Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Arcangeli, Alessandro
• Schattner, Angela
• von Mallinckrodt, Rebekka

Titel

Exercise for Women

Ist Teil von

• Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture, 2016, p.147-163

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Women played a very specific role in the physical culture of early modern Europe, as documented in both theory and practice. Notions of manliness and femaleness clearly influenced shared understandings of the decency of certain sports for each sex; reciprocally customs and bodily practice could actively reinforce those gendered notions. With in the context of a conceptualization of the body as dominated by fluids, intensive exercise was considered as a cause of their absorption with detrimental effects on menstruation, and consequently on fertility and general health. The fact that the most popular forms of early modern sociability comprised a multiplicity of activities of varying physical impact, and those associated with women in particular tended to be gentle and require limited effort, ensured that favoured plaisirs could be far less dynamic than promenading. All historians are agreed that tne Victorian and Edwardian 'revolution' in sport was predominantly a male phenomenon in which females, and working-class females especially, had relatively little part.