Wisconsin, Abby Shaw Mayhew started pioneering down new trails and the new trails led to the Orient. In 1912 she sailed for China. (Vaughn 703) This entry underscores the general tenor of the small bits of scholarship on Mayhew, all of which focus on her “pioneering work” in China where she taught physical education classes, then planned, garnered funding, and oversaw construction of a normal school for female physical educators outside of Shanghai.240 Marking this as Mayhew’s crowning career achievement consequently marks her career as a relative failure in that the school never thrived, and was quickly absorbed by Gingling College where it dissolved into a minor program.241 After several paragraphs explaining in detail the reasoning for the choices made regarding the normal school, the report of the physical department suggests that the failure of the work was “perhaps another instance of the YWCA ‘losing its life’ in the larger life [of the work]. For this it has no regrets” (“A Study” 43). The main reasons cited for the downfall was the apparently unpopular combination of Christianity and physical training, suggesting that China’s focus on training the body for the nation, and specifically women’s duty to maternity as part of their duty to the nation, made muscular Christianity a fringe movement there. Placing Mayhew back in the timeline, considering the context of her work in China, would force further investigations of how all of the issues Bruni raises in his article about physical fitness – its latent Protestantism, its links with techniques of the self 229 – and my arguments regarding its connection with whiteness and reproductivity, translate in non-Western environments. In other words, the latent imperialist sentiments at the core of physical culture made it an ideal tool in the pocket of “manifest destiny” ideologues and over-zealous missionaries. More specifically, the questions raised by the failure of the YWCA’s physical culture training program in China open an area ripe for an analytics of biopolitics, especially the ways in which tactics of governmentality necessarily shift once in China. Of particular interest might be the ways that Mayhew’s project may not have disappeared, but rather proliferated into the structures that now underpin China’s nationalistically based fierce athletic system. As Susan Brownwell documents in her Training the Body for China in the 1870s China witnessed growing “intellectual debates about the nature of the Chinese nation and nationalism, in which the body occupied a central role” and a strong anti-Western “muscular Confucianism” arose that tied “martial valor and national strength” (44). Out of this movement came a strong emphasis on physical education for women blatantly centered around reproducing stronger babies, a trend that Brownwell argues continues explicitly even today. While Brownwell historicizes her investigations in numerous cultural contexts, including the collapse of sport as an all male preserve in the Chinese context, and discusses the YMCA’s affect on China’s sporting arenas, the YWCA is absent. How do the biopolitics of reproductivity operate in a non-Western, socialist state’s sporting complex? This problem becomes especially salient in the context of accusations from the US press that China “breeds” its athletes, training them in government-run sports programs beginning as early as two years old.242 230 The (Mis)Remembered What is most striking about Bruni’s critical post-mordem of LaLanne’s legacy is how issues of white middle-class maternity have been sublimated into concerns about appearance, self-worth, and morality in contemporary physical culture. LaLanne explicitly addressed middle-class at-home mothers as early as the second episode of his show, opening with an imagined interaction with a child viewer (a paternal moment extended to his later interaction with the assumed mothers whom he addressed as “students”), but nonetheless capitalizing on his own sex appeal with his shirt unbuttoned nearly halfway down his chest, exposing a good portion of his well-muscled, hairless, tan pectorals. Acknowledgement of this audience in most stories about LaLanne’s life and death, however, were rare. Discussions of the implicit whiteness of LaLanne’s maternal audience, and hence the implicit whiteness of those addressed by physical fitness, has been completely absent. The displacement of white maternity was clearly demonstrated by a widely circulated YouTube clip on the heels of LaLanne’s death of a moment from one of his shows where he discussed “unhappy people.” He bemoaned the general state of unhappiness of most Americans “who have everything [ . . . ] all the money in the world.” The centerpiece of the narrative, the image he used to motivate his viewers to get up off the couch and exercise, was of a poor woman “wearing a tattered dress” sitting next to him on a bus in South America (“one of the Latin countries”) who was nursing her infant and suddenly burst into song.243 What this clip (and its appearance on sites concerned with everything from zen martial arts to hypnotism) unmasks is way physical 231 culture’s ethic of self-worth and beauty is grounded in its differentiation from poverty, and racial alterity, and then mapped onto a mythic maternal body as the origin of happiness. The physical culture that Mayhew, Sargent, and Macfadden together cultivated, pursued, and perpetuated has itself become surrogated by the now widespread ubiquitous practices of modern physical fitness. They operate as historical performative excess, their legacies implicit, but erased in so-called universal practices like the wood-chop squat, Polar Bear plunges, or the women’s basketball leagues at the Minneapolis YWCA. The absorption of seemingly unquestioned practices like regularly eating raw vegetables, thanking God after a good game, or taking your measurements to assess the effectiveness of a diet or workout routine are all examples of the ways we’ve forgotten the work of Progressive Era physical culturists. However, they are also examples of how, through embodied performance, they are (mis)remembered, constantly restaged in the doingness of the daily sit-ups that will help you be a better worker, a better mother, a better person. These stagings and the concomitant reflection upon their effectiveness also demonstrates the ways in which liberal governmentality, its “‘way of doing things’ directed towards objectives and regulating itself by continuous reflection” inculcates itself into our bodies through its biopolitics (Foucault, Birth, 318). However, as a performative medium, physical culture also opens a field of the possible, the unseen, and the unknown to be (re)imagined and staged through our bodies, enacting ways to be governed otherwise. 232 Figures Figure 2.1. Anthropometric chart of “typical American male physique” from "The Physical Proportions of the Typical Man." The Out of Door Library: Athletic Sports. Charles Scribner and Sons, 1897. 44. 233 Figure 2.2. Wood-chopping exercise from Health, Strength, and Power. New York and Boston: H.M. Caldwell, 1904. 173. 234 Figure 2.3. Pitching Hay exercise from Health, Strength, and Power. New York and Boston: H.M. Caldwell, 1904. 225. 235 Figure 2.4. Photographs accompanying the article covering Sargent’s wall-scaling exercise. “Wall Scaling New Athletic Fad of College Girls.” New York Times. 19 May 1912: SM10. 236 Figure 3.1. The YWCA building from 1893-1898 at 808 Nicollet. From Undated, Unnamed newspaper clipping. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895-1898. Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. 237 Figure 3.2. Headline prefacing the inaugural run of the Minneapolis YWCA Cycling Club in 1894. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895-1898. Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. 238 Figure 3.3. Cycling Club posed outside the YWCA building at 808 Nicollet in May 1894. Box 12, Clippings 1895-1898. Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archive, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. 239 Figure 3.4. Illustration of Abbie Mayhew in article "Working for Young Women" dated in pen, Feb. 4, 1896. Clippings 1895-1898, Box 12, Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archive, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. 240 Figure 3.5. Picture accompanying article about Mayhew's departure. “Miss Abbie Shaw Mayhew.” Minneapolis Tribune. 23 May 1897: A3. 241 Figure 3.6. One of the images accompanying the article about the failed domesticity of the YWCA rooms. Undated, unnamed newspaper clipping (though must have been between 1894 and 1897). Box 12, Clippings 1895-1898, The Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. 242 Figure 3.7. Illustrations accompanying newspaper clipping dated May 1, 1897. Unnamed clipping, Box 12, Clippings 1895-1898, Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. 243 Figure 3.8. Newspaper clipping handwritten in date 1893, from the Minneapolis Journal. Box 12, Clippings 1895-1898, Minneapolis YWCA Records. Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota. 244 Figure 3.9. Niobe statues occupy the top row and the bottom corners. From Elsie Wilbor's Delsarte Recitiation Book. 2nd Ed. New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893. 371. 245 Figure 3.10. Photograph of the Borghese gladiator in Elsie Wilbor's Delsarte Recitation Book. 2nd Ed. New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893. 371. 246 Figure 4.1. The female contestants from the 1903-04 exhibition. Photo courtesy of the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports. University of Texas, Austin. 247 Figure 4.2. Rose Read before and after photos from “Our Thin Subject.” Women’s Physical Development 2.3 (Jun. 1901): 99 248 Figure 4.3. Image from “Light Exercises for the Entire Body” by Bernarr Macfadden. Physical Culture 15.1 (Jan. 1906): 51. 249 Figure 4.4. from “The Physiques of Player-Folks” by J.R. Redding. Physical Culture 9. (Jan. 1903) : 19. 250 Figure 4.5. Cover of Physical Culture 8.2 (Nov. 1902). 251 Figure 4.6. Photograph of correct way to “dress” the patient following labor in Henry Garrigues, A Practical Guide in Antiseptic Midwifery in Hospitals and Private Practices. Detroit: George S. Davis, 1886.A Practical Guide to Antiseptic Midwifery by He (1886). 