Margaret H’Doubler: The Legacy of America's Dance Education Pion ...

work because she is central to the history of dance in American education. To better understand her place in this complex story I have dug deep into H’Doubler’s life and published a number of papers on her work. In, A History of Dance in American Higher Education: Dance and the American University (2000), I devote a separate chapter to Margaret H’Doubler. She deserves singular attention. Her’s was a unique history and contribution to dance in the academy.

Yet, even though I consider myself well informed about Margaret H’Doubler’s life and work, there is much I still don’t know about her. Most of what has been written about H’Doubler—and there’s not a lot out there—has a narrow focus to it and, like the chapter in my own book, largely concerns itself with her period of discovery and early development; the years spanning 1910–1926. In a few doctoral dissertations, and in a limited number of published accounts, one learns little about personal aspects, or the longer history of H’Doubler’s life. Biographical and historical sources focus almost exclusively on H’Doubler’s early work, her teaching, and emerging philosophies. These texts tell us many things, but not much about the breadth of her career, or about the person behind the historic event, the advocacy statement, or the philosophical tract.

I think there are several reasons Margaret H’Doubler’s story has taken on a ‘stock’ sensibility in the references that are made to her work in dance histories and other, related volumes; one of which has to do with the means by which she came to be a dance educator. The story of her evolution from sports coach to dance educator reads like the academic version of a Hollywood script. H’Doubler was a successful and well liked basketball and baseball coach at Wisconsin in the spring of 1916 when she was preparing to take a leave of absence to start graduate study at Columbia University. Her superior, Blanche Trilling, called Margaret into her office and—to me this seems important—Trilling didn’t ask H’Doubler if she would look into what dancing she might bring back to teach in Madison, she told her to do it. In H’Doubler’s own recollection of this event she says: