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Physical Culture, Power, and
the Body

During the past decade, there has been an outpouring of books on ‘the body’ in
society, but none has focused as specifically as this one on physical culture – that is,
cultural practices such as sport and dance within which the moving physical body is
central.
The way in which bodies are emblematic of the social, mediate biological and
social processes, are invested with power, and create social and cultural power are
themes running throughout the book. It is intended to challenge old certainties about
the body and physical culture and to investigate changing knowledge about the body
and the ways in which it has been, and is, experienced, understood and transformed.
Every essay in the collection throws light on how the body in physical culture is
assigned meaning and influences identity.
Throughout the book, questions are raised about the character of the body, spe-
cifically the relations between the ‘natural’ body, the ‘constructed’ body and the
‘alien’ or ‘virtual’ body. The themes of the book are wide in scope, including:

• physical culture and the fascist body

• sport and the racialised body
• sport, medicine, health and the culture of risk
• the female Muslim sporting body, power, and politics
• technological bodies and virtual women
• experiencing the disabled sporting body
• embodied exhibitions of striptease and sport
• the social logic of sparring
• sport, girls and the neoliberal body.

Physical Culture, Power, and the Body aims to break down disciplinary boundaries in
its theoretical approaches and its readership. The authors themselves come from
different disciplinary backgrounds, demonstrating the widespread topicality of
physical culture and the body. Their very varied contributions highlight the
complexities, contradictions, and very indeterminacy of the body in physical
culture.

Jennifer Hargreaves is Visiting Professor of Sport and Gender Politics at Brighton

University, UK.

Patricia Vertinsky is Professor of Human Kinetics and Distinguished University

Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Routledge Critical Studies in Sport
Series Editors: Jennifer Hargreaves and Ian McDonald
University of Brighton

The Routledge Critical Studies in Sport series aims to lead the way in developing the
multi-disciplinary field of Sport Studies by producing books that are interrogative,
interventionist and innovative. By providing theoretically sophisticated and empiric-
ally grounded texts, the series will make sense of the changes and challenges facing
sport globally. The series aspires to maintain the commitment and promise of the
critical paradigm by contributing to a more inclusive and less exploitative culture of
sport.

Also available in this series:

Understanding Lifestyle Sports

Consumption, identity and difference
Edited by Belinda Wheaton

Why Sports Morally Matter

William J Morgan

Fastest, Highest, Strongest

A critique of high-performance sport
Rob Beamish and Ian Ritchie

Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory

Edited by Jayne Caudwell
Physical Culture, Power, and
the Body

Edited by Jennifer Hargreaves

and Patricia Vertinsky
First published 2007
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2007 selection and editorial matter, Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia
Vertinsky; individual chapters, the contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Physical culture, power, and the body / edited by Jennifer Hargreaves
and Patricia Vertinsky.
p. cm – (Routledge critical studies in sport)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Physical education and training—Social aspects. 2. Sports—Social
aspects. 3. Body, Human—Social aspects. I. Hargreaves, Jennifer,
1937–II. Vertinsky, Patricia Anne, 1942– III. Series.
GV342.27.H37 2006
306.4′83–dc22 2006015082

ISBN10: 0–415–36351–9 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–415–36352–7 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–01465–0 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–36351–8 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–36352–5 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–01465–3 (ebk)
Contents

List of illustrations vii

Notes on contributors viii
Acknowledgements xi
Series editors’ preface xiii

1 Introduction 1
J E N N I F E R H A RG R E AV E S A N D PAT R I C I A V E RT I N S K Y

2 Movement practices and fascist infections: from dance under

the swastika to movement education in the British primary school 25
PAT R I C I A V E RT I N S K Y

3 Political somatics: fascism, physical culture, and the sporting body 52

IAN McDONALD

4 Sport, exercise, and the female Muslim body: negotiating

Islam, politics, and male power 74
J E N N I F E R H A RG R E AV E S

5 Producing girls: Empire, sport, and the neoliberal body 101

L E S L I E H E Y WO O D

6 Entertaining femininities: the embodied exhibitions of

striptease and sport, 1950–1975 121
B E C K I L . RO S S

7 The social logic of sparring: on the body as practical strategist 142

LO Ï C WAC Q UA N T

8 Disabled bodies and narrative time: men, sport, and spinal

cord injury 158
A N D R E W C . S PA R K E S A N D B R E T T S M I T H
vi Contents
9 ‘It’s not about health, it’s about performance’: sport
medicine, health, and the culture of risk in Canadian sport 176
N A N C Y T H E B E RG E

10 Welcome to the ‘sportocracy’: ‘race’ and sport after innocence 195

GAMAL ABDEL-SHEHID

11 Race and athletics in the twenty-first century 208

JOHN HOBERMAN

12 Technologized bodies: virtual women and transformations in

understandings of the body as natural 232
K AT E O ’ R I O R DA N

Index 253
Illustrations

4.1 Rakia Al-Gassra from Bahrain in the 100-metre heats at the

Athens Olympics, 2004 87
5.1 The GoGirlGo! homepage, www.gogirlgo.com 108
7.1 Busy Louie sparring with Ashante 145
12.1 ‘Digital beauties’, as dubbed by Wiedemann (2001) in a book
of the same name, which catalogues such virtual women 236
12.2 Digital Beauties, book cover 2 237
Contributors

Gamal Abdel-Shehid is Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology

and Health Science at York University, Canada. His teaching and research
interests include cultural studies of sport and leisure, popular culture in
the black Diaspora, as well as queer and gender studies. He is the author
of Who Da’ Man? Black Masculinities and Sporting Cultures.
Jennifer Hargreaves is Visiting Professor of Sport and Gender Politics at
the University of Brighton, in the UK. Among her many publications are
the edited text, Sport, Culture and Ideology (1982); Sporting Females: Critical
Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports (1994), awarded the
best sports sociology book of the year by the North American Society of
Sports Sociology; and Heroines of Sport: the Politics of Difference and Iden-
tity (2000). In 2006, she received the Max and Reet Howell Award from the
North American Society for Sport History (NASSH). Jennifer is joint
editor of the book series, Routledge Critical Studies in Sport and co-editor
of this book Physical Culture, Power, and the Body. She has worked as a
guest professor in Germany, Hong Kong and Japan, lectures in venues
around the world, does editorial work for journals and publishers, and
consultancy work for sport organisations and the media.
Leslie Heywood is Professor of English and Sport Studies at State University
of New York, Binghamton. She is the author of, among others, Built
to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon, Dedication to Hunger: The
Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture and Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy
of Women’s Bodybuilding, and the sports memoir, Pretty Good for a Girl.
John Hoberman has been active in sports studies and sports journalism for
thirty years. He is the author of Sport and Political Ideology (1984); The
Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics and the Moral Order (1986); Mortal Engines:
The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (1992); Dar-
win’s Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the
Myth of Race (1997); and Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia,
Doping (2005). He is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of
Texas where he has taught courses on Race and Sport, and Race and
 Contributors ix
Medicine. Since 2001, he has been a visiting researcher in doping studies
at the University of Southern Denmark.
Ian McDonald teaches sociology, politics and sport policy at the University
of Brighton, UK. He has published widely on race and anti-racism in
sport, the sporting body in India, and on the politics of sport policy. Ian is
co-editor with Jennifer Hargreaves of the Routledge Critical Studies in Sport
book series.
Kate O’Riordan is on a research secondment at the Centre for the Economic
and Social Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University, for three years,
to work on the Flagship Project, Media, Culture and Genomics. She is
seconded from the University of Sussex, where she is a Lecturer in Media
Studies. Her research background is in digital media, and internet research
and she has published on research ethics in this field. Previous work has
included the representations of gendered bodies, technologies, sexualities
and queer theory across a range of sites. She is currently working on
intersections between biotechnology and information technology in media
discourses. Recent book chapters include (2005) ‘Changing Cyberspaces:
Dystopia and Technological Excess’; with J. Doyle (2002) ‘Virtually Vis-
ible: Female Cyberbodies and the Medical Imagination’; (2002) ‘Windows
on the Web: The Female Body and the Web Camera; (2001) ‘Playing With
Lara in Virtual Space’.
Beckie Ross is jointly appointed in Women’s Studies and Sociology at
University of British Columbia, Canada. Her teaching and research areas
include feminist anti-racist qualitative methods, historical sociology, the
family and nation-making, critical sexuality studies and critical sport
studies. She has published articles in Labour/Travail, Atlantis, Journal of
Canadian Studies, Journal of Women’s History, and the Journal of the History
of Sexuality. A chapter on women’s athletics in the 1940s and 50s appears
in Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument, Modernism
(2004), and the chapter in this book is part of a larger book manuscript
entitled The Shake, the Rattle and the Pole: Vancouver’s Striptease Past.
Brett Smith is a lecturer in qualitative research and a member of the Qualita-
tive Research Unit in the School of Health and Sport Sciences at the
University of Exeter, UK. His current research focuses on men, sport
and spinal cord injury. He is developing work on the lived experiences
of becoming disabled through sport and the storied reconstruction of
selves; the possibilities of narrative inquiry; and the pull of the body in
storytelling.
Andrew C. Sparkes is Professor and Director of the Qualitative Research
Unit in the School of Health and Sport Sciences, Exeter University, UK.
His research interests include: performing bodies and identity/subjectivity
formation; interrupted body projects and the narrative (re)construction
x Contributors
of self; sporting auto/biographies; and the lives of marginalized individuals
and groups. He seeks to explore the lived experience of embodiment via
multiple forms of representation. He has published widely on these issues
and is author of Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity: A Qualitative
Journey (2002). He is also editor of Auto/Biography: An International and
Interdisciplinary Journal.
Nancy Theberge is Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where
she holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Kinesiology
and Sociology. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. She has published widely in the sociology of
sport and the sociology of the body, and is the author of Higher Goals:
Women’s Ice Hockey and the Politics of Gender (State University of New
York Press, 2000), winner of the North American Society for the
Sociology of Sport Outstanding Book Award in 2001. She served as the
Editor of the Sociology of Sport Journal from 2002 to 2004 and in 2005
received the Distinguished Service Award from the North American
Society for the Sociology of Sport. Her current research is on the
medicalization of the sporting body and the system of sport medicine
professions in Canada.
Patricia Vertinsky is Professor of Human Kinetics and Distinguished
University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her
research programme focuses on the history of the gendered body, espe-
cially in relation to health and physical activity. She is the author of The
Eternally Wounded Woman: Doctors and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth
Century (1990, 1994); Sites of Sport; Space, Place and Experience (2004, with
John Bale), Disciplining the Body in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument and
Modernism (2004, with Sherry McKay). Her ongoing projects include an
investigation of Dartington Hall and a remarkable series of educators of
the body who passed through there during the 1930s, and a study of the
social construction of obesity in the twentieth century. She is past presi-
dent of the North American Society of Sport History and Vice-President
of the International Society for Physical Education and Sport History.
Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California,
Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris.
His interests span comparative urban marginality, incarnation, ethnoracial
domination, the penal state, and social theory and the politics of reason.
His recent books include Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer
(2004); The Mystery of Ministry: Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics
(ed.) (2005); Das Janusgesicht der Ghettos und andere Essays (2006); Parias
urbains: Ghetto, banlieues, État (2006); and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the
Rise of Neoliberal Penality (2006). His ongoing investigations include a
carnal anthropology of desire and a historical sociology of racial rule on
three continents. He is co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary
journal Ethnography.
Acknowledgements

Our collaboration in editing this book was a natural outcome of our shared
interest in the significance of the body in sport and exercise and of our
professional communications and friendship over many years. Patricia was
able to use her position as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter
Wall Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia to
host a special conference in October 2004 for all the contributors. Financial
support for the conference from the Social Science and Humanities Research
Council of Canada and the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies was
much appreciated.
Particular thanks go to Patricia’s two research assistants, Christiane Job
and Ellexis Boyle, who helped with the planning of the conference and were
on call throughout the event to make sure that everything ran smoothly and
all our practical needs were catered for. All the people who came to the
conference from the University of British Columbia and other local uni-
versities joined actively into the discussions about the book, resulting in a
creative exchange of ideas.
Several of the chapters in the book are rich with original data resulting
from interviews and communications with people who were generous with
their time and willing to provide sensitive and personal information. We are
grateful to all the research participants and to other people and organizations
that facilitated the research processes.
Thanks also go to all the contributors to this text who made the difficult
job of editing manageable by responding to requests and queries speedily
and in good spirit; and we are most grateful to Mabel Yee who so efficiently
did all the secretarial work, putting the book into the correct format and
collating the original complete draft that was sent to Routledge.
Finally, our thanks go to Chris Crump for producing original art work for
the cover of the book. He has symbolically captured some of the themes that
run through the book – the relationship between the ‘natural body’, the
constructed body, and the cyborg body in the main image, and the relation
between the body and society in the depictions of historical sporting statues
around a stadium for elite events.
Series editors’ preface

Our bodies are implicated in everything we do – in birth, in death, in work

and in leisure, whether we are young or old, rich or poor, men or women,
heterosexual or bisexual, able-bodied or disabled, from the developed or the
developing world, religious or atheist, members of a elite sports teams, or
people who prefer hill climbing, and everything in between. These multiple
identities, which are shaped by the different divisions and layers of society
and our relations within them, are fundamentally and irredeemably
embodied identities. A fascination with such infinite complexities of
embodiment has spread in recent years throughout academia and is reflected
in an escalation of publications about the social and cultural meanings
attached to our bodies.
This collection of essays makes a key contribution to the field, being the
first to concentrate specifically on physical culture by focusing on very
diverse activities in which the physical, moving body is the primary focus. As
co-editors of the Routledge Critical Studies in Sport series, we are delighted
to both be included in its production: Jennifer Hargreaves as co-editor with
Patricia Vertinsky and author of one of the chapters, and Ian McDonald as
author of another chapter. We were both with the other contributors at a
seminar in Vancouver in October 2004, convened specifically to encourage
discussion and the exchange of ideas about the book’s orientation and con-
tent. This is the second edited text in the Series where the contributors have
been able to meet together prior to publication so that the book is more than
a loose collection of essays, but one that has common themes and
orientations.
So how, throughout this publication, do we make sense of the multiple
images, complexities, and contradictions of disparate topics and fields, such
as the body politics of fascism and Islam; the depiction of the bodies of
young women and striptease artists in history and the present day; personal
accounts of bodily feelings in boxing and disability; links between the nature
of sport, the body and ‘race’; the manipulation of, and dangers to the body
in elite sport; and representations of the technologized body? The obvious
starting point was to demonstrate the links between the personal body and
the social body and to consider the significance of relations of power – in
xiv Series editors’ preface
other words, in order to understand the historical and social construction of
different bodies in different contexts, a key concern was to investigate links
between the minute and personal aspects of the physical body, large-scale
social arrangements, and the organization of power.
Another concern – which relates to all the books in our Series – was to
link empirical material to theoretical ideas. In some chapters particular the-
orists and concepts are explicit, in other contributions, they are implicit.
Common to them all is the critical stance – a rejection of essentially descrip-
tive narrative, a deconstruction of the taken-for-granted, and a quest for the
complexities of embodiment. The relation between ‘nature’ and culture,
rather than a separation of the two, is another feature that runs through the
book, as does the sense of contradiction between the emancipatory and
repressive tendencies of the body.
If there is one particular characteristic of the book that most stands out it
is that the human body – however ‘natural’, customary, and staid it might
seem to each of us as individuals who live in it – is utterly indeterminate with
continually shifting and irregular properties. In line with the understanding
that the body is socially constructed, this book turns on its head the separ-
ation of Nature and Culture and the conventional mind-body dualism of
Cartesian thought by providing examples of ways in which the body medi-
ates biological processes and is essentially cultural and social. It provides
confirmation that bodies are no longer exclusively the property of science
and medicine, and the focus specifically on physical culture is an unusual and
fascinating way of integrating physical and social bodies.
Given the focus on sport, it could be said that all books in this Series are
organically linked to the body, but we think that a book that has the body as
its raison d’être is important. It verifies that embodiment is partial and
biased and highlights the significance of the body to issues of liberation and
domination. We hope that this collection makes a worthy and distinctive
contribution to analysing the politics of the (moving) body. Certainly, it is
clear that studies of social experiences and manipulations of the body are
needed for us to understand better what in the past we have taken for granted
as something so personal such that we think we know all about it.

Jennifer Hargreaves (University of Brighton)

Ian McDonald (University of Brighton)
SERIES’ EDITORS
1 Introduction
Jennifer Hargreaves and
Patricia Vertinsky

In October 2004, contributors to this book met together in the beautiful sur-
roundings of the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies at the University
of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.1 As news of the meeting and the
topic spread around the university, what was initially conceived of as a closed
event blossomed into a conference with the same title as the book – Physical
Culture, Power, and the Body – that included faculty and graduate students
as well as some outsiders from other local universities. The attraction was
‘the body’.
Except for the work of anthropologists, where the body has been promin-
ent since the nineteenth century, very few academics from other fields have
shown an interest in the significance of the body and embodiment until
recent years. Sport historians and sociologists were some of the first, writing
about the sporting body since the 1970s,2 but it was Bryan Turner who first
showed a concern to develop ‘a genuine sociology of the body’ when he
wrote The Body and Society in 1984. During the decade that followed, leading
up to the publication of the second edition of The Body in Society in 1996,
Turner claimed that there had been ‘a flood of publications concerned with
the relationship between the body and society, the issue of embodiment with
relation to theories of social action, the body and feminist theory, and the
body and consumer culture’ (p. 1). And now, another decade later, there is
a generalized and enthusiastic recognition of the cultural and social signifi-
cance of embodiment in every aspect of life and culture among scholars
throughout the humanities and the social sciences, as well as in areas of
science and technology (Featherstone and Turner 1995: 2; Shilling 1993,
2005), paralleled by an explosion of interest in the body in popular culture.
Interest in the body is everywhere. The body matters.
This collection is part of this trend, but it has a particular orientation
that sets it apart from other publications for it focuses upon the neglected
issue of the body-in-movement. The outpouring of writings on the body has
had little to say specifically about physical culture (Kirk 1999), which is the
focus of this book. By physical culture we are referring to those activities
where the body itself – its anatomy, its physicality, and importantly its forms
of movement – is the very purpose, the raison d’être, of the activity. The
2 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
chapters in this book are concerned with a preoccupation with the body, a
cultivation of the body by means of motor activity – in other words, our
focus is on the active body; in the case of disability, the body that once was
active (Chapter 8), and in the case of the technologized body, one that sug-
gests humanity and immanent movement (Chapter 12). The book makes
reference to a range of activities, including dance (Chapter 2), female strip-
tease (Chapter 6), and various sports and other forms of physical recreation
and exercise.
The different chapters cover different historical periods and social con-
texts, but a key feature of them all is the relation between the personal and
the social body. This is fundamentally a relation of power linked to other key
people, ethnicities, genders, histories, ideologies, religions, institutions, and
politics. Taking account of the personal and the social derives from social
constructionism, an approach which ‘interprets the human body as a system
of signs which stand for and express relations of power’ (B. Turner 1996: 27)
and uses deconstructivist techniques – essentially the techniques of ques-
tioning and critiquing the taken-for-granted in order to uncover mythologies
and conflicts. B. Turner (ibid.) argues that, ‘Deconstructivist techniques, anti-
foundationalist epistemology and feminist theory have provided powerful
tools for treating the body as a problematic text, that is as a fleshly discourse
within which power relations in society can be interpreted and sustained.
The critique of the text of the body therefore leads into a critique of power
relations within society.’
In each of the chapters of this book, it is clear that the particular body in
question is socially constructed – influenced, changed, adapted, reproduced
according to social relations and social structures – and that integral to these
processes are unequal relations of power. Even in the case of the paralyzed
body which is physically unable to move and therefore appears to be resistant
to social constructionism, in the very personal accounts of disabled ex-rugby
players in Chapter 8, we can see how their experiences of bodily impairment
are part of culture, how they are linked to the world outside their bodies by
the immediacy of physiological and practical needs, and how their sense of
time and feelings of loss are mediated by personal circumstances as well as
the wider politics of disability. This relation between individual body pro-
cesses and social processes has influenced the writing of each of the chapters
in the book.
The nexus between the personal, the social, and relations of power is
integral to the argument in Chapter 10 that the character of postmodern
sport spills over into other aspects of personal and social life in society,
described for this reason as a ‘sportocracy’. The personal–social–power link
is also very obvious in the case of embodiment and political interventions –
such as in Nazi Germany, referred to in Chapters 2 and 3 – in the context of
which two individuals, Rudolph Laban and Max Schmeling, negotiate polit-
ical strictures and construct the dancing body and the boxing body, respect-
ively. In the context of Islam (discussed in Chapter 4), politico-religious
 Introduction 3
ideologies, tied to patriarchal domination, ensure that the personal lives and
bodies of Muslim women are circumscribed by political and social structures
of power; and in Chapter 11 the discussion focuses on how the concrete force
of racist ideology is a major influence on the individual sporting careers of
black athletes. The link between the personal and the social in the other
chapters is made through examining: (i) the political and social processes that
enable sport medicine to claim the athletic body as an object of practice and
how medicalization is implicated in the construction of athletic identities
(Chapter 9); (ii) the way in which the individual bodies of young women in
the USA are represented in the publicity material of the Women’s Sports
Foundation (Chapter 5); (iii) the social and cultural milieu of post-war
Canada that was the location for commercialized female striptease artists and
elite sportswomen (Chapter 6); (iv) the ways in which technologies are inter-
twined with physical bodies by means of visual digital culture (Chapter 12);
and, finally, (v) the experiences and attitudes of prize fighters in the USA –
especially those concerning the boxer’s body – that are influenced by the
different dimensions of the boxing subculture and the social world outside
(Chapter 7).
The examples of the body in physical culture outlined above are wide
ranging. Each of the chapters confirms for us that the body has undeni-
able biological and physiological characteristics that appear as ‘natural’ and
indisputable in commonsense thinking, but that these very personal and
personalized beliefs are only experienced and understood within a social
context. In other words, there is a clear relationship between the anatomy of
the body and social roles, so that our bodies are at the same time part of
nature and part of culture.
The concept of the ‘natural’ body is deconstructed throughout the book.
In some of the chapters there is a very real sense in which the ‘original’ body
is manipulated. Elite sport provides a context in which, through numerous
performance-enhancing techniques, the character of the body is dramati-
cally altered, appearing to be inauthentic and ‘unnatural’. The most extreme
examples of such bodily alienation took place in the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) during the cold war, when a systematic hormonal high-
dosage doping programme was promoted by the government. Women and
adolescent girls were targeted because the amazing improvements in their
sport performances greatly increased the medal count and national prestige.
But very damaging side effects were widespread, grossly and often irreversibly
changing body morphology and function. Girls experienced strong virilizing
side effects, induced ambiguous sex characteristics, including androgenous
facial features, excessive chest and pubic hair growth, lowering of the
voice, and disturbances in libido. Liver damage, long-term amenorrhea, acne,
and severe gynaecological disorders were regular occurrences (Franke and
Berendonk 1997). The case of the GDR athletes is extreme, but other less
damaging body-changing and performance-enhancing techniques remain
endemic in elite sport. Although the medicalization of Canadian elite
4 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
athletes, described in Chapter 9, is a far less dramatic and more ‘humane’
example of intense sport training procedures, claimed to be in keeping with
the traditional amateur ideals of fair competition between ‘natural’ athletes,
it is another level of the same ‘culture of risk’ based on body modification.
Grosz (1994: x) claims that, ‘The body has . . . remained colonized through
the discursive practices of the natural sciences, particularly the discourses of
biology and medicine.’ If a continuum were drawn between the idealized
‘natural’ body at one end and the most extreme form of constructed body,
then the technologized, virtual, alien body described in Chapter 12, would
be at the latter end. Even in the case of cyborg bodies, there is a sense in
which they are ‘flesh and blood bodies’ because they are imbued with
human-like features, poses, clothes, and actions, so that there is confusion
about what is ‘real’ and what is imaginery. Advances in technology have
blurred the boundaries between body and machine. For example, in the case
of amputee athletes with prosthetic legs, there is further confusion about
authenticity and ownership of the body. The issue of body modification is
not insular to physical culture and sport – society would be unrecognisable
without the constant and systematic application of technology to bodies of
all types and backgrounds and in all contexts. Shilling (2005: 173) argues that:

