A01=Jess Libow
American women writers
Author_Jess Libow
Black and Irish domestic servants
Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Category=DS
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSL
Category=JPQB
Category=KCVJ
Category=NHK
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Domestic science
enslaved women's health
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Francis Wright
Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Wilson
Hull-House
Jane Addams
Margaret Fuller
nineteenth-century American literature
nineteenth-century women's reform movements
physical education
self-care
settlement houses
students at off-reservation boarding schools
The Jacobs School
turn-of the-century eugenic feminism
U.S. transcendentalism
volunteers at contraband camps
wellness
women's health
Zitkala-Sa
Product details
- ISBN 9781469689036
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 09 Sep 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Nineteenth-century America saw profound changes in the ways people viewed their bodies, their health, and their corporeal connection to their environments. Though much of the writing about bodies was produced by men, Vigorous Reforms focuses on the understudied literary history of how women came to understand physicality and its connection to their everyday lives. The introduction of physical education allowed women to conceive their own and others' bodies not as static entities, but as adaptable to their own needs, goals, and labor. Jess Libow also shows the limits of the science of the era—since bodily differences were often understood as biologically determined, theories of health defined womanhood in terms of racialized bodily abilities. For example, settler colonial ideology coded Native women as deteriorating due to their "uncivilized" ways of life, and proponents of slavery insisted that Black women's inherent strength made them suitable for enslavement.
Drawing on a wide-ranging archive of ideas about exercise, hygiene, and nutrition, Libow argues that women's writing about health was fundamental to the development of what we now think of as American feminism.
Drawing on a wide-ranging archive of ideas about exercise, hygiene, and nutrition, Libow argues that women's writing about health was fundamental to the development of what we now think of as American feminism.
Jess Libow is interim director of the writing program and visiting assistant professor at Haverford College.
