Sexual equality and the legacy of Catharine Beecher.

An important contemporary issue in physical education and sport relates to whether female participation and competency in physical activities should be asserted as a function of their difference from men or on the basis of their equality with men. Legislation has addressed the issue, in part, but the deeper dilemma remains and has not yet been resolved by modern North American society. Women have historically been conditioned to reconcile themselves to fundamental assumptions of physical inequality (the weaker sex) and the physical education curriculum has been one of numerous institutional instruments designed to perpetuate such notions. One illustration of this is the legacy of Catharine Beecher’s gymnastic system for girls which was developed in the ante-bellum years of the nineteenth century as part of a strenuous effort to closely define the differences between gender roles and promote specific physical exercises and activities for the widely perceived unique needs of the female as wife, mother and housekeeper. Indeed, the cult of motherhood, domesticity and the womanly woman which was etched indelibly into the North American educational system in the first half of the nineteenth century with the express purpose of improving women’s health and fitness for motherhood can be viewed as a significant influence upon the way in which modern physical education programs have been affected by the sexual equality debate.