Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [26]
Besides serving as a walking advertisement for fashion reform, the sponsors wanted this cross-continent achievement to prove the endurance of women.7 As America entered the cusp of the twentieth century, progressive “new women” were challenging the common beliefs about females that often limited their choices. Biological assumptions about women’s inferior physical capacities still existed, including that women were physically delicate and needed to be protected.8 In the Victorian era, fragility in urban society women even became fashionable. “Women are too apt to regard delicacy, in its physical sense of weakness, as an essential element of beauty,” noted one critical observer on women’s deliberate attempts at acting frail for social prestige. “This is a false and dangerous notion, which finds expression in the affectation of paleness of complexion and tenuity of figure, which are deliberately acquired by a systematic disobedience of the laws of health.”9 Yet, physicians and advice books reinforced the prevailing belief that a woman’s biology made her susceptible to disease and ill health. Physicians warned that if women made exceptional exertion, they were far more inclined to nervous exhaustion, known as neurasthenic disease, than men. The neurasthenic was “delicate and high strung, subject to fits of anxiety or even hysteria that could erupt at any time. By virtue of their anatomy, all women were susceptible and therefore had to avoid anxiety-producing and enervating situations.”10
Physicians warned young women of Clara’s age to curtail their physical and intellectual activity during their menstrual periods and gave medical advice such as, “Long walks are to be avoided.… also long wheel rides … in fact, all severe physical exertion.… Intense mental excitement as a fit of anger or grief or even intense joy may be injurious.”11 When Helga asked her eighteen-year-old unmarried daughter to exert herself so strenuously, this ignored society’s advice that young women must guard their reproductive health. Helga’s own years of hard work as a young mother on the prairie gave her confidence that doctors and society underestimated women’s physical strength.
Although remnants of these beliefs permeated America, especially among the privileged classes of American women, these sentiments were being challenged by 1896. The opening of college opportunities for women also brought the development of physical education classes, partly as a way for colleges to develop women’s strength and to prove that intense academic studying would not endanger their health. As the first women graduated from medical school, they began speaking to public audiences on the values of physical training. Speaking to women’s clubs in the East, Dr. Mary Taylor Bissell claimed that physical exercise provided women, as well as men, with “endurance, activity and energy, presence of mind, and dexterity.” She insisted that the value of physical exercise “cannot be overestimated as a sedative to emotional disturbances, and a relief from that nervous irritability and hypochondria so often engendered by a sedentary or an idle life.”12 The sponsor of the wager may have seen the positive health benefits that emerged when women, freed from constraining dress, could pursue an active physical life. Or, it simply may have been an advertising ploy to sell more reform dresses.