The older we grow, the better tailer we ought to have.
Cornelia Clapp
Margaret Conrad, a graduate from Mount Holyoke in the class of 1917 and Director in the Department of Nursing at the Columbia Medical School, makes an arresting comment in the Alumnae Quarterly on her field of work: 'It seems to me that as a profession we are fortunate in having for our goal one of the few positive good things whose value has not been seriously questioned, namely, health.'
That statement bears pondering. Certainly the present age, whatever its skepticism about most values, takes pride in a sound physical state. Any activity headed toward that goal, whether in the medical profession or in physical education, is recognized as contributing to the usefulness and happiness of the individual.
Yet there was a time when fragility was high fashion for women.
Dean Briggs of Harvard once quoted for the entertainment of a Mount Holyoke audience the remark made by a fashionable literary lady of the early nineteenth century: 'You must have Dyspepsia, or be a Clod.'
The Springfield Republican a century ago ran a series of diatribes on the prevailing ill health of ladies, stating that six out of seven of them were 'ailing, complaining, feeble, suffering,' and backing up the estimate with the challenge: 'If anyone thinks this statement extravagant, I will only again desire him to make a list of his acquaintance and see how it stands. Can nothing be done?'
One comment in the series was entitled 'Weeping.'
Young women are full of tears. They will weep as bitterly for the loss of a new dress as for the loss of an old lover. They will weep for anything or for nothing . . . . They weep through pride, through vanity, through folly, through cunning, and through weakness . . . . Married women weep to conquer.
It looks as if somebody on the staff of the Springfield Republican in those days looked at women through disenchanted eyes. In the newspaper of August 25, 1838, he discusses the reasons why ladies refuse to take any exercise out of doors:
In summer it is too hot for exercise; in winter it is too cold; in the spring it is too variable . . . . We want more of the foreign liberty of walking out, without being in full dress. I am sorry to observe the prejudice of fashion against India Rubber shoes - actual instrument of advancing civilization, as I consider it, if it were but daily appreciated and used.
Then the writer goes on to remark, 'Exercise out of doors can be taken the year round, as there are some good examples to prove.'
He would have found some good examples if he had driven up to South Hadley in that very autumn of 1838, and had watched Miss Lyon's young ladies stepping out their 'mile a day no matter what the weather' - their feet, let us hope, shod in the instruments of advancing civilization in time of rain. For many years the 'half-mile posts' set up on the roads were a matter of grave debate among the girls. These half-mile posts were stakes driven into the ground by the wayside at the end of a measured half mile on the nine roads out of South Hadley, so that one could knowwhen the required footage had been covered. There were two orders of ethical thought on the subject. The milder of these held that you had walked your required mile if you arrived at the half-mile post and then turned on your heel and came back. But the more rigid faction decreed that you must do more than simply salute your half-mile post. You must walk around it. Miss Ellen Blakely, class of '81, says that she remembers not only the posts but the debates.
Exercise was not all a matter of punching the half-mile post. From the first there were regular 'calisthenics,' and later drills, including one lovely exercise called 'curtsying round the circle.' Wands and dumb-bell exercises and hoops were favorite appliances, and the first definite 'gymnastic' work was introduced at the time of the Civil War. This flared into enormous popularity just after 1871, when Miss Cornelia Clapp began to teach it in addition to all her scientific work. A member of the class of '73 recalls the fun of watching Miss Clapp coming down the 'spaceway' to teach gymnastics. 'Her curls would be bobbing up and down, and we'd see her coming along and coming along - you know how she looked so enthusiastic when she was coming along?'
And I, who had seen Doctor Clapp, at seventy, 'coming along' down the chapel aisle dancing a rigadoun to amuse a group of alumnae who had lingered after choir rehearsal, while Mr. Hammond, catching her mood, played a jig on the organ, said yes, I did remember. When people used to ask Doctor Clapp how she kept the gymnastics of her youth in such prime condition she would whisper darkly, 'Sad case of arrested development!'
It was with Miss Clapp's eager encouragement that President Mead, in 1892, established a department of physical training with required drill in Swedish gymnastics, fencing, folk-dancing, and apparatus work that filled the Gym on exhibition days with swarms of girls climbing the ropes to the ceiling. One should not forget the fleet of rowboats in the boathouse of that era - elegant 'lap-streak' boats named for the daughters of the donors - the 'Ella,' the 'Florence,' and the 'Bessie Williston.' The canoes today on Upper Lake, with their shimmering colors, are more dreamlike than the capacious old rowboats. But it used to be very convenient, on Lower Lake, to run down to the shadowy boathouse in a free half-hour, unhitch the Bessie Williston, pole out around the cat-tails, ship your oars, and drift idly among the dragonflies in the sun. Or of course if you wanted it to 'count' as exercise you could row.
