Gymnastics

“ . . . the most important distinctions [re men’s gymnastics] pertaining to the ways feminized gymnastics discourses sought to shape female bodies stemmed from the fact that those texts contextualized the regimens they lauded in relation both to female invalidism and to the resulting necessity for . . . feminine rectitude with respect to health and home. . . . Those activities, they purported, not only ameliorated curvature of the spine but also enlarged the chest and drew back rounded shoulders. . . . all were consistent with a straight-backed and broad-chested feminine form ((Chisholm, 744). . . . Overall, therefore, many nineteenth-century gymnastics regimens were represented as techniques for straightening women’s spines, for enlarging their chests, for prompting increased respiration, as well as for invigorating women’s physiological systems in their entirety. . . Nineteenth-century discourses commending gymnastics for U.S. women coordinated postural rectitude and moral rectitude with distinctly utilitarian goals (746). . . . On the other hand, this literature often reflected the prevalent opinion that housework was restorative, while postulating both that it was a coterminous (if not the ultimate) means for maintaining female health and that it was the standard for female fitness. Gymnastics and housework therefore existed in mutual relation: gymnastics for women promised to fortify and to perfect their bodies while making them healthy and fit enough to undertake their household duties; and housework would complete the process by mobilizing and augmenting the healthful effects of gymnastics (748). . . . girls who faithfully participated in gymnastics would attain, embody, and enact postural, moral, and procedural rectitude (749). . . . these discourses positioned gymnastics as switches that closed the circuits that ran between female education and domesticity” (750).