“Mentally superior children are born of physically superior people”
Bernarr Macfadden’s “Physical Culture” World and the Influence of Eugenic Thought in American Fitness Culture, 1900s-1930s
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22910217 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Olaf Stieglitz (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 241-264 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Amerikastudien/American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0340-2827 • E-ISSN: 2625-2155 |
| Publisher | Universitatverlag WINTER Heidelberg (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.33675/amst/2019/2/7 |
| OpenAlex | W3043501736 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
This article analyzes U.S. fitness culture during the early decades of the twentieth century as a field of knowledge production and corporeal practice that helped to establish and normalize eugenics as part of popular culture within the white urban middle class. Using the widely distributed books and magazines from the publishing empire of Bernarr Macfadden as an exemplary case study, the article argues that fitness culture was effective and productive in transmitting the 'science of eugenics' into popular practices of self-management, combining ideas about life-long physical training with questions of marriage counseling, family planning, and health issues related to mothers and children. In relating the appeal of 'scientific modernity,' of university-trained experts and their insistence on efficiency as the ultimate ratio of an ordered society, to physical health and training as well as to citizenship discourse, the texts and images of fitness culture constituted a biopolitical ideal that operated against the backdrop of abject bodies that deviated from 'normalcy' in racialized, gendered, or sexualized terms or because of their supposed lack of physical capacity.
Aesthetics · Appeal · Art · Citizenship · Eugenics · Ideal (ethics) · Modernity · Physical culture · Physical fitness · Physical therapy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · American Sports and Literature · Gender Studies · Law · Medical History and Research · Medicine · Sports, Gender, and Society
The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History
Crusaders for Fitness
Contours of Ableism
Powers of Freedom
An Army of Athletes
The Gender of Reform Politics
The age of fitness
Feet for Fighting
The Pursuit of Fitness
Making Better Babies
Weakness Is a Crime
Apostles of Abstinence
Bodies That Matter
Manliness and Civilization
| Highly cited | No |
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