40. 252 Figure 4.7. Contestants for the 50-yard dash in “The Great Physical Culture Exhibition,” Physical Culture 11.2 (Feb. 1904): 113. 253 Figure 4.8. Beatrice Marshall in Art Portfolio No. 2 From Life. Green Binder. Ottley Coulter Collection. H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport. University of Texas, Austin. 254 Notes Chapter One Notes 1 Included in the plan are some of the following initiatives: “More funding of research into how to get people to exercise. Including physical activity education in the training of all health care professionals. Making physical activity a patient "vital sign" that all health care providers assess and discuss with their patients. Putting a field for tracking physical activity in electronic medical records and electronic health records. Making physical inactivity a treatable and preventable health condition, with payments to doctors for a physical inactivity diagnosis. Developing state and school district policies requiring schools to account for the quality and quantity of physical education and physical activity programs. Ensuring that early childhood education settings for children up to age 5 promote physical activity and discourage sedentary behavior.” “New activity plan seeks to put PE back in school,” National Post. National Post, 3 May 2011. Web. 5 May 2011. . 2 The committee includes former NFL player Tedy Bruschi, NASCAR driver Carl Edwards, former Olympic track and field athlete Allyson Felix, former tennis star Billie Jean King, NBA players Grant Hill and Chris Paul, former baseball player Curtis Pride, former Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan, celebrity chef Dan Barber, fitness and diet “gurus” Dr. Ian Smith and Donn Richardson Joyner, a North Dakota pediatrician Dr. Stephen McDonough, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Dr. Risa Lavizzo- Mourey, and personal trainer Cornell McClellan. “About Us: Who We Are: Council Members.” The President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition. 2010. Fitness.gov. 1 Aug. 2011. . 3 See Jennifer Hargreaves. “The Victorian Cult of the Family and the Early Years of Female Sport,” Gender and Sport: A Reader, ed. by Sheila Scranton and Anne Flintoff. (London: Routledge, 2002). 53-65. Roberta Park, "'Taking Their Measure' in Play, Games, and Physical Training: The American Scene, 1870s to World War I," The Journal of Sports History 33.2 (2006): 193-218. Patricia Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century, International Studies in the History of Sport Ser. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990). Martha Verbrugge, Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4 Foucault frames techniques of the self as “intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oevre that carries certain ascetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.” See The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. by Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage, 1990). 11 255 5 See Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context (1972),” Limited Inc, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988). 1- 24. 6 Quote taken from Schachter’s discussion about why counter-conducts are an important aspect of governmentality. However, he does not, at least in this instance, take into account modes of self-governance. Marc D. Schachter, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France, (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008). 10. 7 Saxton in particular discusses the difficulty in categorizing the 1890s due to its political and moral instability in his section “The Hegemonic Crisis of the 1890s”. Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America, The Haymarket Ser. (London: Verso, 2003). 350-2. 8 Theodore Roosevelt delivered his speech entitled, “The Strenuous Life,” on April 10, 1899 in Chicago. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, (New York: The Century Co., 1902). 1-24. Rational recreation referred to the use of sport and leisure activities in the “creation of a healthy, moral, and orderly workforce.” Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History, Oxford Studies in Social History Ser. (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1990), 136. 9 See, for example, Elliott J. Gorn “Sports Through the Nineteenth Century,” The New American Sport History: Recent Approaches and Perspectives, ed. by S.W. Pope, Sport and Society Ser. (Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 1997). 33-57. The “personal satisfaction” aspect of physical culture will be discussed at length in chapter one, as it pertains to ideas about human capital. For more information on the professional managerial class (PMC) see Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s seminal essay “The Professional Managerial Class,” Between Labor and Capital, ed. by Pat Walker, Political Controversies Ser., (Boston: South End P, 1979). 5-45. 10 This maneuver emerges in many sports histories including Steven Riess who labels lower class sports pre-modern, unorganized, and informal, while inscribing the bourgeois adoption of similar pursuits as traditional, moral, healthy, useful, and modern. Sport in Industrial America 1850-1920, The American History Ser. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1995). 11 In addition to the scholars mentioned in this paragraph I rely heavily on the work of numerous women’s sports historians who point to the historically entrenched marginalization and medicalization of women’s bodies as both a by-product of and requirement for their entrance into sports in the mid to late nineteenth. I rely heavily on sports historians Jan Todd, Patricia Vertinsky, Martha Verbrugge, and Roberta Park, whose work attempts to uncover the historical bases for the masculinist bias in sports, while also re-presenting marginalized and/or forgotten figures that were key to physical culture’s rise in popularity. Park’s prolific work on women in physical education during the nineteenth century spans across countries and continents, seeking to unmask how physical education operated as a patriarchal means of surveillance of women’s bodies, while also providing women with the tools to challenge that patriarchy. Her edited anthology From Fair Sex to Feminism continues to provide seminal case studies on 256 women’s participation in sport during the Victorian Age in the US. Martha Verbrugge’s Able-Bodied Womanhood utilizes many of the same tactics as Park’s work, but applies it to the very specific context of nineteenth century Boston by tracing the simultaneous and mutually constitutive emergence of women’s sports and medicine in the Northeast. Vertinsky further investigates this connection in The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century suggesting that both exercise and medical practices during this period operated on an assumption that women were “eternally wounded,” evidenced by menstruation, and the pain and suffering of child labor. Todd’s work follows a similar trajectory, but focuses on physical culture rather than sport. An often marginalized area of sports history, physical culture is most commonly associated with calisthenics practiced in homes by upper class women during the nineteenth century, its overly contained and constrained movements relegating it to the status of a fad. Todd seeks to challenge this stance by connecting physical culture to the contemporary practice of body building, arguing that rather than repressing women, physical culture provided a means of liberating their bodies from the medical institution, to view their bodies as “trainable and, more importantly, controllable” (Physical 7). Following Todd, my project argues that learning self-control through exercise was and remains a key tenet of physical culture and fitness. Furthermore, it is this emphasis on self-control and self-cultivation that has enabled physical culture to become an innate – unquestioned, taken for granted – aspect of American culture. See Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women 1800-1870, (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998). 7. 12 See Tony Bennett, “Civic Laboratories” Cultural Studies 19.5 (2005): 521-547. Also see Ian Hunter, “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies, ed. by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, (New York: Routledge, 1992). 347-372. 13 This phrase comes from Elin Diamond’s definition of performance, which I will expound on in greater detail further in this introduction. See Performance and Cultural Politics, (New York: Routledge, 1996). In summarizing his lectures on “The Birth of Biopolitics” Foucault suggests that he perceives liberal governmentality “as a practice, that is to say, a ‘way of doing things’.” See The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-9, ed. by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. by David Masey, (New York: Picador Press, 2003). 318. 14 G. Stanley Hall was the most well known instigator of the idea that women were inherently less evolved than men, an idea he fleshed out in his recapitulation theory. See Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1904). 15 Galton discussed his coinage of the term in a footnote: “That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes, namely good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, eugenia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences 257 that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viriculture, which I once ventured to use.” See Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, (London: Macmillan, 1883). 24-5. 16 See Caleb Saleeby, The Progress of Eugenics, (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1914). 156-219. 17 Duster’s account focuses primarily on problems in current practices in the sciences and technology that smack of eugenics. Kelves presents a cultural history of eugenics, highlighting its pre-WWII circulations in Britain and the US. Wendy Kline’s book looks specifically at the gendered implications of eugenics and how they structured modern conceptions of sexuality, gender and racial identity. Kline specifically suggests that the focus of eugenics prior to 1930 was on preventing the “unfit” from reproducing, a movement that at its height in the US in the mid-thirties saw between 15 and 20 people per one hundred thousand sterilized. However, between 1930 and 1960, Kline asserts, eugenics began to shift toward the “positive” type, encouraging efforts that would “preserve and protect marriage and family.” See Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003); Daniel Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 4. 18 Most of these sterilizations occurred in prisons for men and institutions for the “feebleminded” where many of the sterilizations on women occurred. See Kline 61-94. 19 I borrow the idea of an analytics of biopolitics from Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, trans. by Eric Frerick Trump, Biopolitics, Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century Ser. (New York: NYU P., 2011). 117- 124. 20 These questions are variations of the suggestions Lemke poses as part of an analytics of biopolitics. See Lemke, Biopolitics 119-20. 21 Nature in the geographic sense can nonetheless be tied to conceptions of the nature of populations, a concept I address in chapter one. 22 Schechner refers to it as “twice behaved behavior.” Performance Studies: An Introduction, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2002). 22. 23 Parker and Sedgewick use this phrase to refer to Michael Fried’s discussion on performativity. These conceptions rely on the Austinian notion that the performative ushers the thing it says into being; it does what it says. In the context of bodies, the performative, in the Austinian sense, makes reality. If, Austin argued, the performative fails to enact what it claims to do, then it is “infelicitous” or “unhappy.” Consequently, the performative in traditional performance is always “unhappy” or a failure because it doesn’t occur in reality, but is merely citational. Derrida critiqued the Austinian argument by suggesting that, in fact, citationality is a key aspect of the performative, because in order to usher reality into being, performativity must rely on previous performances. Pairing this idea with governmentality, in order for something to be 258 thinkable, it must be repeated. See Derrida. Also J.L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1962). 24 See Derrida. Also Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’,” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 25 I discuss Bourdieu’s theory of habitus in much more depth in chapter one. 26 Foucault makes this point in Birth of Biopolitics, 245. There are some notable exceptions here of scholars who discuss how women operate within biopolitics including Lorna Weir, Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject, (London: Routledge, 2006); Joan Wolf, Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood, (New York: NYU P, 2010). 27 See also Cecelia Techi, “Women Writers and the New Woman,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. by Emory Elliott, (New York: Columbia UP, 1988). 589-606; Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly, 18.2, Part 1 (1966): 151-174. 28 Women’s historian Charlotte Rich argues that the New Woman was primarily a white bourgeois phenomenon, but was subversively appropriated by many different races and classes during the Progressive Era. See Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era, (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 2009). Chapter Two Notes 29 This trajectory is traced through the first several chapters of his autobiography. See Dudley Allen Sargent, Dudley Allen Sargent: An Autobiography, ed. by Ledyard W. Sargent, (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1927). 17-80. 30 See Vertinsky 22, who marks Sargent’s system a the “most well-designed exercise available” for women at the time, but refrains from making him a central figure in her narrative of women and exercise in the late nineteenth century, preferring to center women’s voices. Also see Verbrugge 137, who recognizes his centrality in promoting strenuous exercise for women, but tempers her pronouncements by arguing that Sargent’s techniques were more questionably subjective than necessarily scientific. 31 Human capital incorporates an “innate component of bodily and genetic equipment and an acquired component of aptitudes produced as a result of investment in the provision of appropriate environmental stimuli.” See Colin Gordon, "Introduction." The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. by Colin Gordon and Peter Miller Graham Burchell, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 44. 32 A “scientific system” developed by F.W Taylor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which promoted the use of managers to oversee and supervise workers responsible for a specific and often repetitive (physical) task. Implemented broadly in many factories at the time, this method proposed to ensure the highest efficiency possible by maximizing time and labor. See Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1911). For the physical implications of such methods see Anson Rabinach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, (Berkeley: Basic Books, 1992). 259 33 In addition to Oswald see J.A. Whitman, M.D., Transactions of the Fifty Second Session of the American Institute on Homeopathy, Detroit 1896, (Philadelphia: Sherman and Company Printers, 1896). 990. Oswald often used “crank-work gymnastics” as a pejorative phrase for heavy gymnastics, like tumbling, and apparatus work. 34 “There are in the agricultural class occasionally to be met with good and great men who would rank with the best of any class, but as a general experience it is to be considered that when any large brain is born in all this wide inland, it is sent at sixteen or twenty years to Boston or New York, and the country is tilled only by the inferior class of people, reducing, of course, by so much, the energy and elevation of the agricultural class. Hence, all the whole districts of shiftless, poverty-struck pig farms.” See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Trade of New England,” The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871, Vol. 1 1843-1854, ed. by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2010). 23. 35 For a more in depth exploration of the pastoral in America see Leo Marx., The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 35th Anniversary ed., (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). For numerous examples of American Romantics’ somewhat problematic relationship with urban industry and commercialism see Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 36 See John Barry who provides an excellent overview and summary of connections between discourse on the natural and Social Darwinism in Environment and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007). 63-6. 37 Edwin Black goes so far as to suggest that the manipulation of genes is equivalent to splitting of the atom and its dire consequences. See War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003). 3. 38 The pedagogy of physical culture was widely practiced in primary and secondary schools as a way to subdue the potential delinquency of males in adolescence, a phase of youth popularly constructed as “primitive” or “savage” by psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Childhood was popularly depicted by Hall and others including Sargent as a phase not requiring distinctions between class or gender. Thus, children in this scenario could unproblematically imitate lower class practices or, as in Sargent’s exercise manual, girls could be encouraged to practice the same physically rigorous exercises as boys. Patricia Vertinsky discusses the conditions under which women evolved according to not only Hall, but also Herbert Spencer, 178-80. See also Sargent’s Health, Strength, and Power, (New York and Boston: H.M. Caldwell, 1904). 58-65; Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P., 1996). 113. 39 He recounted in his own words “enjoying my prowess for the sake of the enjoyment” a sentiment he felt he had to put to good use to answer the general disdain he felt was expressed by some townspeople in Belfast, Maine where he used his uncle’s barn as a gymnasium, often giving exhibitions with some of his friends. See Autobiography, 83. 40 It seems that Sargent’s employment was due in part to Harvard’s President Eliot’s 260 favorable attitude toward physical culture (and possibly his hope that it might provide a reasonable means of excising some sports like football) and the generous endowment left to build Hemenway Gymnasium, making the hiring of a capable full-time director to fill the vast space a necessity. See Thomas J. Finnegan, "Dudley Allen Sargent: The Apostolic Entrepreneur of the Values of Physical Education for Men and Women in the Curriculum for Higher Education," Diss. Drew University, (Madison: UMI, 2000). 41 See Mabel Lee, A History of Physical Education and Sports in the U.S.A., (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983). 33-46, 79-109. 42 This choice eventually led one manufacturing company to use his design, alter it slightly, patent it, and then sue him to prevent him from using his own machines in Hemenway Gymnasium. See Autobiography 187-8. 43 Benjamin Rush – famous physician, member of the first Continental Congress, and innovator of the bloodletting technique – died from complications suffered from his own procedure. See Ira Rutkow, Seeking a Cure: A History of Medicine in America, (New York: Scribner, 2010). 31-3. 44 Lee related toward the end of her book the fierce opposition to strongman and self- proclaimed physical culture czar Bernarr MacFadden’s request for recognition from the American Physical Education Association asserting that the APEA had, for years, been “fighting McFadden’s brand of quackery” (269). 45 In 1893 Harvard’s President Elliot, with the support of Sargent, banned football on campus. Though hugely popular with the students, he argued that football and its attendant “coarse publicity” and “hysterical excitement” were a blight on the landscape of the institution as a whole. Quoted in Roberta Park, "Physiologists, Physicians, and Physical Educators: Nineteenth Century Biology and Exercise, Hygienic and Educative," Journal of Sports History, 14.1 (1987). 30. 46 See Lee on the requirement for military drills as part of land grant institutions (80). See George M. Beard, who coined the term “neurasthenia” to describe a whole host of loosely defined problems relating to nervous temperaments, and whose "English and American Physique,” North American Review 130 (1880): 588-603, draws conclusions between brain-work and physical robustness. Also, See Shannon Jackson’s “Professing Performance: Disciplinary Genealogies,” TDR 45.1 (2001): 84-95, for an excellent genealogical tracing of performance studies’ imbrication in the disciplinarization of colleges and universities. In particular, for my argument here, is her claim that near the end of the nineteenth century “rogue” field such as theatre, and I would say physical culture, relied on establishing connections to existing discipline such as literature for theatre, or medicine for physical culture, while simultaneously linking themselves to practical modes of economic capital, such as labs and workshops for theatre, or gymnasiums and factories for physical culture, in order to construct themselves as autonomous disciplines worthy of their own independent space within the curriculum. 47 Lee briefly and dismissively speaks about an early nineteenth century tendency for industrial colleges to rely on manual labor as a form of physical education, a move which she claims stymied physical education’s “progress” in colleges. Ironically, these same 261 philosophies served as the basis for Sargent’s promotion of mimetic exercises (38). 48 The exercise machine industry grew with the Industrial Revolution, the first American patent was given in 1831. Somewhat ironically, the booming business of the late nineteenth century revolved around the mechanization of mimetic exercises similar to the wood-chop. The 1890s and early 1900s saw a huge uptick in patents for rowing machines, stationary bicycles, and treadmills, all of which were meant to simulate actual sporting practices. See Ellen Hughes, “Machines for Better Bodies: A Cultural History of Exercise Machines in America, 1830-1950,” University of Maryland, College Park, (Madison: UMI, 2001), for an exhaustive study of exercise machine patents in the US from 1830-1950. 49 For larger institutions, Sargent send out blank cards to be filled in by examiners in each respective gymnasium and then returned for tabulation to Sargent. The mechanisms of the process are not readily discernible in the material in his papers at Harvard. However, he often responded to individual requests for measurements (outside of Harvard) by agreeing to plot the person’s measurements on a chart for a small fee. See Sargent, “The Physical Test of a Man,” Conference Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, (Ithaca: Andrus and Church, 1890). 55-6. Also see Measurement cards. Research material: Measurement Cards, 1880-1902. Papers of Dudley Allen Sargent. Harvard University Archives. HUG 1768.60. 50 For an explanation of his measuring methods see Sargent, “The Physical Test of a Man” 36-56. 51 Letter to Miss Day, December 14, 1889. Correspondence: Letter – Press Volumes of D.A. Sargent, 1887-1894, 3 vols. Director of Hemenway Gymnasium. Harvard University Archives. UAV 689.5. 52 Example taken from Diane M. Nelson, "'The More You Kill the More You Will Live': The Maya, 'Race,' and Biopolitical Hopes for Peace in Guatemala," ed. by Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian, Nature and the Politics of Difference, ( Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 136. 53 See, again, “The Physical Test of a Man” in which Sargent cites Galton extensively, as well as Weismann, to justify not only his use of the mean in his anthropometric charts, but also to reinforce the eugenic impetus behind his physical training. 54 However, Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and the Nation in Latin America, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), asserts that Lamarckianism continued to exert broad influence over the eugenic movement in Latin American well into the twentieth century. Sargent himself made contradictory statements regarding the Lamarckian standpoint. In the 1890 AAAPE proceedings he marked the inevitability of biological determinism, yet in 1904 when he wrote Health, Strength, and Power he claimed “[i]f the same [physical] work was persisted in for a few generations these modifications in the body would become hereditary” pointing to the uneven logic at the heart of much eugenic discourse (4). 55 While much of Sargent’s concerns about the effects of “business competition” and industry on the body are discussed at length in almost all of his writings, he gives little indication about what he means by “social life.” 262 56 For a concise summary, contextualization, and history of anthropometry as it related to physical education see Roberta Park, “‘Taking Their Measure’ in Play, Games, and Physical Training: The American Scene, 1870s to World War I." 57 Special Exams of Athletes, Students. Box 1 of 3, 1882-1890, 6 vols.. Harvard University Archives. UAV 689.5.270.5. 58 See Sargent, "The System of Physical Training at the Hemenway Gymnasium," Physical Training: A Full Report of the Papers and Discussions of the Conference Held in Boston in November, 1889, ed. by Isabel C. Barrows, (Boston: Press of George H. Ellis, 1889), especially the discussion following Sargent’s paper (77-86) where not only are the different systems debated at some length, but the efficacy of a system like Sargent’s working in the public schools is questioned. 59 Several “studies” about the soldiers’ poor physiques came out of the Civil War and fueled the push for military training exercises in colleges and universities. See Sargent Health, Strength, and Power, 16-20. 60 See Weir, 1-30, for a contextualization of the increasing categorization of types of used to gather the statistics on birth rates, infant and maternal mortality, and their contribution to the phases in reproductive surveillance that she discusses. 61 This viewpoint was reinforced by obstetrical and gynecological texts that labeled women’s menstruation as the “monthly sickness.” See Vertinsky for an in-depth analysis of the medical construction of female bodies in both America and Britain during the late nineteenth century. 62 Like his system for men, Sargent felt that physical training was more desperately needed by middle and upper class women. In a 1910 article in The New York Times titled he heralded the results of physical training for bourgeois women by comparing them not only with their “weak” and “hysterical” predecessors, but with her lower class sisters saying that if one walked through the better parts of town one would find “invariably well-developed, tall, well-proportioned women [ . . . ] on the other hand, examine women of the lower classes, the mill girls, shop girls, and others. You will find these diminutive creatures, probably muscular on account of the work they daily perform, but by no means showing the same physiques” as those who benefited from systematized physical training. See “Woman Improves Physically, But ---,” The New York Times 13 February 1910: SM11. 63 “Physical Education in Relation to Race Improvement.” Speech at the Race Betterment Conference, Battle Creek Mich. January 6-10, 1914. Folder: Sex/The Human View. Miscellaneous (Box12). Sargent, D.A. Articles and Speeches. Harvard University Archives, GV347SA 73AS to GV391SA 73. 64 Sargent used the same male model for all of the exercises in his handbook even though many of the exercises were not suggested for young men. 65 In this section Sargent claimed to be the creator of all the mimetic exercises used throughout the country in schools and gymnasiums. While he my have been responsible for most, earlier exercise handbooks from well before Sargent’s time demonstrated that this may be an exaggeration. The earlier example from Colburn’s handbook for school- age children using the wood-chop squat was three years before the publication of Health, 263 Strength, and Power. 66 The book was subsequently revised and reprinted for the next two decades. 67 See Patrick Geddes and Arthur Thompson’s The Evolution of Sex, (London: Walter, Scott, 1889). 267-271. Also Hall’s Adolescence. Also see Spencer’s Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, (New York: D. Aplleton and Co., 1898). 219-83. 68 “Physical Education in Relation to Race Improvement.” Speech at the Race Betterment Conference, Battle Creek Mich. January 6-10, 1914. Folder: Sex/The Human View. Miscellaneous (Box12). Sargent, D.A. Articles and Speeches. Harvard University Archives, GV347SA 73AS to GV391SA 73. 69 Deaths occurring in the first month were viewed as inevitable, usually the fault of genetic or physical abnormalities which were untreatable. See Richard A. Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929, (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P., 1990). 119. However, by 1920, as Weir chronicles, perinatal medical practices began to view the infant as a separate living entity prior to birth changing and complicating perceptions of the threshold of the living subject and enabling a medical separation between the fetal and maternal bodies during pregnancy. See Weir, 1-30. 70 Quoted in Meckel, 119. 71 “Physical Education in Relation to Race Improvement.” Speech at the Race Betterment Conference, Battle Creek Mich. January 6-10, 1914. Folder: Sex/The Human View. Miscellaneous (Box12). Sargent, D.A. Articles and Speeches. Harvard University Archives, GV347SA 73AS to GV391SA 73. 72 Foucault uses the term “ability-machines” to refer to the entrepreneur of the self. See Birth of Biopolitics, 226. 73 Many of these articles are in Sargent, D.A., Clipping File, F-1 to F-83. Harvard University Archives. 74 “Sargent’s Critics Defend Fair Sex.” Folder: F-82 – Sargent’s Critics Defend Fair Sex – Pocket Hercules. Sargent, D.A. Clipping File. F-1 to F-83. Harvard University Archives. Chapter Three Notes 75 In addition to asking women to come to Cambridge for training, insisting that his methods did not translate well in book form, he also taught classes at several women’s colleges, such as Wellesley. He crafted the wall-scaling exercise specifically for Wellesley students. See Deborah Cottrell, "Women's Bodies, Women's Minds: The Influence of the Srgent School for Physical Education," (Diss. The University of Texas at Austin. 