Incarnations and Practices of Feminine Rectitude
Nineteenth-Century Gymnastics for U.S. Women
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9075716 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alison Chisholm (0000-0001-9197-8159, California State University, Northridge, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 737-763 |
| Publication date | 2005-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Social History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-4529 • E-ISSN: 1527-1897 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jsh.2005.0026 |
| OpenAlex | W2062641714 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 14 |
Between 1830--1870, a number of influential texts promoting gymnastics deemed appropriate for U.S. women claimed that those exercise regimes would cultivate feminine rectitude along postural, moral, and procedural lines. In doing so, while promising at once to straighten women's spines, to increase their chest size as well as their lung capacities, and to foster beauty and grace, those discourses promoted a female figure that stood in direct opposition to contemporary representations of incapable housekeepers and useless invalids. Many gymnastics regimens thus functioned as disciplinary mechanisms that sought to forge docile bodies, to infuse those bodies with (disciplinary) temporality, to encourage habits of precision, system, and order, and to cultivate postures and sensibilities of feminine rectitude that would reconcile (true) women with conceptions of domesticity that required them to conceal the strains of their duties. Those gymnastics systems, then, encouraged U.S. women and girls to refigure their physiques and their identities as social subjects: to materially constitute themselves in clearly identifiable ways as healthy, pious, and thus authentically true women who had inherited crucial traits of Republican Motherhood
Media studies · Political science · Social media · Sociology · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Sports, Gender, and Society
And the Word was Made Flesh
Transatlantic Traffic in Expressive Movement
From ‘cultivators of the soil’ to ‘citizen-soldiers’
From Physical Educators to Mothers of the Dance
The disciplinary dimensions of nineteenth-century gymnastics for US women
Gymnastics and the reconstitution of Republican motherhood among true women of civic virtue, 1830–1870
Built on Christian Principles”
Serving women
Rudeness & civility
"Just a housewife"
Confidence Men and Painted Women
Never Done
Dimity convictions
Disorderly conduct
Discipline and Punish
The Nineteenth-century Woman
The Bonds of Womanhood
Sport, gender and society in a transatlantic Victorian perspective
Living in the Shadow of Death
More Work For Mother
Alma Mater
| Citations per year | 0.35 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2006 - 2017 (12) |
| Highly cited | No |