Responses to the Talk
On-Line Forum for Continuing the Conversation
Further Resources:

• Women Living Well: Mind and Body Connection
• Mind and Body: René Descartes to William James
• Being and Thinking: Writing Descartes

The college's swimming requirement is not mentioned until the course catalogue of May 1901...Although legend has it that the requirement came about in response to the drowning death of a Bryn Mawr student, there is no particular event cited in any of the college's records that makes this story credible. (Barbara Grubb, Visual Collections Specialist)

The opening of the pool precipitated a crisis that Thomas feared would damage the College's reputation as a moral institution. On May 10-11, 1896, Thomas wrote to Mary Garrett that she had been interrupted at dinner "by the excitement of naked students in the pool. It seems about 20 do it & are fast persuading others to do it. Of course it must be stopped at once as it wd do us more harm than any thing I can think of but there is really no harm in it." (Thomas Archives, BMC)

I want to think out loud, more generally,
about the historical relationship of
women's bodies to women's minds,
both on this campus and elsewhere,
and what that relationship looks like today
in a range of locations:
in our lives,
in those of our daughters,
in those of women 'round the world.

To begin with my own...

What is an athlete?

According to Sam Dalke (Haverford College '07), an athlete is
someone who competes (against himself or others) to improve his performance.

Amy Campbell, Director of Athletics and Physical Education,
Body + Mind @ Bryn Mawr:
Athletics...are central to a rigorous liberal arts experience.....We need to continue to provide programming...that emphasizes the benefits of physical well-being for the life of the mind....developing an athletics...model that complements Bryn Mawr's academic mission....The Challenging Women campaign seeks...funding [that] will allow us to hire coaches and teachers who understand the role of sports and fitness at a rigorous undergraduate college...and...secure the future of a strong athletics and physical education department that fosters the important link between mind and body.

But how do we understand that link?

The late 19th century theory saw it as managing a closed system.

Edward Clarke, Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873):
both women and men had closed bodily systems with only finite amounts of energy. Studying...for young developing women...pulled blood, nourishment and energy away from reproductive organs...in the fragile and critical stages of maturation.

M. Carey Thomas, Address on "Women's College and University Education" (1907):
We did not know when we began whether women's health could stand the strain of college education. We were haunted in those days by the clanging chains of that gloomy little specter, Dr. Edward H. Clarke's Sex in education. With trepidation of spirit I made my mother read it, and was much cheered by her remark that, as neither she, nor any of the women she knew, had ever seen girls or women of the kind described in Dr. Clarke's book, we might as well act as if they did not exist. Still, we did not know whether colleges might not produce a crop of just such invalids. Doctors insisted that they would. We women could not be sure until we had tried the experiment. Now we have tried it, and tried for more than a generation, and we know that college women are not only not invalids, but that they are better physically than other women in their own class of life.

Amy Campbell,
I have been thinking about the role of posture and strength training--how one's carrage is a visible signal and how physically strong women have an opportunity to project confidence and a sense that they have a 'strong' sense of where they are in the world and how to engage in meaningful ways....

David Gersham, "A Line on Life: Throwing Like a Girl" (4/26/98)
(on the causes for gender differences in throwing ability)

Cf. "Throwing Like A Girl" Is Total Misnomer
Penn State Sports Medicine Newsletter (10/16/97):
The sports expression "throwing like a girl" is not only politically incorrect, but also biologically incorrect.... Recognizing obvious anatomical differences between men and women, no scientific data indicates that those differences prevent either gender from correctly throwing a baseball or football. If a person has underdeveloped muscles, is inexperienced or has not had proper instruction, the throwing motion will look strange. "There is no such thing as a throwing-like-a-girl motion," says A. Eugene Coleman, Ed.D., chairman and professor of health and human performance at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. "It is all a matter of strength, flexibility and practice....This is not a gender issue; it's a training and experience issue."

Audrey Dixon, with cat and ball.

Edwin Strauss, "The Upright Posture," Phenomenological Psychology (1966):
The girl of five does not make any use of lateral space. She does not stretch her arm sideward; she does not twist her trunk; she does not move her legs, which remain side by side. All she does in preparation for throwing is to lift her right arm forward to the horizontal and to bend the forearm backward in a pronate position....The ball is released without force, speed, or accurate aim....A boy of the same age, when preparing to throw, stretches his right arm sideward and backward; supinates the forearms; twists, turns and bends his trunk; and moves his right foot backward. From this stance, he can support his throwing almost with the full strength of his total motorium....The ball leaves the hand with considerable acceleration; it moves toward its goal in a long flat curve.

