The Female Tradition in Physical Education

Women First reconsidered

David Kirk, Patricia Vertinsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138899926
• eBook ISBN: 9781317480341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

The Female Tradition in Physical Education re-examines a key question in the history of modern education: why did the remarkably successful leaders of female physical education, who pioneered the development of the subject in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, lose control in the years following the Second World War? Despite the later resurgence of second wave feminism they never regained a voice, with the result that male leadership was able to shift the curriculum in ways that neglected the needs and interests of girls and young women.

Drawing on new sources and a range of historiographical approaches, and touching on related fields such as therapeutic exercise and dance, the book examines the development of physical education for girls in a number of countries to offer an alternative explanation to the dominant narrative of the 'demise' of the female tradition.

Providing an important contextualization for the state of contemporary female physical education, this is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the development of sport and physical education, women's and gender history, and physical culture more generally.

Chapter 1

Re-examining Women First

Rewriting the history of the ‘end of an era’

Patricia Vertinsky

It is 30 years since Sheila Fletcher published Women First: The Female Tradition in English Physical Education, 1880–1980. Towards the end of her book she wrote,

It’s too soon to write the history of what has been called ‘the end of an era’ – to document the dismantling of the female tradition in the decades following WW2 . . . In this field, where women were leaders, the war brought not only a change of direction but a chance for the men to get out from under.

(Fletcher 1984: 139, 134)

Male physical education leaders had broken out of the gymnasium and playing fields and spread to the mountains and rivers, developed fitness techniques and measurements, and taken their exercise and training views to the universities where they pioneered the study of physical education in a more academic and scientific way than had been countenanced by the women who, says Fletcher, were relatively indifferent to scientific measurement in physical education. ‘The service ethos, therapeutic approaches, and interest in dance, somatic practices and group work built upon by the women were being increasingly replaced by the male’s winning investment in science, athleticism and fitness’ (Fletcher 1984: 135). This was Fletcher’s prediction for the future of physical education in England.

We think it’s a critical and timely moment to re-examine Women First, given the current difficulties of the physical education profession from elementary through secondary to higher education, not just in England but also in North America and perhaps elsewhere. Among the more general questions we need to seek answers for from historical work is: why physical education has not been able to provide a more capacious home for somatic work and broader notions of contemporary physical culture; why in higher education is there such a meagreness of kinaesthetic experience in those subjects that focus on the study of movement, from kinesiology to cultural studies to physical and occupational therapy and rehabilitation medicine; and why has there been so little attention to or celebration of physical education histories? Indeed David Kirk (2010) laments that history is not on the physical educators’ side (and we know that history has not tended to be on the ‘winners’ side either). The teaching of histories of physical education has gradually disappeared from physical education teacher education courses over the last 30 years. Without sensitivity to the past, physical educators cannot appreciate how their subject came to be the way it is now, and ‘without this knowledge it is hard to imagine futures that are likely to become fact rather than remain fiction’ (Fletcher 1984: 143). How can we get a better understanding, for example, about why ‘exercise is medicine’ is replacing ‘physical education through the physical’, and can we better explain these moves by reconsidering the ways in which we approach our histories of physical education (Berryman 2010; Neville 2013)? Given that the past provides a pre-eminent source for the solution of contemporary problems, how we understand the relations between past and present has direct implications for whatever conceptions of the future we may develop. ‘It is the present that writes the past’, says feminist historian, Elizabeth Grosz (2000), rather than ‘as positive historiography has it, the past that gives way to the present’. She continues,

Time . . . the very matter and substance of history, entails the continual elaboration of the new, the openness of things (including life, texts, or matter) to what befalls them. This is what time is, if it is anything at all: the indeterminate, the unfolding and emergence of the new.

(Grosz 2000: 1018–1019)

Thus, the passage of time changes the contours of history itself; as always, when history is debated, the stakes are not just about the past but about the present and the future as well. Now, decades later and with Grosz’s views in mind, we can examine the validity, and/or durability, of some of Fletcher’s conclusions, and work through the evidence she used in her discussions. Time does not come to a stop just because a historian claims to see a period begin or end. As Walter Benjamin (1955) warned decades ago, progress-orientated histories depict the past as a finished step in humanity’s continuous advancement, and suppress traces of historical struggle that remain relevant in the present. By this he meant that the past could only be sustained as closed and completed when the flow of thoughts and images through continuous historical time remained uninterrupted. Certainly, the underlying assumptions on which physical education histories have been built – the foundational way historians ‘know’ things about the past require ongoing challenge and critique (Phillips 2006; Munslow 2010). Those who have lived part of this history and draw upon personal memories in the recounting of their stories tell only partial truths, points out Catriona Parratt in her chapter in this collection (see Chapter 9), smudging the lines between researchers (them) and researched (mostly them as well) in drawing upon ‘rememberings of’, and ‘returnings to’, places, people and practices.

