More than a century before a distinction between sex (biology) and gender (social role) was introduced, early women’s exercise discourse reflected the widespread conflation of anatomy and identity. Committed to changing women’s lives by transforming their bodies, experts promoted exercise as a strategy for more effectively inhabiting feminine roles and for elevating domestic labor to the status of a scientific field. For these pioneering physical educators, the body’s social performances were just as important as its health status.
In the early nineteenth century, sex-specific physical education granted women rare authority over their bodies and their health. As a domestic science, exercise instruction could be administered by mothers and school teachers, allowing these women to demonstrate scientific expertise amidst their limited occupational opportunities. Linking prevailing expectations for women with knowledge of human physiology, the first decades of physical education instruction sought to transform women’s lives but also promoted a narrow biological model of womanhood.
The first major exercise fad for American women and girls was calisthenics, which, after its importation from Europe in the 1830s, retained devoted practitioners through the 1860s. Consisting of light, choreographed movements set to music, calisthenic routines largely resembled dance steps designed to emulate white upper-class conventions of beauty and elegance. These routines were also linked to idealized familial roles. The 1831 publication of A Course of Calisthenics for Young Ladies in Schools and Families instructed women in “graceful” and “dignified” exercise routines. Believed to be the first calisthenics manual authored by a woman, the book was signed simply “M” and framed as a series of instructional letters “by a mother,” who suggested that it was a woman’s responsibility to both acquire a healthy physique and train young girls to do the same.
A Course of Calisthenics simultaneously lent scientific authority to women’s limited roles and made this discourse available within the home. While the author was wary of the “indelicacy” of providing anatomical description in a book for “young ladies,” A Course of Calisthenics did explain that women were constitutionally more “delicate” than men. Any changes in the body brought on by physical training were not intended to minimize this difference, but rather to enable a fuller embrace of the maternal role such delicacy facilitated. It was the duty of daughters, sisters, and wives, “M” insisted, “to be ‘a ministering angel' to the weak, the sorrowing, the suffering, and the dying.” In order to provide care for vulnerable members of their communities, women needed to properly maintain their own strength –– within reason.