National Fitness: Reform, Sports, and Leisure

In an age of Social Darwinist concerns about national fitness in the international struggle to survive, middle- and upper-class reformers founded organizations for social improvement. Settlement houses, clinics, and maternal and child health centers sprang up overnight in cities. Young middle- and upper-class men and women, often from universities, eagerly took up residence in poor neighborhoods to study and help the people there. Believing in the scientific approach to solving social problems, the Fabian Society, a small organization established in London in 1884, undertook studies to devise reforms based on planning rather than socialist revolution. In 1893, the Fabians helped found the Labour Party to make social improvement a political cause. Religious faith also shaped these efforts: the Catholic church in Hungary, for example, ministered to those experiencing rural poverty as agriculture came under the stresses of global competition.

To make the poor more fit in a competitive world, philanthropists and government officials intervened in the lives of working-class families as a way to “quicken evolution.” The worry was that the poor, as one reformer put it, “were permanently stranded on lower levels of evolution.” Reformers sponsored centers to provide good medical care and food for children and instructed mothers in child-care techniques, including breast-feeding to promote infant health. Some schools distributed free lunches, medicine, and clothing and inspected the health and appearance of their students. Yet the poor were also pressured to follow new standards they could ill afford, such as finding children respectable shoes, and reformers believed they had the right to enter working-class apartments whenever they chose to inspect them.

A few professionals began to distribute birth-control information in the belief that smaller families could better survive the challenges of urban life. In the 1880s, Aletta Jacobs (1851–1929), a Dutch physician, opened the first birth-control clinic, which specialized in promoting the new, German-invented diaphragm. Jacobs wanted to help women in Amsterdam slums who were worn out by numerous pregnancies. Working-class women used these clinics, and knowledge of birth-control techniques spread by word of mouth among workers. The churches adamantly opposed this trend, and even reformers wondered whether birth control would increase sexual exploitation.

Another government reform effort consisted of legislation barring women from night work and from “dangerous” professions such as florist and bartender—allegedly for health reasons. Even though medical statistics demonstrated that women in even the most strenuous jobs became sick less often than men, lawmakers and workingmen claimed that women were not producing healthy enough children and were stealing jobs from men. Women who had worked in trades newly defined as dangerous were forced to find other, lower-paying jobs or work at home. The new laws did not prevent women from holding jobs, but they made earning a living harder.

As nations competed for territory and global trade, male athletes created sports teams. Soccer, rugby, and cricket matches drew mass audiences that welded the lower and higher classes into an imperial culture. Competitive sports began to be seen as signs of national strength and spirit, as newspapers reported all sorts of new contests, whether they concerned nations vying for colonies or bicyclists participating in cross-country races such as the Tour de France. “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” ran the wisdom of the day, suggesting that the games played in school could mold the strength of an army—an army that competed with those of other nations in pursuit of empire. (See “Seeing History: Anglo-Indian Polo Team.”)

Team sports for men—like civilian military service—helped differentiate male and female spheres and thus promoted a social order based on distinction between the sexes. Reformers introduced exercise classes and gymnastics into schools for girls, often with the idea that these would strengthen them for motherhood and thus help build the nation-state. As knowledge of the world developed, some women began to practice yoga, while wealthy men crossed the empire to challenge themselves with mountain climbing.

Working-class people adopted middle-class habits by joining clubs for such pursuits as bicycling, touring, and hiking. Clubs that sponsored trips often had names like the Patriots or the Nationals, making a clear association between physical fitness and national strength. The emphasis on healthy recreation gave people a greater sense of individual might and promoted an imperial citizenship based less on constitutions and rights than on an individual nation’s exercise of raw power. A farmer’s son in the 1890s boasted that with a bicycle, “I was king of the road, since I was faster than a horse.”