| Chapter 1: | The Uncorseted Bostonian: Health, Physical Culture, and Dress Reform for Women in Nineteenth-Century Boston |
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Plate 1. Photograph of Boston c. 1860. Boston Public Library, Print Department.
on important issues such as poverty and abolition, they gained organizational and leadership skills. Moving toward the end of the nineteenth century, the role of women and their relationship to their minds, spirits, and bodies underwent a radical shift that eventually cleared the way for Boston's first schools of expressive dance.
Female educators and activists acknowledged that there was a health crisis among women early in the nineteenth century. The medical profession blamed this health crisis on the belief that individuals were born with a finite amount of energy.2 Women were particularly bound by this principle due to menstruation and childbirth. Menstruation was treated as a medical illness, and women were taught to perceive themselves as invalids during their monthly cycle. The menstrual “wave” was believed to render women unstable and prone to mental illness and derangement.3 As young