American History: 20th Century

This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including coed and single-sex, public and private, and predominantly white or black institutions. Working primarily with female students, women physical educators had to consider what an active female could and should do compared to an active male. Applying concepts of sex differences, they debated the implications of female anatomy, physiology, reproductive functions, and psychosocial traits for achieving gender parity in the gym. Teachers’ interpretations were contingent on where they worked and whom they taught. They also responded to broad historical conditions, including developments in American feminism, law, and education, society’s changing attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality, and scientific controversies over sex differences and the relative weight of nature versus nurture. While deliberating fairness for female students, white and black women physical educators also pursued equity for themselves, as their workplaces and nascent profession often marginalized female and minority personnel. Questions of difference and equity divided the field throughout the twentieth century; while some women teachers favored moderate views and incremental change, others promoted justice for their students and themselves by exerting authority at their schools, critiquing traditional concepts of “difference,” and devising innovative curricula. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book sheds new light on physical education’s application of scientific ideas, the politics of gender, race, and sexuality in the domain of active bodies, and the enduring complexities of difference and equity in American culture.

From the beginnings of industrial capitalism to contemporary disputes over evolution, nature has long been part of the public debate over the social good. As such, many natural scientists throughout American history have understood their work as a cultural activity contributing to social stability, and their field as a powerful tool for enhancing the quality of American life. In the late Victorian era, interwar period, and post-war decades, massive social change, economic collapse and recovery, and the aftermath of war, prompted natural scientists to offer up a civic-minded natural science concerned with the political wellbeing of American society. Science and the Social Good explores the evolving internal and external forces influencing the design and purpose of American natural science by focusing on three representative scientists — geologist Clarence King, forester Robert Marshall, and biologist Rachel Carson — who purposefully considered the social outcomes of their work. As comfortable in the royal courts of Europe as the remote field camps of the American West, Clarence King was the founding director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and used his standing to integrate science into late 19th century political debates about foreign policy, immigration, and social reform. In the mid-1930s, Robert Marshall founded the environmental advocacy group, The Wilderness Society, which transformed the face of natural preservation in America. Committed to social justice, Marshall blended forest ecology and pragmatic philosophy to craft a natural science ethic that extended the reach of science into political discussions about the restructuring of society prompted by urbanization.

In 1899, Carrie Chapman Catt, who succeeded Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, argued that it was the “duty” of U.S. women to help lift the inhabitants of new island possessions in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii up from “barbarism” to “civilization,” a project that would presumably demonstrate the capacity of U.S. women for full citizenship and political rights. Catt, like many suffragists in her day, was well versed in the language of empire and infused the cause of suffrage with imperialist zeal in public debate. Unlike their predecessors, who were working for votes for women within the context of slavery and abolition, the next generation of suffragists argued their case against the backdrop of U.S. expansionism in Indian and Mormon territory at home as well as overseas in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. This book examines these simultaneous political movements—woman suffrage and American imperialism—as inextricably intertwined phenomena, instructively complicating the histories of both.