Iris Marion Young, "Throwing Like a Girl" (1977):
...girls do not bring their whole bodies into the motion [of throwing] as much as the boys do. They do not reach back, twist, move backward, step, and lean forward. Rather, the girls tend to remain relatively immobile except for their arms, and even the arms are not extended as far as they could be. Throwing is not the only movement in which there is a typical difference in the way men and women use their bodies...body movement...is frequently characterized...by a failure to make full use of the body's spatial and lateral potentialities....Women are generally are not as open with their bodies as are men in their gait and stride....Though we now wear pants...women still tend to sit with their legs relatively close together and their arms across their bodies....we also tend more to keep our hands and arms touching or shielding our bodies....girls and women most often carry books embraced to their chests....

"Throwing Like a Girl": Twenty Years Later" (1998):
A look at my daughter's growing up and young adulthood shows me that a great deal has changed. Jeans have been her normal daily wear since she could walk....it seems to me that she and her friends move and carry themselves with more openness, more reach, more active confidence, than many of my generation did. She has been able to take athletic opportunities for granted. There is at least as much danger of sexual assault for her as there was for me, but acceptable norms of male street behavior seem to have altered such that she endures fewer vocalized objectifications than she might have twenty years ago...

The [1977] essay assumes a rather instrumentalist account of the motility and spatiality of the lived body. Its body as subject is a purposive actor, with specific objectives it moves out into the world to accomplish....privileges plan, intention, and control.....In the world of this essay, women are inhibited, hesitant, constrained, gazed at, and positioned....One could imagine a less limited, more self-conscious project of philosophically describing feminine body comportment, motility and spatiality...might look for specifically feminine forms of movement...an amazing passage from one of Tillie Olsen's short stories, for example, describes a kitchen dance in which a farm woman cans her tomatoes while mindful of the colicky baby she holds between her arm and her hip. The movement is plural and engaged, to and fro, here and yonder, rather than unified and singly directed. What might a phenomenology of action look like which started from the mundane fact that many of us, especially women, often do several things at once?

Donald Siegel, "Play, Games, Sports and Athletics"
observes that the experimental quality of play, an "original and basic. . . fundamental phenomenon of existence," both enables individuals to experiment with finding ways out of situations in which they appear to be "stuck" and serves "society's need for innovation." Its psychological rewards are intrinsic in the doing, rather than in the "exchange value" of what is produced by playing; when players are totally absorbed in a game, they (not so) paradoxically both lose a sense of self-consciousness and feel "in control" of what they are doing: "a sense of ego is lost but concentration is vastly increased."

When Siegel's analysis moves from "play" to the artificially created situations he calls "games," the critical distinction is rules, which structure play, in part, by placing spatial and temporal constraints on the activity. Rules are conceived in such a way as to make the attainment of ends "deliberately inefficient," in order to create challenges for those playing the game. Following Siegel's analysis, I came to understand, and attempted to structure, my classroom not as a space of pure "play," but rather as a site where a very particular sort of game was enacted, one that, when successful, avoided the "attentuated play" of athletics (with its "overemphasis on winning" and "exaggerated emphasis on efficiency of technique"), but also instantiated a set of rules intended to provoke the particularly inefficient, and insistently unending, communal "game" of thinking. (From The Grace of Revision, the Profit of "Unconscious Cerebration," or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play)

Some concrete examples (and counter-claims?):

• accounts of the relation of the athletic and mental lives
  of faculty teaching the Women, Sport and Film Course

• claims, in the current version of the course
  ("Chick Flicks and Women's Sports Movies--are they the same?") that
  "for a women's sports film...there had to be a 'victory' in the end."

• Sam Dalke's experience: finding himself successful on the track,
  realizing the pay-offs of training and practice,
  he settles down to his studies...

What is the "victory" here?
Does it have to do with
staving off aging,
proving oneself,
saving a relationship,
building a team,
learning to work off one another's strengths,
helping one another with weaknesses,
winning a game,
and/or...?

What does play look like in the classroom?
What is the game there?
What consistitutes a "win"?

Might we re-think competition?
(Is this particularly hard for women?
Downright shocking on a visceral level?)
Are we afraid that competitiveness will destroy relationships,
that if we disagree fundamentally,
we will find no common ground for shared interests?

From A League of Their Own

Can playing team sports help us learn to set aside personal interests,
to focus on team success rather than our individual starring roles?
Might competition be something we need to "play"
(practice, rehearse innovate, experiment with)
in order to learn to do it well, healthily, ethically, effectually....?

Might we talk about the game of thinking
in terms other than those of winning and losing?

Might it resemble anything like what we've just been up to?

A League of Their Own, from Movie-O

The Story of Evolution/The Evolution of Stories

So: what do you think, now,
is the role of "physical culture" at Bryn Mawr College?

Many thanks to my coaches,
(both in the classroom and outside it),
Amy Campbell, Elizabeth Catanese, Ann Dixon,
Paul Grobstein and Katherine Rowe.

Further Resources:
Women Living Well: Mind and Body Connection
Mind and Body: René Descartes to William James
Being and Thinking: Writing Descartes