Shannon L. Walsh, "Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
Today we are joined by Dr. Shannon Walsh, Associate Professor of Theatre History, and author of\xa0Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout\xa0(Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of women\u2019s physical culture in the United States, the role that physical culture reformers played in producing femininity and whiteness, and the possibilities for anti-racist and anti-sexist sport to reconceptualize the white supremist roots of American athleticism.\nIn\xa0Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era,\xa0Walsh traces the beginnings of reform era physical culture, paying special attention to the way that physical culturists attempted to shape women\u2019s bodies. She argues that their efforts hinged on using exercise to produce femininity and whiteness and that they prefigured the larger eugenic movements aimed at perpetuating the white race later in the 20th\xa0century. In each chapter she looks at different physical culturists or physical cultural movement. Her second chapter looks at Steele MacKaye and Americanised Delsarte, a physical cultural practice that combined acting, dance and exercise. Her third chapter focuses on Dudley Allen Sargent and mimetic workouts that introduced working class motions \u2013 for example wood chopping - to middle and upper-middle class men and women at Ivy League colleges.\nThe fourth and fifth chapter work together to unpack the complicated position of women\u2019s physical culture, femininity and motherhood. In chapter four, Walsh shows how Abby Shaw Mayhew and the YWCA articulated a genre of motherhood, which Walsh calls \u201csocial motherhood,\u201d that reframed women\u2019s exercise as domestic and maternal rather than grotesque and masculine. In the fifth chapter, Walsh examines Bernarr MacFadden \u2013 the Barnum of physical culture \u2013 to showcases the places where advertising, motherhood, and women\u2019s exercise came into explicit contact.\nRelying on a close reading of physical culture through critical theory, these main chapters trace the intersections between exercise, femininity, motherhood, race and social class, to illustrate how debates over these issues helped to produce whiteness. Whether they were in elite educational institutions in the Northeast, Midwestern metropolises like Minneapolis, or travelling around the country these experts helped to code physical culture as specifically as womanly, middle class, white, and ultimately as unremarkable.\nHe final body chapter, chapter six, looks at physical culture for indigenous women in three sites: the Odanah Mission School, the Model Indian School at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Unlike their white counterparts, indigenous women were not offered significant opportunities for physical exercise and if they were it was only for the purpose of assimilation. Unsurprisingly, many indigenous girls and women challenged those expectations and were successful athletes.\nKeith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies