Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States

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 ada...