The idea of ‘technological bodies’ . . . suggests not only that the work-
based and other contexts in which we live have become more techno-
logically dominated than ever before, but that productive techniques and
knowledge have moved inwards, to invade, reconstruct and increasingly
dominate the very contents of the body. This raises the possibility that
the spatial and functional arrangements of the organic properties of our
bodies have been altered in line with the structures of society, and to an
extent which challenges conventional notions of what it is to be and to
have a body.

The idea of the ‘natural’ body is a mythology, but it is an idea that is hung
onto and reproduced, especially in contexts where the biological is used as an
explanation for cultural inequalities and discrimination. Defined as biological
determinism, this is a process that occurs in relation to gender and ‘race’
differences. In spite of evidence to the contrary, and for different reasons,
both women and black Afro-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans are considered
to be close to ‘nature’. Over the years, their bodies have become the properties
of science and medicine, tied to the idea of a ‘fixed’ ‘natural’ state whose
sporting and exercising activities have been understood in terms of causal
biological explanations. The female body has been conceptualized and repre-
sented as ‘natural’ flesh embued with a caring, maternal, and gentle character,
an identification that is used to restrict women’s cultural roles. For example,
Chapter 4 illustrates how in establishment male discourse, the association of
Muslim women with nature is used to control their bodies and limit women’s
involvement in sport and exercise. The black male body has also been aligned
 Introduction 5
with nature, but differently, through its association with brute strength, phys-
icality, and innate athletic superiority, doubled with an implied intellectual
inferiority. Examples of racial discrimination based on stereotypes of black
male bodies in sport and the ideology of ‘natural’ superior black athletic
prowess are explored in Chapter 11. There are similarities about the natural-
izing of bodies in Chapter 10, where the commodification of the black body
and black culture are explored as intrinsic to the idea of a ‘sportocracy’,
characterized as a ‘raciological’ structure. It is not the actual biology or physi-
ology of women or black men that is oppressive, but the meaning attached to
their biologies within a specific social system and organization. And there is
an added complexity to our understanding of gendered and racialized bodies.
Gender and ‘race’ are not separate structures of difference, but intersect and
overlap with others, such as age, class, and disability.
Bourdieu (1984) defines embodiment as a bearer of symbolic value that
reflects social divisions – such as class, gender and racial divisions – and is
integral to the maintenance of social inequalities. He uses the term habitus to
describe ‘a system of dispositions’ or ‘a way of being’ that encompasses a
‘predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination’ relating to a person’s
social location (1995: 214). Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, and capital
are very relevant to the sociology of dance, for example, despite the fact
that he has been criticized for not directly addressing performance and
movement experience (Shusterman 2002; Turner and Wainwright 2003). In
the examples of physical culture in this book, we can recognize different
ways in which social divisions based on unequal relations of power and
domination are mediated through the body. Bourdieu maintains that the
specific opposition between masculine and feminine, based on the body,
constitutes ‘the fundamental principle of division of the social and symbolic
world’ (1995: 93).
Specifically in relation to gendered relations of power and domination
in the examples of physical culture referred to in this book, Judith Butler’s
concept of ‘performativity’ is helpful. Performativity refers to the idea
of actively and intimately ‘doing’, ‘sensing’, and ‘living’ gender, which ren-
ders the notion of an innate or imposed gendered self inadequate. Butler
(1993: xv) herself explains that, ‘The view that gender is performative sought
to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manu-
factured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered
stylization of the body.’ So gender for Judith Butler is, like sexuality, not
‘naturally’ ascribed, but a changing social construct, concretely expressed,
but also fluid and changing through public performance. She argues that
discourse produces: ‘the regulatory norms of “sex” (that) work in performa-
tive fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically,
to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service
of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative’ (1993: 2).
All bodies are essentially gendered and racialized in all forms of physical
culture. And all gendered and racialized bodies result from relations of
6 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
power. Because the focus in physical culture is on the body and the ways
in which it moves and performs, the characteristics of masculine in relation
to feminine bodies, and white in relation to black bodies are always visible
and frequently exaggerated. Connell (1987: 85) has shown how ‘The social
definition of men as holders of power is translated not only into mental
body-images and fantasies, but into muscle tensions, posture, the feel and
texture of the body.’ This characterization is especially clear in relation to
the specifically hyper-masculine bodies of boxers portrayed in Chapters 3
and 7, and memories of the muscular and aggressive bodies of white male
rugby players are essential to an understanding of their lived sense of post-
accident disability portrayed in Chapter 8. Sexualized and commodified
femininities are in different ways the focus of Chapters 5 and 6, and we are
introduced to an exaggerated and idealized (and technologized) version of
heterosexual femininity in Chapter 12. Body images of sexualized females
reflect the changed meanings surrounding the body with the demise of
industrial capitalism and the rise of leisure and consumerism society in
which physical culture plays an important role (Davis 1997: 1–2). According
to Baudrillard (1998: 144), it is sexuality itself which is offered for consump-
tion, and he goes on to describe the body as ‘the finest consumer object’ as
follows:

