Seeing your way to health: the visual pedagogy of Bess Mensendieck's physical culture system.

This essay examines the images and looking practices central to Bess M. Mensendieck's (c.1866-1959) 'functional exercise' system, as documented in physical culture treatises published in Germany and the United States between 1906 and 1937. Believing that muscular realignment could not occur without seeing how the body worked, Mensendieck taught adult non-athletes to see skeletal alignment and muscular movement in their own and others' bodies. Three levels of looking practices are examined: didactic sequences; penetrating inspection and appreciation of physiological structures; and ideokinetic visual metaphors for guiding movement. With these techniques, Mensendieck's work bridged the body cultures of German Nacktkultur (nudism), American labour efficiency and the emerging physical education profession. This case study demonstrates how sport historians could expand their analyses to include practices of looking as well as questions of visual representation.

Bodies that differ: mid- and upper-class women and the quest for "Greekness" in female bodily culture (1896-1940).

This article discusses different expressions of mid- and upper-class Greek women's use of classical antiquity in relation to female bodily culture. It focuses on two cases, connected with successive phases of the collective women's action in Greece. The first case concerns principally the conjuncture of the Athens Olympic Games of 1896. The games offered the opportunity to the Ladies' Journal, the weekly that gave expression to the first feminist group in Greece and its leading figure, C. Parren, to put forward a discourse which, by constructing a specific image of the ancient Heraia games for 'maidens', 'invents' a specific athletic-competitive 'tradition' on behalf of Greek women of their social class. The second case rejoins the same circle of women principally in the interwar years as leading figures of the Lyceum of Greek Women, the organization which distinguished itself by juxtaposing to the newly formed militant feminist organizations its 'hellenic-worthy' activity, by organizing monumental festivals in the Panathenaic Stadium, which, through displays of 'national' dances - folk and 'ancient' dances - and other ritual events, performed the 'tradition' of the nation from prehistory until today.

[Health instead of gallantry: a paradigm shift in physician's beauty advice in the century of enlightenment]. / Gesundheit statt Galanterie. Der Paradigmenwechsel in ärztlichen Schönheitsratgebern im Jahrhundert der Aufklärung.

The views of femininity and the attempts to standardise it, developed in the 18th century in philosophy, education, literature, theology, anthropology and medicine, have led to intense research in the last years. Such research normally starts with the Enlightenment debates in the second half of the 18th century, but there are interesting sources which allow the tracing of a development over a longer period and which had a wider contemporary readership than any scholarly treatise. These are the popular beauty manuals, which in the German-speaking area started to appear more frequently from the late 17th century on, composed chiefly by physicians who thereby hoped to profit from the growing book and healthcare market. The present article considers the approaches of physicians to female beauty, with special reference to the discontinuities caused by the Enlightenment.