1993). 152. 76 While the YWCA’s current website lists that their first African American association was established in 1899 and Native American association in 1894, based on several books, including Spain’s How Women Saved the City, and Robertson’s Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA those associations were pretty much ignored at the national level. See “Our History.” YWCA.org. 1 Aug. 2011. . Daphne Spain, How 264 Women Saved the City, (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P., 2011). Nancy Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-1946, (Chicago, U. of Illinois P., 2007). 77 Rima Dumbrow Apple examines the impacts on the ideology of scientific motherhood, laying particular emphasis on its foundation in childrearing techniques. See Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006). 78 Though, as I will point out, this shift did not mean that the eugenic impulses of Sargent’s rhetoric disappeared, they only ceased to be so heavily foregrounded. 79 Pollock summarizes Butler’s theory of performativity in this quote. 80 In 1870 St. Paul stood at the zenith of northern navigation on the Mississippi River marking it as a northwestern, urban entrepreneurial powerhouse. Grand Victorian mansions stood (and still stand today) on the river bluffs as a testament to its early prestige and lucrative commerce. Meanwhile, up river, early Minneapolitans, their piece of the river unnavigable, used its waters as a power source to fuel industrial mills. See Don L. Hofsommer, Minneapolis and the Age of the Railways, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 2005). 21. 81 Information here was gathered from the Mill City Museum website at “Flour Milling History,” Millcitymuseum.org, 23 Sept. 2011, . The Mill City Museum is built on the ruin of the Washburn A mill along the banks of the falls, and chronicles the birth and death of the milling district in downtown Minneapolis. 82 By 1910 single rural women from the surrounding Upper Midwest constituted the majority of migrating workers to the Twin Cities. See Joan M. Jensen, Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850-1925, (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 2006). 403. 83 The North Star Woolen Mill produced blankets and by 1929 was the largest manufacturer of such blankets. From its founding in the 1860s the factory employed almost all women and forced them to work in deplorable conditions. See Karen Mason and Carol Lacey, Women’s History Tour of the Twin Cities, (Minneapolis: Nodin P., 1982). 51. An 1888 report of women’s wages shows which areas women were most likely to work in including at hotels, laudries, and restaurants, but also boot and shoe factories, cigar, cracker, and confectionary makers, and book bindaries. See Peg Meier, Bring Warm Clothes: Letter and Photos from Minnesota’s Past, (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 1981). 152. 84 In 1897 the fine became a flat one hundred dollars, a system of profit flow that netted the city $41,000 in 1900. Mason and Lacey 50. 85 Source that talked about the spatial proximity of boarding houses to brothels…think it was Lacey and Mason again. 86 The distinction between “business women” and “working girls” is consistently conjured in both Minneapolis YWCA documents and Wilson’s National YWCA history. See the Minneapolis YWCA Records, Social Welfare History Archive, University of Minnesota (hereafter SWHA) and Elizabeth Wilson, Fifty Years of Association Work 265 Among Women, 1866-1916: A History of the Young Women’s Christian Associations in the United States of America, (New York: National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association of the United States of America, 1916). 87 M. Belle Jeffery “Beginnings: The First Twenty-Five Years – Minneapolis YWCA.” Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. 88 They eventually occupied the building on 11th and Nicollet in 1929 that is still occupied by the YWCA today. See “Summary – Rented Quarters and Buildings.” Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. 89 Based on information in the Minneapolis YWCA records it appears that the YWCA focused on white rural and immigrant women. While there are numerous references to Scandinavian, and German immigrants the Boardman helped, I found no evidence that they reached out to the rather larger African American population (over 1,200 in 1895). This may in part be due to the fact that both African American and Chinese populations in Minneapolis at the time were mostly male. See David Vassar Taylor, African American in Minnesota, People of Minnesota Ser., (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 2002). 7. Also Sheri Gebert Fuller, Chinese in Minnesota, People of Minnesota Ser., (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 2004). 3. 90 “Origin and Development of the Young Women’s Christian Association.” Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. 91 See YWCA’s homepage, Ywca.org, 1 Aug. 2011, . In comparison to other women’s groups, the YWCA was fairly progressive in responding to the problems of blacks, especially in the South, a stance that led to accusations that the C in YWCA stood for “Communist” in 1936. See Robertson 150. However, internal divides within the YWCA have also been critiqued for the relatively slow pace of action regarding race. See Robertson for a lengthy critique of YWCA race relations. 92 As the YWCA often occupied only a room or a set of rooms in a larger building with multiple tenants, visitors often had to wait outside or in the foyer for someone to take them to the rooms. Secretaries were the titles given to the women who oversaw the daily operations of the organizations. Elizabeth Wilson ended up working for the national YWCA, but started or at least spent significant time working for the Minneapolis YWCA. It is probable that she witnessed the conversation that she described. 93 This was the term used in both Boardman’s reports and the accounts of the Traveler’s Aid by YWCA employees in the Minneapolis YWCA Records, SWHA. 94 “Traveler’s Aid for 1896.” Box 8, Department reports/minutes, Folder: Traveler’s Aid Committee minutes, Monthly and Annual Case Reports 1896-1922. SWHA. 95 Quote from M. Belle Jeffries, “The Travelers Aid.” Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. Lacey and Mason 49. 96 Box 8, Department reports/minutes, Folder: Traveler’s Aid Committee minutes, Monthly and Annual Case Reports 1896-1922. SWHA. 97 The Minneapolis Traveler’s Aid began in 1893 as a joint venture between the WCA (Women’s Christian Association) and the YWCA. These organizations employed an aide 266 who was stationed at the Milwaukee and Union Stations in downtown Minneapolis from 6:30am to 8:30pm. Based on Boardman’s reports the primary focus of her work was women and children, though occasionally she assisted men as part of a couple or family. In response to the influx of “young women flocking from the country to the City for employment” the Traveler’s Aid was partially a response to a concern about the particular susceptibility of young rural women to the whims of pleasure-seeking men who “loitered” around the stations. As the city transitioned into the twentieth century and the district around the rail stations descended into a skid row, the Traveler’s Aid grew in importance and size employing five aides by 1915 at the different stations. The aids themselves were almost always married, or older, referred to as “matrons” in descriptions and reports, which was crucial to the subsequent job necessities as guides, and nurturers, again acting as mothers to the cities new “stranger” daughters. The Traveler’s Aid operated as part of both the WCA and the YWCA until 1932 when it expanded enough to incorporate under its own separate and independent National Traveler’s Aid Association. See Box 8, Department reports/minutes, Folder: Traveler’s Aid Committee minutes, Monthly and Annual Case Reports 1896-1922. SWHA. Also Lacey and Mason 49 98 “Report of Traveler’s Aid for Apr 99.” Box 8, Department reports/minutes, Folder: Traveler’s Aid Committee minutes, Monthly and Annual Case Reports 1896-1922. SWHA. 99 Known then as the Northwest as Minnesota marked the far northwestern reach of the frontier until 1889 when North and South Dakota, and Washington became states. 100 “Fall 1892 Advertisement.” Box 12, Scrapbooks. SWHA. 101 Of the 70 students examined in October 1896, three were barred from classes, for “health reasons.” See “Report of the Physical Committee, October 1896.” Box 7, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 102 “Fee Schedule for 1893.” Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, tickets, clippings, and memorabilia 1893-1999. SWHA. 103 “Advertisement for November 1892 Meeting.” Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, tickets, clippings, and memorabilia 1893-1999. SWHA. 104 Ibid 105 M. Belle Jeffery “Beginnings: The First Twenty-Five Years – Minneapolis YWCA.” Box 1, Historical Reminiscences by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. 106 “1894 Weekly Schedule.” Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, tickets, clippings, and memorabilia 1893-1999. SWHA. 107 Unnamed Newspaper Clipping from April 16, 1895. Box 12, Scrapbooks. Scrapbook, Newspaper clippings 1895-1998. SWHA. Also “Report of the Physical Department for 1895&6.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 108 “Fall 1895 Advertisement.” Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, tickets, clippings, and memorabilia 1893-1999. SWHA. 109 Ibid. Also “Report of the Physical Director for September 1895” and “Report of the Physical Committee for October 1896.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893- 267 1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 110 “Report of the Physical Department for 1895&6.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 111 “Report of the Physical Committee for October 1896.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 112 Initial reports in the newspapers had it that she was going east for medical training. See “End of the Week Harvest,” Minneapolis Tribune 9 May 1897: 4 C1. However, she ended up working as the first women’s physical director and ladies’ hall director at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 113 “Report of the Physical Director for September 1896.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 114 See Clifford Putney for an in-depth and detailed account of nineteenth and early twentieth century muscular Christianity in both the Bristish and American contexts. 115 20 Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, 21 nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you." See English Standard Version Bible, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001). 116 “Annual Report of the Physical Department for 1895.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 117 The speech was reprinted in the YWCA’s monthly publication Association Monthly 5:8 (Sept. 1911): 311-14. 118 Mayhew felt that the YWCA might be the “dawning of a new era,” in which physical education would come to be “classed as a Christian profession.” Qtd. in Cottrell 357. 119 Most likely written by Mrs. Charles Gardner, a member of the physical committee, rather than Mayhew. “Annual Report for 1893 and 1894.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio, SWHA. 120 Bakhtin rooted his conceptions of the grotesque in the image of terracotta figurines of “senile pregnant hags.” See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984). 25. 121 For further examination of the connection between Greek democracy and American Progressive democracy, see Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy in the Progressive Era, (University Park, PA: Penn State P., 1998). 20. 122 Delsarte covered all manner of “expression” including elocution. However, my examination will focus on the gestural componenet, the primary aspect of Americanized Delsarte. The triad of qualities central to grace was a key to Steele Mackaye’s system. See Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, The Cultivation of the Body and Mind in Nineteenth- Century American Delsartism, (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1999). 84. 123 Hovey emphasized more athletic modes of Delsarte that, Mackaye claimed, had never been part of Delsarte’s original system. Stebbins originally focused mainly on pantomimic gesture, but finished her career focusing mainly on breath, voice, and elocution. 124 Ross actually credits Mayhew with laying the foundation for Wisconsin’s 268 groundbreaking dance program through her emphasis on Delsarte. See Janice Ross, Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education, (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2000). 83. 125 Basketball really pushed the limits of acceptable feminine behavior at the time, most especially because it involved competition – an impermeable barrier between the masculine and feminine in sports at the time. Mayhew avoided potential conflict by only allowing women to watch the basketball games. “Women Only” Exhibition program. Box 12, Scrapbooks. SWHA. 126 The notion of performance is also complex and often paradoxical terrain in muscular Christianity. Competition and performance become aligned here as both rely on and often require an audience. While competitions can occur without an audience, the other team or competitor serve as a spectator to some extent. It is this “showmanship,” the notion that a body is being exercised not for its own sake, but in order to be shown to and show up others, that Robert J. Roberts objects to in his speech. In sporting competitions men perform not for themselves, but to some extent for other men. In addition to banning competition Roberts also discouraged exhibitions. Ironically, his speech against showmanship in the gym is very theatrical in nature. He opened his talk explaining that “[t]o show the value of my work I will have to take part of my clothes off, to show what hygienic body building will do for a man.” Throughout the speech he used his body as a visual tool to illustrate his points about the body. Muscular Christianity required display and performance in order to circulate and reform bodies and souls. In a rapidly growing consumer culture, muscular Christianity and physical culture needed to advertise themselves. See Robert J. Roberts, "What Should Be the Chief Aim in Our Physical Department," YMCA Conneticut State Annual Report, (1895). 62. 127 I discuss in much more depth the ways that physical culture influenced conceptions of whiteness in the next chapter. 128 For example, Sargent’s summer teacher’s school for women gave free public exhibitions, but more to prove the good physical culture might bring to higher education. See “The Hemenway Gym: Exhibition by the Pupils of Dr. Sargent's Summer School.” Folder: F-179: Physical Training – Work in Hemenway Gymnasium – Summer School - “Upon Being a Good Animal.” Clipping File F179-F-183, D.A. Sargent, HUA. It appears from articles and also Mayhew’s continual use of their gymnasium in the evening – prime class time – that the physical training program at the Minneapolis YMCA was much less organized than Mayhew’s program at the YWCA, focusing more on measurements and allowing members to use the gymnasium without instruction, and rarely gave exhibitions. See “Building Health.” Minneapolis Tribune 17 June 1896: 5. 129 “Annual Report for 1893 and 1894.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio, SWHA. 130 Tickets. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Programs, tickets, clippings, and memorabilia 1893- 1999. SWHA. 131 “Annual Report for 1895.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 132 “Annual Report from 1895 and 1896.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 269 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 133 The venue is an even more interesting choice (last resort?) considering the all-male Minneapolis Athletic Club used the Opera House for their exhibitions just a few years before, creating complicated connections between the “high art” of opera and men’s physical culture, and the popular appeal of vaudeville and women’s physical culture. See “Amusements: Athletic Exhibition at the Grand,” Minneapolis Tribune 3 May 1887: 4. 134 For example, an 1897 article led with the headline “Both Grace and Skill” to describe an exhibition at the Lyceum Theatre where the marching exercises – rapid walking or running in a circle accompanied by music with sometimes intricate variations in step sequences and pacing – “looked very graceful” and “executed intricate figures with ease.” See “The City in Brief: Both Grace and Skill,” Minneapolis Tribune 4 May 1897: 5. 135 As similar paradox between the performance and the practice involved in cultivating a sense of ease was noted in an 1895 description of a similar exhibition that the women were heartily applauded “as they did some apparently easy, but really difficult movement.” Ibid. 136 Undated newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper clippings 1895-1998. SWHA. 137 Undated newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper clippings 1895-1998. SWHA. 138 Mayhew was apparently quite the club swinging phenom and frequently performed solo at YWCA exhibitions, and even at the state YWCA convention. See “Blue Caps Won,” Minneapolis Tribune 5 May 1895: 5, and “Talk on Many Topics: Discussion at the State Convention of the YWCA,” Minneapolis Tribune 5 Nov. 1893: 5. 139 “Like a Zouave Guard.” Undated newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper clippings 1895-1998. SWHA. (However, article mentions that they’ve moved into new quarters at 808 Nicollet indicating the class took place sometime in Spring of 1895.) 140 Undated newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper clippings 1895-1998. SWHA. 141 See “Are Healthy Girls,” Minneapolis Tribune 16 May 1896: 9. 142 “Like a Zouave Guard.” Undated newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper clippings 1895-1998. SWHA. 143 Destinations are an accumulation of places from Boardman’s reports spanning from 1896 to 1899. See Traveler’s Aid Reports. Box 8, Department reports/minutes, Folder: Traveler’s Aid Committee minutes, Monthly and Annual Case Reports 1896-1922. SWHA. 144 Untitled, undated newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895-1898. SWHA. 145 Testimony of Mrs. Charles W. Gardner. (New York City, 1930). Box 1, Folder Historical Remembrances by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. 146 Ibid. 147 “Annual Report of the Physical Department for 1895.” Box 7, Physical/Health 270 Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 148 “SKIRTS.” Undated newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895-1898. SWHA. 149 Testimony of Mrs. Charles W. Gardner. (New York City, 1930). Box 1, Folder Historical Remembrances by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. 150 “In Bloomer Costume” (1894). Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895-1898. SWHA. 151 See the section on the bicycle craze in Ruth Eng’s The Progressive Era’s Health Reform Movement: A Historical Dictionary, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). 43-44. 152 See Thorstein Veblem, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 68-101. 153 See Vertinsky 75, where she quotes from the British Medical Journal. 154 I’ll actually talk more about the photographs later. The YWCA scrapbooks have several drawings from unnamed, undated newspaper articles of Abby Mayhew. She was also in a photo in the Tribune upon her departure. Physical descriptions of Mayhew pop up throughout the executive secretary reminiscences in ways that physical description of other employees do not. She clearly made a physical impression. See Undated, Unnamed newspaper drawings. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Clippings 1895-1898. SWHA, and “Miss Abbie Shaw Mayhew,” Minneapolis Tribune 23 May 1897: A3. 155 See “Blue Caps Won,” Minneapolis Tribune 5 May 1895: 5, and “Like a Zouave Guard.” Undated newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper clippings 1895- 1998. SWHA. 156 See Testimony of Mrs. Charles W. Gardner. (New York City, 1930) and M. Belle Jeffery “Beginnings: The First Twenty-Five Years – Minneapolis YWCA.” Box 1, Folder Historical Remembrances by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. 157 Quote from Elsie Wilbor’s Delsarte Recitiation Book. 2nd Ed., (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1893). 