its omnipresence (specifically the omnipresence of the female body . . .)

in advertising, fashion and mass culture; the hygienic, dietetic, thera-
peutic cult which surrounds it, the obsession with youth, elegance,
virility/femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices
attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become
an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological
function from the soul.
(p. 129)

The idea of bodies as objects of salvation is especially relevant to the bodies

of the young women in Chapter 5 who are portrayed as subjects for
improvement in the marketing and publicity material of the WSF in the
USA. Post-industrial culture focuses on physical culture for leisure and
enjoyment, but also for the moral value and personal responsibility of keep-
ing the body young and fit. The equating of fitness with goodness, followed
by success, is signalled as an imperative pathway for the young women who
are targeted. But if the body was not an object of constant attention and
interpretation it could not be effective in this way as a means both of self-
identification and social communication. B. Turner (1996: 27) points out
that, ‘Feminist writers have been concerned to reject the equation of the
good body with the good person as the underlying principle of aesthetics
in contemporary culture.’ Feminist criticism is directed at the constant flow
of commodified, fetishized, and idealized images of heterosexual femininity
that fill new markets, and in particular with the obsession in publicity and
 Introduction 7
advertising material with the explicit sexualization of the female body, often
compared to pornographic representation (Hargreaves 1993).
In an attempt to capture the historical dimension of the body in society,
B. Turner (1996: 1) uses the term ‘somatic society’, ‘namely a society within
which major political and personal problems are both problematized in the
body and expressed through it’. We can see, then, that the body is change-
able, malleable, according to private desires and troubles, public issues, and
political demands. Bodies are part of a signifying process of meaning and
identification. In the case of art and artistic movement such as dance,
B. Turner (2005: 2) further raises the issue of the performing body and the
complex relationship between performance, embodiment, and representa-
tion. Dance, he points out, opens up an important research field in which we
can study connections between the lived body in relation to state formation,
national culture, and globalization. Dance has a natural language by which
human beings convey meaning through organized performances, and it is
this issue that we are drawn to in Chapter 2, which examines how Rudolph
Laban’s movement choirs and modern dance arrangements provided a
powerful means for both celebrating existing social arrangements and cul-
tural ideas and for imagining and advocating new ones. Dance, it is claimed,
is ‘corporeal politics’, bringing people together in rhythmic affinity while
expressing histories and embodied identities through movement (Turner
2005).
In the different forms of physical culture included in the book, we can see
that the private body is made public and understood through its activities,
movements and gestures, clothing and other accoutrements, and as a result
of the social relations intrinsic to the activity. For example, in the case of
the Chicago boxing club described in Chapter 7, the rituals of sparring, the
physical appearance of the boxers, the ‘body language’, and the accompany-
ing social interaction reflect an inner identity and communicate a public
identity. The body has become, par excellence, a means of self-expression,
described by Giddens (1991) as the essence of an ‘identity project’ which, in
high modernity, has become hugely complex, incorporating and producing
multiple identities. T. Turner (1994: 28) suggests that:

This new ‘life politics’ (Giddens 1991) of personal identity has focused
so largely on issues of bodiliness because . . . the appropriation of bodi-
liness, in all its aspects, from sexuality and reproductive capacities to
sensory powers and physical health, strength, and appearance, is the
fundamental matrix, the material infrastructure, so to speak, of the pro-
duction of personhood and social identity. What is at stake in the strug-
gle for control of the body, in short, is control of the social relations of
personal production.

The essential significance of the body lies in the intimate interconnectedness

between the physical and the social dimensions of experience. Who we are,
8 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
how we look and feel, what we do, our relations with others, our hurdles,
struggles and aspirations, the organizations we belong to, and our under-
standing of the social world, are all features of the politics of the body. In
other words, we are embodied in every aspect of our everyday experiences.
Dutton (1995: 11) describes how our lives and identities are centred on our
bodies:

What subject, after all, could be closer – either figuratively or literally –

to our human concerns? The body is the focal point of our individual
identity, in that we not only have but in a sense are our bodies: however
distinct the body may be conceptually from the ‘self’ which experiences
and knows it, that which experiences and knows is by its nature an
embodied self, a self whose social identity and whose location in time
and space are contained and defined by their individual embodiment.

