UC Davis

This dissertation examines the roots of physical training in the United States in the late nineteenth century before gendered associations developed among fitness, sports, and dance. While there is a rich literature on the links between American masculinity and competitive sports, as well as on the supposedly recent entry of women into this arena, there has been little scholarship on femininities and alternative masculinities prior to the gendering of categories of physical activity. By examining the history of Dudley Allen Sargent's Harvard Summer School of Physical Training, this study shows that now-familiar gendered divisions in body training arose at the turn of the century largely because of cultural imperatives, not physical ones.Women and men early on favored the application of body training to public health, and in this context the individual variation in bodies mattered as much as any average difference between groups. The focus on, and exaggeration of, between-sex, as opposed to within sex, variability reflects the rise of a hegemonic masculinity stressing aggression and competitiveness in American males. The exclusion of women from formerly coeducational medical schools and the closure of even highly respected women's medical schools was accompanied by a decrease in status for any sort of preventive medicine. This resulted in the exclusion from medicine of what we now consider to be "fitness," relegating "wellness" programs to the scientific margins, even as women continued to be disproportionately represented in these fields. American football was deliberately cultivated, initially in elite colleges, as a way of promoting a masculinity that used military imagery, without requiring actual military service. The organization of the American education system with competitive team sports as high status, and physical health of the full student body a comparatively low priority, combined with the feminization of schools, particularly the lower grades, was an essential part of sorting physical activity hierarchically by gender and age. The result is a "fitness industry" that is ill-defined, devoid of any sort of oversight or mandate for training, and with the quality of instruction varying widely, particularly with regard to anatomy and physiology.