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Body and Self: learning to be modern in 1920s–1930s Britain

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09612025.2012.726115

1747-583X

Charlotte Macdonald,

Diversity and Impact of Dance

Abstract Observing the divergent tracks taken by historians of the 'modern self' and those of the 'modern body' the article focuses on health and fitness movements in Britain, c.1920s–1930s. Asking whether there is a place for the body in the history of women performing 'the self' in this context, the article suggests a way in which contemporaries found a way to have a 'self' in the body. Contemporary notions of the body emphasised its interdependence with 'the mind', health and happiness being functions of each other. In the language of health and beauty was a language of inner vitality and outer radiance, a modern formulation of the individual as a 'self' equipped to embrace the exciting but uncertain possibilities of the 'modern world'. Popular print culture on 'healthy living', reports by the BMA and the National Fitness Council are considered along with more extensive discussion of the Women's League for Health and Beauty founded in 1930 by Mollie Bagot Stack and inherited by her daughter, Prunella, 'Britain's Perfect Girl', in 1935. Acknowledgements My thanks to Susan Foley and Megan Simpson for help in preparing this paper, and to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington for financial assistance in attending the Women's History Network Conference at the University of Warwick in September 2010. Notes The first publication of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's classic work appeared in 1970 under the title Women and Their Bodies (Boston: New England Free Press). In 1971 a new edition appeared as Our Bodies, Ourselves (New England Free Press). The first commercial edition, published by Simon & Schuster in 1973, appeared as Our Bodies, Ourselves. A book by and for women. See www.ourbodiesourselves.org/about, accessed 17 Aug. 2010. See also Ruth Rosen (2000) The World Split Open: how the modern women's movement changed America (New York: Viking); Sheila Rowbotham (1999) A Century of Women: the history of women in Britain and the United States in the twentieth century (New York: Penguin Books); Christine Dann (1985) Up from Under: women and liberation in New Zealand, 1970–1985 (Wellington: Allen & Unwin); Marilyn Lake (1999) Getting Equal: the history of Australian feminism (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin). For further exploration of the archival question see Antoinette Burton (Ed.) (2005) Archive Stories: facts, fictions and the writing of history (Durham: Duke University Press). The larger project was published in 2011 as Strong, Beautiful and Modern: national fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, c.1935–1960 (Wellington and Vancouver: Bridget Williams Books/UBC Press). Christopher Wilk (Ed.) (2006) Modernism: designing a new world, 1914–1939 (London: V&A); Sean O'Connell (2000) Gender and the car in interwar Britain, in Moira Donald & Linda Hurcombe (Eds) Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: St Martin's Press), pp. 175–191; Georgine Clarsen (2008) Eat My Dust. Early women motorists (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press); Matthew Hilton (2000) Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800–2000. Perfect pleasures (Manchester: Manchester University Press); Adrian Bingham (2004) 'An Era of Domesticity'? Histories of women and gender in interwar Britain, Cultural and Social History Society, 1(2), pp. 225–233; Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (2006) Building a British Superman: physical culture in interwar Britain, Journal of Contemporary History, 41, pp. 595–610; (2011) The Making of a Modern Female Body: beauty, health and fitness in interwar Britain, Women's History Review, 20(2), pp. 299–317. While this discussion focuses on interwar Britain, similar trends are apparent across the wider 'British world', see, for example, Susie Johnston (2009) Lighting Up: the social history of smoking in New Zealand, c.1920–62 (MA: Victoria University of Wellington); Jarrett Rudy (2005) The Freedom to Smoke: tobacco consumption and identity (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press); Charlotte Macdonald (2009) Marching Teams and Modern Girls: bodies and culture in interwar New Zealand, in Paula Birnbaum & Anna Novakov (Eds) Essays on Women's Artistic and Cultural Contributions 1919–1939. Expanded social roles for the new woman following the first world war (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen) pp. 23–36. Nikolas Rose (1998) Inventing Our Selves. Psychology, power, and personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); (1990) Governing the Soul: the shaping of the private self (London: Routledge); Carolyn Steedman (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman: a story of two lives (London: Virago); (1999) The Commercial Domain: advertising and the cultural management of demand, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort & Chris Waters (Eds) Moments of Modernity: reconstructing Britain 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press). See also discussion of Steedman's work in Geoff Eley (2005) A Crooked Line: from cultural history to the history of society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Gregory S. Brown (2008) Am 'I' a 'Post-Revolutionary Self'? Historiography of the self in the age of the Enlightenment and Revolution, History and Theory, 47, p. 229. From a European perspective see also the important work of Jan Goldstein (2005) The Post-Revolutionary Self. Politics and psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), and an earlier collection, Roy Porter (Ed.) (1997) Rewriting the Self: histories from the Renaissance to the present (London: Routledge). Carolyn Steedman (2010) On Not Writing About the Self. Frances Hamilton (1743–1802) of Bishops Lydeard, near Taunton, Somerset, paper presented at the Conference of the Women's History Network titled 'Performing the Self: women's lives in historical perspective', University of Warwick, 10–12 September 2010. Conekin, Mort & Waters, Moments of Modernity, p. 11. Rose, Inventing Ourselves, p. 22. Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau & Cécile Dauphin (1997) Correspondence: models of letter-writing from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Martin Pugh (2008) 'We Danced All Night'. A social history of Britain between the wars (London: The Bodley Head). Robert Graves & Alan Hodge (1940) The Long Weekend: a social history of Great Britain 1918–1939 (London: Faber); John Stevenson (1984) British Society 1914–45. The Pelican social history of Britain (London: Allen Lane). London School of Economics and Political Science (1930–35) The New Survey of London Life & Labour (London: PS King); Sally Alexander (2007) A New Civilization? London surveyed 1928–1940s, History Workshop Journal, 64, pp. 296–320; Ian Gazeley (2005) Poverty in Britain, 1900–1965 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), ch. 3. An argument made in Ana Carden-Coyne's recent Reconstructing the Body in discussion of classicism and modernism in Britain, Australia and the United States. Ana Carden Coyne (2009) Reconstructing the Body: classicism, modernism, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Sabra Milligan (1934) The Body and How to Keep Fit (Brighouse: Premier). Ibid., p. 5. John F. Lucy (1937) Keep Fit & Cheerful for Young and Old of Both Sexes (London: Talbot Press). Harry Roberts (1939) The Practical Way to Keep Fit (London: Odhams); (1940) Keep Fit in War-Time (London: Watts & Co) and other works. Dorothy M. Cooke (1937) 'Keep Fit' Work for Women (London: Pitman). Sheila Fletcher (1984) Women First: the female tradition in English physical education, 1880–1980 (London: Athlone Press). Bengamin Gayelord Hauser (1936) Eat and Grow Beautiful (London: Faber). First published Tempo Books, New York, 1936. Patricia Vertinsky (1994) The Eternally Wounded Woman: women, doctors, and exercise in the late nineteenth century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press); Lesley Hall (2000) Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (Basingstoke: Macmillan); W. F. Bynum & Roy Porter (Eds) (1993) Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine (London and New York: Routledge). Roberts, The Practical Way to Keep Fit, p. 289. British Medical Association (1936) Report of the Physical Education Committee (London: British Medical Association), p. 1. Ibid. National Fitness Council (1939) The National Fitness Campaign (London: National Fitness Council for England and Wales), p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Prunella was dubbed 'the most physically perfect girl in the world' by the Daily Mail in 1933. She was widely referred to as 'Britain's Perfect Girl', Jill Julius Matthews (1990) 'They had such a lot of fun.' The Women's League of Health and Beauty between the wars, History Workshop Journal, 30(1), pp. 24, 33. See also Jill Julius Matthews (1987) Building the Body Beautiful, Australian Feminist Studies, 5, pp. 17–34, and Jill Julius Matthews (2004) Stack, Mary Meta Bagot (1883–1935) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press), online edition, Jan. 2008. Millicent and Caroline Ward, proteges of Bagot Stack training in London travelled to New Zealand in 1937 setting up branches of the League in Auckland (1937) and Wellington (1938), Evening Post (Wellington), 31 July, 2 Aug., 17 Oct. 1938. Mrs A. J. Cruickshank & Prunella Stack (1937) Movement is Life. The intimate history of the founder of the Women's League of Health and Beauty and of its origins, growth, achievements, and hopes for the future (London: Bell), p. 229. The major historical work on the League has been done by Jill Julius Matthews, see her '"They had such a lot of fun"', 'Building the body beautiful', and 'Stack, Mary Meta Bagot'. The League may have exaggerated their numbers. The National Fitness Campaign gave their membership as 'something like 60,000 members' (1938–39), National Fitness Council, The National Fitness Campaign, p. 10. The next largest was the Amateur Gymnastic Association, noted as having 'around 7,000 members', National Fitness Council, The National Fitness Campaign, p. 10. The Fitness League, see www.thefitnessleague.com, existing most strongly in Britain but also in groups in New Zealand and possibly elsewhere. Samantha Clements (2008) Feminism, Citizenship and Social Activity: the role and importance of local women's organisations, Nottingham, 1918–1969 (PhD, University of Nottingham), p. 78. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, The Making of a Modern Female Body, p. 313. Guardian, 2 Jan. 2011; Daily Mail, 31 Dec. 2010; 'Prunella Stack OBE 1914–2010', www.thefitnessleague.com/media-pr/prunella-stack-obe-1914-2010. The phrase was first made famous by Isadora Duncan in the 1920s. The widespread popularity of the idea can be found throughout the interwar period in books and organisations ranging from Annette Kellerman's (1918) Physical Beauty and How to Keep It, to the Margaret Morris Movement, and much beyond, see Matthews, 'Building the Body Beautiful'. Stella Gibbons (1932) Cold Comfort Farm (London: Longman). For further development of this theme see Wendy Parkins (2009) Mobility and Modernity in Women's Novels, 1850s–1930s. Women moving dangerously (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Matthews, 'They Had Such a Lot of Fun', p. 36. Annual performances at Hyde Park began in 1930, indoor demonstrations followed at the Royal Albert Hall in 1931, moving to Olympia and later Wembley as the Hall proved too small. Mollie Bagot Stack to her sister Mrs Cruickshank quoted in Cruickshank and Stack, Movement is Life, p. 123. Matthews, Stack, Mary Meta Bagot (1883–1935), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. As described on the title frame, '500 Business Girls' British Pathé, www.britishpathe.com. Adrian Bingham (2004), Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press). See, for example, '500 Business Girls', Women's League of Health and Beauty performs at Hyde Park 9 May 1932; 'Health and Beauty on Parade!', Hyde Park demonstration 22 May 1933; 'Women's League for Health and Beauty', n.d. silent footage; '"Miss Britain" Keeps Fit—to Music', 1950, all at www.britishpathe.com. Matthews, 'They Had Such a Lot of Fun', p. 25. Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall note the vagueness and diffusion of eugenic terms in Britain through the 1920s and 1930s, see Lucy Bland & Lesley Hall (2010) Eugenics in Britain: the view from the metropole, in Alison Bashford & Philippa Levine (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), ch. 11. Marshall Berman (1982) All That is Solid Melts into Air: the experience of modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster). Among them, Christine Boydell (2004) Review article. Refashioning Identities: gender, class and the self, Journal of Contemporary History, 39(1), pp. 137–146; Barbara Burman & Carole Turbin (2002) Material Strategies Engendered, Gender and History, 14(3), pp. 371–381; Christopher Breward & Caroline Evans (Eds) (2005) Fashion and Modernity (Oxford & New York: Berg); Bronwyn Labrum, Fiona McKergow & Stephanie Gibson (Eds) (2007) Looking Flash. Clothing in Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press). Additional informationNotes on contributorsCharlotte Macdonald Charlotte Macdonald is Professor of History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Strong, Beautiful and Modern (Bridget Williams Books/UBC Press, 2011), with Frances Porter 'My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates' (Auckland University Press/BWB, 1996), and 'Between Religion and Empire', Journal of the Canadian Historical Association online edition, Spring 2008 (winner of Canadian Historical Association Prize 2009).