Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Thomas L. McHaney, committee chair; Pearl McHaney, Beth Burmester, committee members. Electronic text (330 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Jan. 7, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 314-330).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2008. / Includes appendixes: 105-137. Title from PDF title page (viewed September 25, 2008) Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-137)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed Oct. 10, 2007). PDF text: 254 p. : ill. UMI publication number: AAT 3262190. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, evolving scientific ideas about the body and its vulnerabilities, about women’s education, and about appropriate gendered behavior each contributed to the emergence of physical culture and healthy living environments for women and girls. Decrying the physical state of American mothers, health reformers and educators promoted new habits and routines meant to establish bodily health, and ushered physical culture programs into educational institutions and private homes. Bound together by their unwavering faith in the ability of the material world to produce healthy bodies, reformers evoked the language of efficiency, of maternal fitness, and of a fallible body that could be bolstered through material objects and spaces. This dissertation provides at once a cultural history of the female body, a study of architecture and material culture, and a critical examination of the ways in which race has been historically constructed. While scholars have begun to take up the diverse threads of this story, an architectural and material analysis of spaces and objects for exercise has thus far been overlooked. Drawing on prescriptive literature, building manuals, advertisements, and images, this dissertation argues that in the decades between 1865 and 1930, scientific ideas about racial reproduction tangibly effected the design of women’s spaces. Chapter One locates the roots of women’s physical culture in the aftermath of the Civil War and elucidates its relationship to the dress reform movement. Chapter Two considers architectural space for women’s exercise from 1881 to 1912. These three decades mark a crucial moment as the typology of the American gymnasium solidified, and women’s physical culture slowly moved out-of-doors. Chapter Three examines the middle-class house through the lens of health, and the ways in which reformers and medical experts projected scientific beliefs about gendered and racialized fitness onto the home, its contents, and the moments of performance required to maintain household and personal health. It concludes with a discussion of performative health in each of these three instances, and the specialized knowledge required of women to maintain their own health and the health of their households.

Bedford College, established in 1849, was the first institute of higher education for women in England, and with it came the beginning of the women's higher education movement. While Bedford is often dismissed or ignored by modern scholars for not being equal to the women's colleges associated with Cambridge and Oxford, it was crucial in the development of these later colleges and was a bellwether of the women's higher education movement. By examining personal letters and official college documents and carefully assessing later-written histories of Bedford and the other women's colleges, this thesis will explain why and how the College was successfully founded two decades before any other college for women in England. It will also include a thorough discussion of the events that occurred before and during Bedford's establishment, its enigmatic founder Elisabeth Jesser Reid and the role of the women's higher education movement in Bedford's development. This thesis will also show how the successful foundations of Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge University and Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College at Oxford were made possible by the monumental strides made by Bedford College's influence on the creation of the women's higher education movement.

This study identified and examined individual, group, institutional, and other factors and conditions associated with the founding and development of private higher education institutions designed to serve religious groups, women, black Americans, native Americans, and Hispanic Americans. A number of distinct influencing social conditions were identified. Distinctness was due to different group needs and circumstances during certain American historical periods. Common social conditions found included need for culturally sensitive institutions, pervasiveness of religious interests in founding attempts, social exclusion and discrimination, population growth and urbanization, democratic opportunity, federal government pervasiveness, and social consciousness change. Fifty-four specific factors associated with the founding and development of institutions were identified. Analysis revealed many complex interrelationships among social, individual, group, institutional and other miscellaneous factors and conditions existing in collegiate institution founding and development efforts. These factors created many variables that could affect the success of the institutions. Forty-two of the fifty-four factors were judged to be important elements for those contemporarily considering founding collegiate institutions. General conclusions: (1) Institutions best able to deal with the many complex factors were most likely to succeed. (2) The more support and (3) confidence institutions could generate, the better their chances for survival. (4) Institutional and community cohesion were important in achieving permanency. (5) Many institutions were created because of perceived socio-economic, political, cultural, and educational inequities. (6) Social groups addressed higher educational needs after increased awareness of their social conditions. (7) Sociocultural differences existed in group approaches to provision of higher education. (8) Regarding effectiveness in founding, groups ranked as follows; religious groups, women, black Americans, native Americans, and Hispanic Americans. (9) Religious denominations were very involved in founding efforts for three of the groups studied, minimally involved with native Americans, least involved with Hispanic Americans. (10) Religious affiliated institutions generally served socio-economic and religious needs of constituents; this was not evident with the Roman Catholic Church and Hispanic Americans. (11) Educated leadership was essential in founding efforts. (12) High dissatisfaction with existing institutions prompted private founding attempts.

Access to abstract restricted until May 2015 / Access to thesis restricted until May 2015 / Department of History

The idea of establishing a denominational college for young women in the Anglican Deanery of Bedford was first submitted to the Montreal's Synod in 1873. Following a contest which was held between local municipalities, the overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant rural village of Dunham won the honors and six years later, the Dunham Ladies' College (the college would become St. Helen's School in 1913) opened its doors. This thesis examines the reactions and readjustments of the Anglican Church, and those of their followers, attributable to its disestablishment (in the 1840's and 1850's) and to the rise of liberalism and to the transformation of traditional social order that went on in the same age. The example that we have selected---the DLC/ SHS---will allow us to scrutinize de 1870 to 1930 period. It will demonstrate the importance of religion in the construction of women's social identities: education being a means borrowed by the local and diocesan Anglican elite (both lay and ecclesiastical ones) to promote the new spiritual mandate of the Church and a conservative vision of social organization. The elite's men wished for the DLC/SHS to be an oasis of peace and of purity, the ideal place for young ladies to become gentlewomen. Throughout our study of the methods employed for their education, we will demonstrate how this elite planned the education of these young ladies in a way that would insure their becoming conveyances of the values necessary for the implementation of a spiritual Anglican society.

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