Women, Sport, Society

Further Reflections, Reaffirming Mary Wollstonecraft

Roberta Park, Patricia Vertinsky

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317985792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

During the last four decades women's and gender history have become vibrant fields including studies of attitudes regarding the limited physical and other abilities of females as well as studies of the accomplishments of notable female athletes. We have become increasingly aware that women have made contributions to physical education, dance and sport that go far beyond being teachers, athletes and coaches. They have created and implemented an astonishing variety of programs intended to serve the needs of large numbers of children and youth sometimes organizing student health services, as well as chairing departments of physical education. They have worked as directors of sport, physical education and dance, running playgrounds and recreational facilities and have created and/or served as important officers of a variety of sporting organizations.

This book explores the contributions and achievements of women in a variety of historical and geographical contexts which, not surprisingly opens opportunities for additions, revisions and counter-narratives to accepted histories of physical education and sport science. It seeks to broaden our understandings about the backgrounds, motivations and achievements of dedicated women working to improve health and bodily practices in a variety of different arenas and for often different purposes.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

From Physical Educators to Mothers of the Dance: Margaret H’Doubler and Martha Hill

Patricia Vertinsky

Margaret H’Doubler and Martha Hill were American physical educators who played pioneering roles in the debate over the place of modern dance in higher education. In establishing the first university degree programme in dance education in the women’s physical education department at the University of Wisconsin in 1927, H’Doubler has been credited with challenging the way Americans thought not only about dance and female physicality but also higher education for women. Rivalling the reach and influence of H’Doubler in the promotion of dance education in higher education, however, was Martha Hill, a former student of H’Doubler. In a markedly different approach to the teaching of dance, Hill and her modern dance colleagues at Bennington College reoriented the nature of college dance during the 1930s towards a vocational and professional model, reshaping dance as an arts-based discipline. In my discussion I examine the relative contributions of H’Doubler (who was not a dancer) and Hill (who was a dance performer) to these opposing developments in dance education in the academy during the first half of the twentieth century; trace the rise and fall of dance’s importance within women’s physical education programmes; and discuss the equivocal nature of H’Doubler and Hill’s legacies to feminism and the gendering of the body.

Introduction

Intimate histories of dance in the American university, writes Elliot Eisner, are extremely rare. [1] Yet anyone who has studied the history of dance education knows that Margaret H’Doubler established the first dance major in higher education in the United States – and perhaps in the world. [2] Fewer realize that the innovative programme was nurtured within the Department of Physical Education by a female physical educator who was initially far more interested in basketball than expressive movement. From a physical education perspective, Ellen Gerber did not consider physical educator Margaret H’Doubler sufficiently important to include her among the leading innovators and institutions in the world history of physical education, although Jessie Bancroft’s Posture League is included, as is Elizabeth Birchenall’s contribution as founder of the American Folk Dance Society in 1916 and Margaret Streicher’s leadership in developing ‘revolutionary’ Natürliches Turnen, in Austria. [3] Similarly, in the world of professional dance H’Doubler has not been evaluated or assessed as a model for connoisseurs of the art form, although she has been recognized and applauded as a remarkable teacher. Yet in establishing the first university degree programm in dance education at the University of Wisconsin, dance scholar Janice Ross claims that Margaret H’Doubler changed the future of dance education and female physical education in America, challenging ‘the way Americans thought about not only dance and female physicality, but also higher education for women’. [4]

Rivalling the reach and influence of H’Doubler in the promotion of dance education in higher education, however, was Martha Hill, a former student of H’Doubler. In a markedly different approach to the teaching of dance, Hill and her modern dance colleagues at Bennington College during the 1930s reoriented the nature and focus of liberally based college dance towards a vocational and professional model, seeding the future of dance as an arts-based discipline and reshaping the academic world of dance. This paper examines the relative contributions of H’Doubler and Hill to these developments in dance education in the academy during the first half of the twentieth century, traces the rise and fall of dance’s importance within physical education programmes and discusses the equivocal nature of H’Doubler and Hill’s legacies to feminism and the gendering of the body.

Margaret H’Doubler

In her recent biography of H’Doubler, Ross tells the story of how dance education entered the twentieth century university. She likens H’Doubler to the Gibson girl, Charles Dana Gibson’s prototype of the turn-of-the-century modern woman, athletic yet graceful, strong but not overly muscled, adventurous while decorous – in short, a figure of accommodation to past and present. H’Doubler entered the University of Wisconsin as a student in 1906 at a time when middle- and upper-class women were beginning to gain entry to higher education in greater numbers and when state universities such as Wisconsin were identifying with progressive ideas and the notion of service to the community. [5] H’Doubler’s upbringing was conducive to this ethos. She was born in Deloit, Kansas, in 1889 to a prosperous and reform-minded Swiss immigrant family and after a comfortable rural childhood, where she was encouraged to study and be physically active, she moved with her family to Madison and graduated from high school there. At school she participated enthusiastically in basketball, field hockey and attended eurhythmic classes before entering the University of Wisconsin in 1906. [6] As a biology major enrolled in required physical education courses for women, she tells in her own words her delight at participating in sports and gymnastics and coming home to announce ‘I’m going to be a gym teacher’. She showed a special talent in basketball and in team coaching, and it was for the latter that she was hired by the newly established women’s physical education division in 1910. ‘So there I was’, said H’Doubler, ‘and could go on to what I loved to do’ – teaching apparatus work and coaching basketball and baseball. She was obviously an excellent coach; records from the student newspaper of the time pointed out that women’s basketball was so popular that there was standing room only at some of the women’s games. [7]