It may be my imagination, but I think there was an interval during which appreciation of formal 'gym' work suffered a slump. Competitive basketball, class team against class team, drew most of our athletic enthusiasm in the opening decades of the twentieth century. During basketball season class loyalty ran to extremes, and the spectators got almost as much exercise as the players, particularly in chest expansion with cheers and groans and songs. The most enthusiastic basketball song ever composed, without a doubt, was the paean of joy sent up by the class of 1910 when it learned that the mascots of the class of 1909 had fallen ill and died. Mascots were a great secret. not until the teams ran out on the floor were the mascots, so to speak, unveiled. Through some leak in diplomatic circles the news got about that the class of 1909 had bought nine small pigs for pascot - and that one by one, in spite of scientific care, they all had departed this life. Accordingly, to the tune of Old John Brown Had a Little Injun,' the rival class of 1910 opened the basketball season with a song that ran:
'Nineteen-nine had nine little piggies -
Nine little piggies had they . . . .
Nine little, eight little, seven little piggies,
Six little, five little, four little piggies . . .
and so on, gleefully, until the last little pig had died.
The only song connected with athletics that was ever sung with equal fervor was the one to the tune of 'Who is on the Lord's Side?' composed and rendered much later in our history when the students rose in revolt against the cumbersome old gymnasium suits and demanded something different. The hymn ran to several stanzas, and was sung a cappella in season and out of season that it might come to the ears of the powerful in the early nineteen twenties. Not yet is it quite safe to sing in chapel the hymn from which that ditty derived.
How completely most of the old raging battles have been won! Today it is all of a piece with the new freedoms, the gay new costumes in class colors, and the new methods of teaching that physical education should actually be popular - not the infliction it often was in the prickly black serge sailor-collar-blouse-and-bloomer days. The new community attitude and mental 'posture' is a revelation to one who remembers the rebel troops of old.
One almost hesitates to mention the miracle for fear it will vanish at a word. But the miracle has been worked up to with consumate skill, not only in good team-play between the department and the College Physicians, but in collaboration with the Athletic Association and with the individual students. The technical courses in Hygiene and Body Mechanics make a rational basis for thoroughly aroused interest in the work. There is an understanding of fundamentals, and incidentally an awareness that the exercises given in formal Gym are appreciated outside to such an extent that wealthy persons expend large sums to be buffeted about and made to 'do' them. After training in the function of the muscles, classes are taken to the Art Gallery to study the play of those same muscles as interpreted in action by great sculptors. And finally, the most gifted of the students are given scope to act as expert leaders in athletic fields.
To take just one example. Our old-time Gym exhibitions centered rather definitely on apparatus drill and military exercises, with the voices of instructors constantly snapping out the order, 'Right - DRESS!' (Or perhaps I remember that command above all others because at the crack of those words my reason usually became unhinged an dI dressed left.) However that may be, the present-day annual gymnasium assembly is quite different. In the first place, the galleries are packed to the standing-room-only and waiting-line point. In the second place, the students run the meet themselves, and members of the department are not in evidence. Everything is done to music, and all grades of undergraduate proficiency are shown in an inventive scheme of program-making - something different in central theme each year. The program one year developed around the idea of a 'Century of Progress,' in which one of the prettiest scenes was a revival of the old Mount Holyoke sport of rinkle polo, and a fancy skaing act done in the costumes of Queen Alexandra's youth - large bustle skirts, knowing little bonnets, and muffs. The skates were roller-skates, of course, but the enormous swaying skirts disguised that fact. The picture was surprisingly lovely - the balance, the rhythm, the responsive swing of the costumes, and the illusion of old-time quadrille skating in figures elaborately carried out. If you can skate to a pattern in a bustle, you are good.
And in one of the most amusing features of an 'Olympiad' staged in honor of the money-raising campaign for a swimming-pool to supplement the lake, was a dry-floor swimming race. Into the arena came a score of water-crew experts dressed for a swim.Each was provided with the kind of small wheeled platform used by garage mechanics for under-car repairs. At the command, 'On your mark - get set,' each swimmer put on her rubber cap as if for a dip in the lake, and disposed herself upon her wheeled creeper. And at the starter's signal the crew 'swam' with elegant strokes at top speed up and down the gymnasium floor, winning race after race to the cheers of the audience - first a side-stroke race, then a crawl, and then a back-stroke contest wonderfully picturesque. Finally from the tops of the old leather 'horses' they gave an exhibition of fancy diving to the mats.