372. Sandow posed as the Borghese gladiator in a set of photographs from circa 1894. 158 “The Y.W.C.A. Girls” (16 Apr. 1895). Newspaper article. Box 12, Scrapbooks, Newspaper clippings 1895-1998. SWHA. 159 “Annual Report of the Physical Department for 1893-1894.” Box 7, Physical/Health Education reports 1893-1907, Exercise Folio. SWHA. 160 See Mrs. C. S. Wallace, “30 Years in Retrospect.” Box 1, Folder Historical Remembrances by Executive Secretaries and Others, 1891-1976. SWHA. 161 Ibid. 162 Such recollections and blatant nostalgia also served as justification for the potentially colonizing aims of the YWCA’s social maternity project as it expanded its mission in the early part of the twentieth century, and sent Mayhew to China in 1912, a topic I will return to in my conclusion. For an explanation of this type of nostalgia see Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia, Representations: Special Issue: Memory and Counter- Memory, 26 (Spring 1989): 107-122, an article I will return to in the next chapter as well. 271 Chapter Four Notes 163 He often cited animal behavior and “savage” childbirthing practices as evolutionary evidence for his view of familial relations. In Womanhood and Marriage he argued that “the greatest, most lasting, most satisfying happiness that comes to woman, comes through the satisfaction of her maternal instinct.” In this quote maternity was firmly rooted in a woman’s instinct and desire, as much as her reproductive capacity, though Macfadden argued extensively that affective investments in the unborn during pregnancy and after birth necessarily influenced physical and biological characteristics. For example, in the same book, the chapter on “Sterility” outlined a host of physical maladies in women that can cause sterility, all conditions that he argued throughout his publications, could be prevented or cured through his physical culture techniques. See Womanhood and Marriage, (New York: Physical Culture, 1918). 22, 266-72. 164 Women’s Physical Development became the subtitle of the newly titled Beauty and Health in 1902. By 1906 Beauty and Health: Women’s Physical Development was subsumed into Physical Culture. 165 For further investigations of The Police Gazette see Guy Reel, The National Police Gazette and the Making of the Modern American Man, 1879-1906, (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006). 166 Flexing muscular woman was Emma Newkirk in “The Great Physical Culture Exhibition,” Physical Culture 11.2 (Feb. 1904): 113. Numerous naked nymphs dance across the pages of Physical Culture. Figure 4.5, and a drawing accompanying John Coryell’s “A Man’s Wife,” Physical Culture 8.1 (Oct. 1902): 20. He wrestling servants appear in “Physical Culture Among the Mahrattas One Hundred Years Ago,” Physical Culture 9.5 (May 1903): 405. The emaciated child accompanied an advertisement for F.L Oswald’s book against vaccinations in numerous Physical culture issues between 1905 and 1910. 167 As I will discuss at some length throughout this chapter, Macfadden’s arrest, and its ample coverage in the New York Times is the opening through which most accounts of the Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibitions are explored and told in contemporary scholarship and Macfadden biographies. The three articles cited most profusely (including I this chapter) are “20,000 in a Crush at the Beauty Pageant,” The New York Times 10 October 1905: 9, “Comstockery vs. Macfaddenism,” New York Times 7 Oct. 1905: 8, and “Comstock Takes Physical Culture Show in Hand,” New York Times. 6 Oct. 1905: 9. 168 According to the New York Times, Anthony Comstock, head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, had the police arrest Macfadden and some associates a week before the event, escorting Macfadden in his “broad-brimmed hat and sandals” to the Tenderloin police station, and confiscating 500 pounds of “obscene pictures” used to advertise the event. See “Comstock Takes Show in Hand.” 169 However, the well-publicized promise of lewdness and obscenity led one reporter, expecting to see a “show,” to be disappointed by a “tame program of athletics.” The widely circulated photographs from the first event, as well as a short film showing a male and female competitor demonstrating some of the show’s poses, seem to support this 272 conclusion, leading many contemporary scholars to investigate how, exactly, such an event could be considered obscene. See “20,000 In a Crush at the Beauty Contest.” 170 See Fulton Oursler, The True Story of Bernarr Macfadden, (New York: Lewis Copeland Co., 1929), and Clement Wood, Bernarr Macfadden: A Study in Success, (New York: Lewis Copeland Co., 1929). 171 He suggested the Mammoth Physical Culture Shows demonstrated the complex tangle of complimentary and competing discourses at work in/on the bodies displayed in the event saying that “an older discourse of health, grace, and strength merges with one that emphasized the sexual advantages of being and looking muscled – for both genders – and of wearing fewer and fewer clothes.” See Simon During, “Popular Culture on a Global Scale: A Challenge for Cultural Studies?” Critical Inquiry. 23.4 (Summer 1997): 829. 172 Quote by Macfadden about the purpose of his 1905 physical culture exhibition. See “Comstock Takes Physical Culture Show in Hand.” 173 See Bernarr Macfadden, “Editorial Department,” Physical Culture 15.2 (Feb. 1906): 228. 174 I will discuss the concept of visual excess in some detail further in the chapter. See Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums, (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001). 18. 175 It is interesting to note that the term “physical culture” went out of vogue in higher education and the YWCA right around the time that Macfadden’s Physical Culture was gaining popularity. 176 I borrow the phrase from Linda Williams. It will be expounded upon in some detail further on in the chapter. See Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1989). 177 Three other biographies have been written about Macfadden since the Oursler and Wood biographies. See William R. Hunt, Body Love: The Amazing Career of Bernarr Macfadden, (Bowling Green State UP, 1989); Robert Ernst, Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden, (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1991); and most recently Mark Adams, Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet, (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). Additionally, Macfadden’s third wife, Mary, wrote an unauthorized biography/memoir of her life with Macfadden after an ugly and grueling divorce process called Dumb-Bells and Carrot Strips: The Story of Bernarr Macfadden, (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1956). 178 The friend was Alexander Whitely, who eventually advertised the same exerciser in Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine. Ernst 17. 179 See Di Leonardo’s prologue for a concise summary of the ways in which the Expo performed numerous Progressive Era racial tension. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998). 1-24. 180 “Editorial,” Women’s Physical Development 1.5 (Feb 1901): 225. 181 “Is Separation of the Sexes Advisable?” Physical Culture 23.3 (Mar. 1910): 229-34. 182 The curses appeared at the beginning of every editorial that year, and at least initially 273 Macfadden attempted to speak to each every time. However, this became increasingly difficult as new “evils” emerged and others, like alcohol, became potentially beneficial, or at least crucial to his advertising revenue. 183 For instance, the November 1900 editorial listed alcohol as a curse, but it also contained an advertisement for Teutonic Mead Honey Wine. Here, Macfadden’s practices of self-government came into direct conflict with the need to keep his magazine commercially viable and operational. 184 The first volume was principally taken up with his own story The Athlete’s Conquest. See Ernst 12. 185 The 1901 volumes of Physical Culture listed the readership at the bottom of every cover. 186 John Coryell was listed as an assistant for Macfadden’s “The Strenuous Lover,” and he also wrote articles for the magazine. Oswald, perhaps because of the M.D. at the end of his name, appeared throughout Macfadden’s writings, and was a particularly outspokenly against vaccinations. See Physical Culture 5.2 (May 1901) for advertisements for books written by Oswald and Macfadden. 187 See Dumbells and Carrot Strips 70. 188 Upton Sinclair was actually a frequent contributor in the first decade of the twentieth century including a short piece, “The Raw Food Table,” and a fictional story “Prince Hagen: A Phantasy” both in Physical Culture. 23.1 (January 1910): 33-6, 62-70. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "If I Were a Man." Physical Culture 32 (1914): 31-34. See Booker T. Washington, “Keeping Tuskegee Students in Physical Repair” Physical Culture 23.3 (March 1910): 221-5. Booker T. Washington also went through Sargent’ Summer Teacher Training course. 189 Macfadden constantly rearticulated his own sickly youth, and hereditary disadvantage as a way to plug the benefits of his practices. 190 “Editorial.” Women’s Physical Development 1.1 (Oct. 1900): 25-8. 191 I borrow not-quite-white from the title of Matthew Wray’s book on the historical context of whiteness in the US, to whose work I will be returning shortly. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006). 192 Macfadden’s story of his wife’s births directly contradicted Mary’s story in her autobiography. He claimed to insist (implying his wife was helpless) on the presence of a midwife at the birth of all of his children. See Preparing for Motherhood viii. 193 Macfadden was on the Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1899 cover. Sandow on the Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1899 cover. 194 The reproduction of “Psyche” was in Physical Culture 5.6 (September 1901): 276. “At the Bath” in Physical Culture 5.4 (July 1901): 152. 195 All of these advertisements were in Physical Culture Vol. 5 (Apr.-Sept. 1901) issues. Macfadden must have received complaints, because numerous issues in volume 6 address fake advertisers, and the advertising sections are greatly reduced. However, the main advertisers products were then pushed and planted within various “articles” in the magazine’s contents. 