In many ways, Fletcher vacillates between a celebratory history and a loss narrative, what Herbert Kliebard (2004) called a ‘house history’, where the historian is practising a partial historical practice, showing us how the women of Bedford Physical Training College worked against some cultural stereotypes while also being caught up in them, and were perhaps ultimately undone because of that. As well, Gadamer (1994) argues that we can only make interpretations based on what we already know and we know that Fletcher herself did not emerge from the physical education tradition.¹ Should we ask how and if that affects the meanings of the actual events she describes in the book, the ways in which she interprets critical issues and the effects of her own training and horizons on these interpretations?² Do we have a sort of hagiography here that needs to be re-examined?

Thirty years later, of course we have a better long-term view of the context of her book as well. Fletcher’s study of Bedford Physical Training College enclosed female physical educators in rather a small, white, middle-class and body focused world; somewhat isolated perhaps from the other female colleges with their differences and similarities.³ In a number of respects, it tended to place them in adversarial positions in relation to men in general and male physical educators in particular. Issues around sexuality are muted if not silent, which points to the fact that

histories of sexual minorities have been the most contested and difficult of the marginalized histories to present publicly, and that on the occasions when this is achieved there are problems concerning the anachronism of ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ as identities in the past.

(Oram 2012: 537)

Women who teach physical education have long been suspected of being lesbian, and for much of the twentieth century suspicions about lesbianism enveloped physical educators in a shroud of oppressive silence. This suspicion of lesbianism, Susan Cahn (1994a, 1994b) reminds us, has functioned both as a homophobic repellent and as a magnetic sexual field of force in physical education and women’s sport. The status of a female teacher, combined with physical education’s focus on the body, form a unique object for queer desire. The athleticism of women in physical education often challenged traditional notions of femininity, given the longstanding associations between masculinity and athleticism. Indeed, lesbian athletes only 30 years ago were the ‘bogey-women’ of women’s sport: ‘the lesbian label along with accompanying unsavoury stereotypes was an effective social control mechanism to trivialize, marginalize and stigmatize women athletes and women’s sports’ (Griffin 2014: 265). It would not be surprising then, if versions of past physical education student experiences have been idealized or only partially recalled, setting aside or suppressing inconvenient and burdensome memories around sexuality and leaving discrimination and stereotypes unchallenged. We know, for example, that college instructors tended to discourage their students from fraternizing or spending long periods of time together in pairs, a strategy that Verbrugge (2012) argues ‘stood in for “an oblique code” that all physical educators understood to imply homosexuality’ (Verbrugge 2012: 25). Women physical educators have had to learn to be circumspect. Silencing has been central to the experiences of lesbian teachers and teachers in training.

In Women First, not only issues of sexuality but issues of social class and expressions of social conditions dealt with more substantially might have led to other conclusions about the women’s colleges, the lives of the students and the ambit of their professional ambitions. ‘Class matters’, says Dorling (2014): ‘we cannot avoid it. It becomes a little differently defined in different times and places but we have always had classes’ (Dorling 2014: 454). Gaby Weiner (1997) has pointed out that past debates concerning class influences on education in the UK were inadequate, because they disregarded girls’ and women’s values and life patterns, and that new analytical frameworks involving a synthesis of gender, class and other social formations were necessary. What is important then is an effort to introduce new voices and new narratives coming from the advent of women’s/gender history on the one hand and from subaltern/postcolonial race studies on the other (see, for example, Eley and Nield 2007).