Blanche Trilling and H’Doubler at Wisconsin

When Blanche Trilling arrived at the university in 1912 to join Clarke W. Hetherington, director of physical education’, and take charge of the women’s physical education division, she developed a working partnership with H’Doubler that lasted for decades. Hetherington was viewed as one of the early giants of physical education, a philosopher committed to ‘play as nature’s method of education’, a path to character development and spontaneous living. [8] Strongly influenced by John Dewey’s concepts of mind-body unity and the ideas of G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, he had worked assiduously to ‘naturalize’ physical education as well as to solidify gender differences in sport by substituting play days for athletic competition for girls. This accorded nicely with maternalist physical educators’ vision of what manner of activities was appropriate for women – a viewpoint with which both Trilling and H’Doubler concurred. Trilling found a ready ally in Hetherington in developing her programmes for women along progressive lines. ‘Her position on fitness and sports was expansively optimistic, braided through with notions of morality, good citizenship, and inclusiveness.’ [9] It was also a conservative standpoint, for she was resolutely opposed to competition in female sport and the perceived unseemly and unhealthy aspects of over-exertion and unladylike behaviour, noting that exposure to the ‘evils of commercialization and exploitation of outstanding girl athletes often leads to the danger of nervous breakdown’. [10] As one of the leading female physical educators of the day she eschewed competition in favour of participation and collaboration, with the goal of getting as many women as possible involved in a wide variety of ‘appropriate’ physical activities. Indeed, she played an important role in fostering the Athletic Federation of College Women as well as sitting on the executive committee of the Women’s Division of the National Amateur Athletics Federation (NAAF), convened in 1923 by Mrs Hoover, president of the Girls Scouts of America and wife of the future President Hoover. It was this committee that defined the prevailing wisdom for women’s physical education for the next 30 years – a sport for every girl and every girl in a sport. [11]

H’Doubler goes to Columbia University

Trilling was committed to expanding the scope of the women’s physical education programme so that when her young teacher H’Doubler requested leave from the physical education department to go to Columbia University to further her studies in philosophy and aesthetics she was enthusiastic. [12] Trilling, herself a dance educator certified in the Chalif method, also saw this as an opportunity for H’Doubler to use her stay in New York to ‘look into dance suitable for college women’ as a future teaching possibility at Madison. [13] H’Doubler was understandably reluctant to investigate the subject, let alone teach it instead of the team sports that she loved, but she agreed to try. 1916, the same year that H’Doubler attended Columbia, was also the year that John Dewey published his influential Democracy and Education and it was likely that H’Doubler attended classes with both him and William Heard Kilpatrick. During the time she was in New York she never did complete her degree. Nor is it clear how far she was influenced by Dewey’s progressive views on education and creativity. [14] She was certainly increasingly unhappy about Trilling’s charge to seek out ‘new dance’ possibilities and complained about the dreary elementary ballet classes she saw in New York. On a visit to Boston to visit her brother she stopped in at the Sargent School, only to find that ‘they didn’t have the slightest idea of what I was talking about’. [15] A trip to Wellesley College was equally unpromising. Back in New York, it was only when she viewed the movement classes of music teacher Alys E. Bentley at Carnegie Hall that she believed she had found what she was looking for. [16] ‘I could see it right away. And I thought, yes, get a technique worked out that is based on the body structure, the structural responses first and know body technique, and then you can have the knowledge of how to develop your own style.’ [17]

The Role of Dance in Women’s Physical Education

It was not the case that there was no dance taught at the time in women’s physical education programmes in schools and colleges. H’Doubler herself had participated in folk, ballroom and Chalif-method dance classes during her undergraduate studies – though she claimed they were quite disagreeable. German gymnastic clubs introduced forms of gymnastic dance into the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first women’s colleges all offered some forms of music and movement along with social dancing. Indeed, Madison had a thriving Turner society as well as an Academy of Dancing and Deportment for middle-class patrons – re-named more commercially ‘Professor Kehl’s Palace of Pleasure and Education’ in 1899. [18]

A major influence that helped bring dance into schools and colleges were the ideas of two Europeans: François Delsarte, who developed a system of expression through the body after he damaged his voice through opera singing, and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, whose system of eurhythmics filtered into German modern dance through the work of Rudolf Laban and his pupil Mary Wigman as well as throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. The Delsartian system also made its way into the vocabulary of German expressive dance but more obliquely through strands of American-style Delsartism brought back to Europe by American modern dancers, Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller and Ruth St Denis, and harmonic gymnastics advocates Bess Mensendieck and Hedwig Kallmeyer. [19] Both systems (and their offshoots) provided the impetus for the development of a complex array of expressive movement forms that were taken up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in various educational and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Historical Perspectives series pages
• Sport in the Global Society series pages
• Prologue: Reaffirming Mary Wollstonecraft! Extending the Dialogue on Women, Sport and Physical Activities
• 1. From Physical Educators to Mothers of the Dance: Margaret H’Doubler and Martha Hill
• 2. The Physical is Political: Women’s Suffrage, Pilgrim Hikes and the Public Sphere
• 3. From Alice Milliat to Marie-Thérèse Eyquem: Revisiting Women’s Sport in France (1920s–1960s)
• 4. Eliza Maria Mosher: Pioneering Woman Physician and Advocate for Physical Education
• 5. Recreation and Racial Politics in the Young Women’s Christian Association of the United States, 1920s–1950s
• 6. Leading the Way in Science, Medicine and Physical Training: Female Physicians in Academia, 1890–1930
• 7. Empowering Women through Sport: Women’s Basketball in Brazil and the Significant Role of Maria Helena Cardoso
• 8. Strong, Athletic and Beautiful: Edmondo De Amicis and the Ideal Italian Woman
• 9. Women as Leaders: What Women Have Attained In and Through the Field of Physical Education
• Epilogue: Retrospectus
• Index