Fifteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

This paper addresses changes in how colleges and universities in the United States controlled and regulated the physical body of students through requirements in physical education, health and hygiene between 1900 and 1975. Using course catalogs from women’s colleges, historically black colleges and universities, Jesuit colleges, public state colleges, and elite private colleges, I find that while physical education became incorporated in the college curriculum broadly by the beginning of the 20th century, the type of control and regulation differed by conceptions of the student and by race, gender, and social class over time. Drawing on Foucault, I argue that the emergence of physical education and health requirements at colleges and universities was undergirded by disciplinary power of new fields of knowledge on the body. However, over the twentieth century, requirements change based on the status of students in broader society based on gender, social class, and race.