User:Alex Winetrout/History of women in the United States

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In 1912, an article in Harper's Bazaar, a popular American magazine for women, Angenette Parry raised an important question about women's exercise and fertility: "Are athletics a menace to motherhood?" Throughout the twentieth century, Americans were anxious about active female bodies, which masked deeper apprehensions about femininity, sexuality, and race, as traditional gender norms were centered around the idea that: "A woman's place is in the home". Doubts about female exercise paralleled cultural debates about women's nature and physicality. The female body was viewed as a site where social codes and relationships of gender, race, sexuality, and class are rehearsed, enforced and contested.

Women's physical activities varied widely by era, region, and social background. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, Native American women participated in dances and games associated with spiritual rituals, while European gentlewomen in southern and mid-Atlantic settlements enjoyed such pastimes as horse riding and an early version of badminton.

During the nineteenth century, both formal and informal activities expanded. Women on farms and the frontier hiked and rode horses; middle-class white women patronised gymnasia in north-eastern cities; urban working-class women joined the YWCA and flocked to dance halls and public parks; students at female colleges learned gymnastic drills and tennis; privileged white women played golf and croquet. Many factors contributed to this growth of women's activities in the nineteenth century, including new patterns of work and leisure, the commercialisation of recreation, the popular health movement, and concerns about women's health, especially among middling and elite white people. The Gilded Age is a rich period for a discussion of changing gender roles, as women moved into public spaces, modified their dress, began attending college, and challenged the prevailing ideas of weakness by taking up bicycling, basketball, and other leisure activities that required physical and mental strength. Traditional notions about the physical and mental capacities of women were challenged during the debate about their fitness for higher education.

Opportunities increased even further during the early decades of the twentieth century. Organised sports for women flourished in blue collar industries, ethnic communities, and some black colleges and training schools; mandatory physical education classes introduced schoolgirls to hygiene and sports; white college students took bike rides and played field hockey; non-competitive co-ed recreation became customary for middle and upper-class white women. Commercial, social, and scientific developments all influenced the character of women's recreation and exercise in the early twentieth century. For example, bourgeois culture gave rise to the 'new woman', an ideal that celebrated vibrant, wholesome, white, heterosexual femininity. The 'new woman' could be found hawking soap, cosmetics and corn flakes in popular magazines, getting her hair bobbed at the beauty salon, and hitting putts and tee shots with her husband at the golf course.

Developing alongside the new culture of active womanhood in the early 1900s was a science of exercise. Body experts regarded reproductive systems as the most salient difference between males and females. After basketball was invented in the 1890's, special rules were made for females. Each player was confined to a small zone on the court and was not allowed to bounce the ball more than once, which was implemented in order to avoid the risk of pushing the uterus out of position. Physical educators observed that certain basketball shots are difficult for girls because of their small hands, narrow shoulders, and inadequate muscles. When guarding an opponent, a player was required to stretch her arms along a plane, to avoid strain and refrain from snatching the ball away because it was unladylike to grab something that belonged to someone else. Girls could not play by boys' rules because, as Helen Smith explained in 1927, "their organs are more delicately balanced and more easily displaced, their nervous system is more unstable, their endurance and vitality is less. This was not simply the biological legacy of primitive woman and the labor and task of her period. Instead, too many centuries of being held down by conventions and customs have intervened, too many centuries of physical inactivity." Even the domesticated form of basketball, however, seemed to imperil normal menstruation; thus, white female teachers prohibited practice and competition during a girl's period. Women teachers found the impulsiveness and excitability of female basketball players to be quite discouraging. However, they attributed girls' immaturity to inexperience, rather than female 'nature', and pointed to proper instruction as the corrective.