All the old feats of conventional gymnastics and many new ones have a chance to be displayed at these programs, but with an original theme running through the ceremonies to stimulate the imagination as well as the circulation, and to give each performance its dramatic setting of music, color, and costume, so that it holds the audience and makes sense.
The Horse Show and the Dance Recital and the Regatta on Upper Lake are equally popular. And as for teams - every individual has an opportunity in some kind of teamwork. Physical education has opened out from the confines of the Gymnasium Building to take advantage of the resources of the surrounding country. One hardly knew there were so many varieties of sport until one caught glimpses of practicing groups in unexpected moments - canoes all out on Upper Lake - archers out for all the targets on the Archery Range - the horses all out of their stables, and a pleasant notice in the college newspaper that one should 'not ask for the horses during feeding hours.'
Evidently if you are going to take up a sport at all you are likely to want to learn it well enough so that you can enjoy it, take pride in it, and contribute to the pleasure of your companions. From the list in which instruction is offered you select perhaps two - one that you can enjoy with other players, and one that you can always enjoy alone. To a person who loves the very implements of sport, there is a fascination in the mere selection of equipment - one's favorite racquet, target, canoe, hockey stick, oar, bat, paddle, skates, ball, snowshoes, skis. Even an older person contemplating the list begins to wonder which two sports he would select in which to be coached expertly if he had a chance to choose.
Here are some of the choices, some strenuous, some less strenuous, according to tastes and powers: tennis, canoeing, basketball, volley-ball, speed-ball, baseball, golf, archery, badminton, hockey, soccer, lacross, dancing, bicycling, bowling, swimming, deck tennis, horseback riding, show jumping, skating, skiing - the complete list should include also the house-sports and many other details. For curiosity I once looked up the list of sports advocated by the women in the British Who's Who, and in the new volume entitled American Women, and I found that all of the favorite sports listed by hundreds of representative women in the English-speaking world have their place on our modern campus - except these: salt-water yachting and sailing, big-game hunting, and practice with ancient swords. Oh, yes, to be perfectly accurate, there were two more that I have not happened to see at college this year - cricket and 'curling.'
How do the college girls get time for these sports? They take the time we used to spend walking 'around Cold Hill' for our required exercise. The line of march around Cold Hill is a motor road now, and there is not so much casual tramping done now even in the country lanes. But there are organized hikes, and many activities of the Outing Club - an institution, by the way, which two hundred and thirty out of two hundred and sixty-three freshmen of a certain class have joined. That record may be exceeded now, but at the moment of writing it was up to date.
I believe, however, that of the many new scenes on the campus the most vivid of all may be the winter sports. Snow on the slopes, ice on the ponds, ski suits everywhere - and in the evening lights strung over Lower Lake for a skating carnival on week-ends when the weather is fine. The most beautiful skating carnival of last winter was an affair that began by starlight and finished in a whirl of glinting aluminum particles catching the light. The air was windless, and the skaters drifted in time to the music of old waltzes sent out by an amplifier over the lakes. Swooping figures in bright costumes followed the strings of tiny lamps out across the pond and back to the glow of the bonfire. Snowflakes in the air for sparkle, white drifts on the banks of the lake, gay red ski suits, white caps, parti-colored mackinaws - college girls and college men and village children racing on skates to the music; there was always a crowd on land around the refreshment booth, to be sure, but the skating carnival went on being a skating carnival regardless of the tingling snow. Next day the pond would need to be swept again, in the section kept glazed for skating. But just now the snow was not troublesome; in showers of tiny crystal sparks it was turning the lake into elfland. The little group of observers on the bridge, lost in the shadows, murmured to one another almost in whispers at the flitting beauty of the sight.
Is a skating carnival a team sport, or a sport for the individual? One may ask that question about almost every aspect of physical education and play. Personal beauty and prowess for the individual, or companionable enjoyment and stimulating rhythm with the group and with the outside world: which is the central gain? Ideally there is a balance. But whichever goal with a given college girl may seem the primary incentive, there is always one incidental object to be attained, a good thing that will in later years stand by in unquestionable value: namely, health.