Furthermore, while focusing strongly on local continuities, Fletcher tells us little about the diverse transnational interconnections – what Ballantyne and Burton (2005) call ‘bodies in contact’, which we find shaped everyday life and clearly affected institutional life and curricula development in physical education. The strong American influence in Britain’s mid-twentieth-century shifting socio-cultural landscape had a significant effect upon aspects of gender and physical education, albeit modified by domestic attitudes and circumstances (Nixon 2013). Since the mid-1990s, historians of women have begun to move more readily beyond the state and the social relations within its boundaries and to provide evidence for diverse encounters in transnational and transcultural spaces. Harzig (2008) points out, for example, that ‘a transcultural perspective allows us to understand better the extent to which women induce historical change’ (Harzig 2008: 211). The overwhelming whiteness of female physical educators during these years necessarily provokes questions about how race and racism entered and shaped their professional and personal lives and their constructions of embodied practices (Frankenberg 1993; McDonald 2014). As well, it seems clear that whiteness and heterosexuality fused in the impulse to normalize, an impulse becoming ever stronger for middle-class women in the years following World War II (see e.g. Adams, 1997). There is little sign in histories of female physical education of the ripples of the New Left that emerged during these years with its ideas of a third space beyond the existing models of political leadership and increasingly thorny questions around gender, culture and race (Eley 2015). While intersectionality as a heuristic term was only introduced in the late 1980s – well after the publication of Women First – there is clearly a vast opportunity here for intersectional analysis to examine the dynamics of difference and sameness in facilitating considerations of gender, race, class and other axes of power (MacKinnon 2013). Indeed intersectionality can be considered both an epistemological position as well as a methodology that explores ‘the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationship and subject formation’ (McCall 2005: 1771). ‘Not only do intersectional prisms excavate and expose multi-layered structures of power and domination . . . they also engage the conditions that shape and influence the interpretive lenses through which knowledge is produced and disseminated’ (Cho et al. 2013: 804).

In relation to curriculum development, Fletcher does convince us that Bedford and its sister colleges played a vital and constructive role in projecting broader ideas about the potential of education ‘of the physical’ as well as ‘through the physical’ to use the American terms popularized by well-known physical educator, Jesse Feiring Williams (1928, 1930) at Columbia University Teachers College. Bedford’s address of physical education was clearly an important component of the quest for fitness that developed before and during the Cold War years, and yet those contributions have been largely forgotten or written out of the new histories of exercise that chronicle government and scientific and medical forces that omit the valuable work of female physical educators in organizing and evaluating physical fitness work. I’m thinking of Shelly McKenzie’s (2013) recent Getting Physical: The Rise of Physical Fitness in America as one of many examples of the omission of the world of female physical education from the domain of physical activity and fitness. ‘This is the first book on the modern history of exercise in America’, says the jacket blurb, completely underestimating the flow of interesting and significant histories around the pedagogy of managing the active body and thought and practices in body cultures before 1950. Before this date, claims McKenzie (2013), science offered little insight into the utility of exercise, and a brief mention of the physical culture movement is limited to entrepreneurs and wartime fitness drives. Physical education and health experts defined fitness differently she says, and it was fitness entrepreneurs after the mid-twentieth century who ‘rehabilitated the public’s perception of fitness pursuits replacing dark smelly gyms and compulsory physical education classes with luxurious feeling health clubs and an emphasis on fun’ (McKenzie 2013: 10). In another recent study titled Women and Fitness in American Culture, Sarah Hentges (2014) discusses physical fitness in prisons, the ‘Y’, video games and boot camp with only a passing mention of the ‘limited and limiting role’ played by her school physical education class (Hentges 2014: 22).

It is clear as well that we need to pay more attention to the formation of versions of masculinity in physical education through the use of sports and fitness education as a training ground for the development of vigorous masculine citizens to protect a secure nation and provide perceived new kinds of leadership. Peter McIntosh (1966) referred to this attitude as ‘sp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Female Tradition in Physical Education
• Routledge Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• 1 Re-examining Women First: Rewriting the History of the ‘End of an Era’
• 2 The Displacement of Ling for Laban: A Growing Alliance of Dance with the Arts
• 3 Dancing in New Directions: Transatlantic Connections
• 4 Under the Critical Eye: An Insider’s Experience of the Female Tradition
• 5 Behind and Beyond Women First: Hidden Histories and Silences in the Female Tradition
• 6 Moving to the ‘Midway Model’: The Longer-Term Development of Dance Education
• 7 ‘Masculinisation’, ‘Sportification’ and ‘Academicisation’ in the Men’s Colleges: A Case Study of the Carnegie Curriculum
• 8 Transformation or Accommodation? The Entry of Women Students into Carnegie
• 9 Refuge: The Female Tradition, Gender, Class, Sex and Sport in Northern England, 1960s–1970s
• 10 Gender Dynamics in the Making and Breaking of a Female PETE Culture in Sweden
• 11 The Rediscovery of a Female Tradition in the Physical Activity Field: The Case of Therapeutic Exercise
• 12 Women First Revisited: Recent Historical Research and Perspectives on US Physical Education
• 13 Troubling the Progress and Loss Narratives: Insiders and Outsiders, Silences and Omissions, Signs and Route-Markers
• Index