196 This is the convention used in the Art Portfolio showcasing photographs of the 1903- 274 04 Mammoth Physical Culture Exhibition contestants. Art Portfolio No. 2 From Life. Green Binder. Ottley Coulter Collection. H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport. University of Texas, Austin. 197 Physical Culture addressed a broad range of readers, but for a short time Macfadden specifically addressed women in his magazine Women’s Physical Development beginning in 1899, which became Beauty and Health in 1904. While the overall layout of the magazine was generally similar to Physical Culture, the types of images were vastly different. Gone were the images of collapsing femininity, and the nude and semi-nude muscle men. Instead, the women’s magazines were strewn with pictures of women exercising in domestic environments, portraits of famous stage actresses, recipes, and “physical culture” babies. Additionally, while some covers, such as the July 1902 cover of a seemingly topless woman, utilized the nude body to sell magazines, unlike Physical Culture, the content rarely followed through on the promise of the cover. 198 For instance an 1885 photography handbook was titled, The Amateur Photographer: A Complete Guide for Beginners in the Art-Science of Photography by W.F. Carlton. 199 As Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerrotype process often cited as the birth of photography, suggested in 1839, as quoted in Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, (London: Laurence King, 2002). 23. 200 See “Our Thin Subject.” Women’s Physical Development 2.1 (Apr. 1901): 33, and 2.3 (Jun. 1901): 98-9. 201 See Richard W. and Dorothy C Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America, expanded ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989). 29-78. 202 See Matilda Coxe Stevenson, “The Sia,” The Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1889-1890, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894). 132. Also “Childbirth with Savage and Civilized Women,” Massachusetts Medical Journal 20 (1900): 184. 203 Another from a missionary claimed a Native American chief’s wife went into labor, walked eleven miles to have the child at her brother’s residence, and walked back the next morning with her baby. 204 See Gerald Keating, “Our Indians in the West,” Physical Culture 9.4 (Apr. 1903): 264, 266. The article concluded that the problem lay primarily in the fact that the Native American was forced to “forego his fish and venison in favor of white flour, bacon, tea, sugar, and coffee” and abandon open air tents in favor of “closed huts [which] brought disease.” 205 See Rev. E. de Rouge, “Our Indians of the West,” Physical Culture 9.3 (Mar. 1903): 182. 206 Most of the sources he used were written right around the middle of the nineteenth century. 207 In the early twentieth century the non-white birth-rate was one child more that the white birth rate at 4.9 versus 3.8. See Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, Ben J. Wattenberg, The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900-2000, (Washington D.C.: The American Enterprise Institute, 2001). 84. 275 208 For descriptions of the potential candidates see “Beauty Show Candidates,” The New York Times 27 December 1903: 14, and “So-Called Beauty Contest,” New York Times. 2 Oct. 1905: 5. Such depictions (“black-eyed sylph”) of Irishness supported popular idea at the time that the Irish, though appearing white, were also “not quite white.” See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, (New York: Routledge, 1995). 209 See “Beauty Show Candidates.” 210 Art Portfolio No. 2 From Life. Green Binder. Ottley Coulter Collection. H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport. University of Texas, Austin. 211 White womanhood was often associated in representation with the divine, and thus “purer” than white manhood, as Richard Dyer suggests in his book White. Using images and stills from early films and also paintings from the nineteenth century, Dyer demonstrates how lighting effects were used to make white women seem to glow from within, associating them with Western Christian representations of divine internal purity. Here, white womanhood was equated with godliness, which contributed to the demonization of women who indulged in “earthly pleasures” such as sexual promiscuity or even over-eating. See White, (New York: Routledge, 1997). 82-144. 212 See “Editorial,” Women’s Physical Development 2.3 (Apr. 1901): 34. 213 Though Macfadden’s exhibitions ran throughout the day and evening for almost a week, the physique competitions were supposed to be held at 8 o’clock in the evening. However, at least in one instance, as one reporter attested, the women did not hit the stage until around ten. See “Beauty Display Draws Big Crowd,” Chicago Daily Tribune 29 Dec. 1903: 3. Also see the advertisement for the event in the New York Times 28 Dec. 1903: 12. 214 Maurice Roche defines mega-events as “[l]arge-scale cultural events (including commercial and sporting) events which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal and international significance.” See Mega-events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2000). 1. Macfadden’s post-show description in 1904 in “The Great Physical Culture Exhibition.” Physical Culture. 11.2 (Feb. 1904): 113. 215 See New York City Standard Guide: A New and Complete Handbook for Visitors to New York and New Yorkers, (New York: Foster and Reynolds, 1901). 75-6. 216 Ibid. For a detailed description of the salacious French Balls housed at the Garden see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920, (New York: Norton, 1992). 232-6. 217 See “Beauty Display Draws Big Crowd,” and “Comstock Takes Physical Culture Show in Hand.” 218 Gilfoyle 238. 219 See “Beauty Display Draws Big Crowd.” 220 See Advertisements, New York Times 28 Dec. 1903: 12 221 The stage for the 1903-4 show was at the far end of the Garden, some fifteen to twenty feet off the ground, and apparently a good thirty to forty feet away from the roped off boundary where the first row of spectators stood. See “Miss Baier Tells Her Story,” Minneapolis Tribune 9 Jan. 1904: 3. 276 222 See “Miss Baier Tells Her Story.” 223 The quote is from American Delsartian Genevieve Stebbins in Chalfa-Ruyter 117. 224 While Delsartians like Stebbins utilized draperies, the living picture shows, like Macfadden’s exhibitions, sometimes used white tights to represent work of art containing nudity. As a result of the latent eroticism of such depictions, the living picture shows also ran into trouble with Comstock. See Jack W. McCullough, Living Pictures on the New York Stage, Theater and Dramatic Studies ser. No. 13, (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P, 1983). 133-142. 225 See “20,000 in a Crush at the Beauty Pageant.” 226 See Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina P., 1991). 195-240. 227 See contestant Ralph Thayer’s interview with the Minneapolis Tribune for his assertions that it was like an “art exhibition,” and their interview with contestant Jeanette Baier about how “she felt like she was a statue” in response to accusation, largely based on the Chicago report of lewdness. “Miss Baier Wore Tights,” Minneapolis Tribune 7 Jan. 1904: 4. 228 These were just a few of the poses Marshall took in a film made in 1904 of she and Albert Treloar as winner of the competition. See “Treloar and Miss Marshall,” Winners at the Physical Culture Show in Madison Square Garden, perf. Beatrice and Albert Treloar Marshall, prod. Thomas A. Edison. January 16, 1904. 229 See Greg Mullins “Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of Disavowal in Physical Culture,” Discourse. 15.1 (Fall 1992): 27-48, for an in-depth discussion of homoeroticism in Physical Culture. 230 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Race and American Culture ser. (New York: Oxford UP, 1993); Phillip Deloria, Playing Indian, (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (New York: Routledge, 1995), make similar claims in their books. Conclusion Notes 231 “Timeline: Trying to Whip Us into Shape,” New York Times Online 29 January 2011, , 1 Aug. 2011. 232 See Richard Goldstein, “Jack LaLanne, Father of Fitness Movement, Dies at 96.” New York Times Online 23 January 2011, , 1 Aug. 2011. 233 Indeed, physical culture, it seems, at least in the US has been forgotten as history, necessitating articles like David Kirk’s which call for the reclamation and reinstatement of physical culture as a term, rescuing it from historical obscurity and contemporary marginalization. See “Physical Culture, Physical Education, and Relational Analysis,” Sports, Education, and Society 4.1 (1999): 63-73. 234 The AMA archives in Chicago have their Macfadden material in the ”Historical 277 Health Fraud Collection.” 235 This moniker appeared on the cover of Physical Culture from 1900 on. 236 Kirk makes explicit in his etymology of the term “physical culture” that most contemporary (post-WWII) associations attached to the term situate it in “forms of keep fit exercises to music for women,” 1. 237 See “Our History: Education Gets Physical.” BU.edu, 1 Aug. 2011, . 238 In the archives only chunks of material are restricted. As I looked at everything else in their holdings, but never once saw any photographs of his students, which are listed as part of the collection, I can only assume it’s the photographs that are restricted. 239 He did, however, get measurements from the National Deaf Mute College in Washington D.C., and Boston policemen. 240 Deborah Cottrell’s dissertation spends the majority of the time focusing on Mayhew’s work in China as well. This emphasis makes sense in that the holding of the national YWCA archive are focused on Mayhew’s work in China. Janice Ross’s book does discuss her work at Madison, especially how it paved the way for the inauguration of the dance program. Again, UW Madison also has some holdings of Mayhew’s work while she was there. 241 See Katherine E. Vaughn, “Abby Shaw Mayhew.” Supplement to the Research Quarterly of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation 12.3 (Oct. 1941): 700-03 for a brief summary of Shaw’s life. Also Vaughn. 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