In each contribution to this book it is possible to see how the body symbol-
izes identity at the levels of both the personal and the social; how identity is
constructed within the body, and how representations of the body specific-
ally in physical culture are assigned meaning and influence identity. While
theories relating to the social construction of the body proliferate, creative
ethnographies of embodiment are less plentiful. One of the most graphic
ways of understanding about bodily identities is to listen to personal stories
(Sparkes and Silvennoinen 1999) – a research approach used in a number of
chapters. Participant observation and autobiography are the methods used
in Chapter 7 by Loïc Wacquant, allowing us to ‘get under his skin’ by means
of his very personal, intense, and insightful feelings of body and selfhood
as he works out and spars with professional boxers in a working-class
subculture in Chicago. Andrew Sparkes and Brett Smith interrogate the life-
histories of ex-rugby football players who have suffered spinal cord injuries,
enabling the reader to understand their sense of body alienation and identifi-
cation as disabled. These are methods that explore the connection between
body, self, and identity. In Chapter 6 the very explicit and moving interview
stories of strippers and professional female athletes illustrate clearly various
aspects of identity linked to social differences such as class, ethnicity, femi-
ninity, and sexuality, as well as to their identities as entertainers. Chapter 4
shows quite poignantly how the accounts of some Muslim women tell us
about their struggle for identification and their sense of hybrid identity in
the face of local–global disputes about their bodies. In Chapter 9, interviews
with sport medicine practitioners working with elite Canadian athletes
reveal how they construct their professional identities as they negotiate the
‘dialectic between the cultures of risk and precaution’ and the tensions
between performance and health. Because these very personal stories have
never been told before, they make available to us for the first time specific
embodied practices that would otherwise have been hidden from history.
Furthermore, allowing analysis to evolve from the narratives and locating
 Introduction 9
them in specific contexts and historical periods results in a realistically
authentic understanding of body and identity.
Another aspect of the body that is featured throughout the book is its
very complex and contradictory character. At first glance physical culture
appears to be a free, autonomous activity incorporating the body in ways
that are personally enriching. But as we can see in different chapters, it is
simultaneously a site of constraint and contestation. Referring to con-
temporary times, T. Turner (1994: 46) explains that, ‘The body . . . has
become the focus of fundamental contradictions between the emancipatory
and repressive tendencies of the social, cultural and political order of
contemporary capitalism.’
For Foucault (1979, 1980, 1981), the body is a site of discourses of power,
an object of discipline and control. Burkitt (1999: 45), discusses Foucault’s
use of the term ‘bio-power’ – particularly relevant to Chapter 3 – as follows:

A form of power exerted over the population and over the bodies of
individuals, disciplining them and regulating them, and turning them into
rational and calculable machines. Through bio-power, life is brought into
the field of political calculation and manipulation and there develops a
bio-politics of the population, fascism being one of the most extreme
examples.

Referring to consumer culture, Foucault noted a shift in control of the body

from control by repression to control by stimulation. The best examples in
this book are Chapter 5, in which young women are enticed to exercise with
the promise of securing well-toned, sexually attractive, good-looking and
healthy bodies; and Chapter 9, where the chance of an Olympic medal will
attract athletes to the rigours of elite training procedures at the expense of
positive health and well-being. But Foucault fails to engage fully with the idea
of the body as the source of consciousness, subjective will, and activity – the
‘lived’ body. Referring to Foucault, Csordas (1994: 12) asks the question,
‘What about the body as a function of being-in-the-world, as in the work of
Merleau-Ponty (1996) for whom embodiment is the existential condition of
possibility for culture and self?’ Lyon and Barbalet (1994: 50) introduce
the concept of ‘embodied agency’, suggesting that, ‘the current interest in the
body in social theory generally fails to emphasize the body as agent’ and ‘The
human capacity for social agency, to collectively and individually contribute
to the making of the social world, comes precisely from the person’s lived
experience of embodiment.’
The examples of physical culture introduced in this book confirm the
argument that although the body is subject to social power, it is not simply a
passive recipient of it. For example, in Chapter 4, some Muslim women have
negotiated for all-female venues and events in order to take part in sports of
their choice, while other Muslim women have re-interpreted the Qur’an in
order to take part in mainstream international competitions. In Chapter 6,
10 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
both the striptease artists and top sportswomen articulate clearly how they
present themselves in their respective activities in order to suit themselves.
Embodied agency is accompanied by meanings, associated with desires, needs,
and emotions. Participants cannot engage in physical culture simply as and
when they like; they are constrained by circumstances and social inequalities,
by ideologies, politics, and in ways that relate directly to the physical body.
But agency arises from within regulatory practices and the body in physical
culture can also be a site of relative freedom and personal empowerment.
Frank (1991: 47) makes the important point that:

People construct and use their bodies, though they do not use them in
conditions of their own choosing, and their constructions are overlaid
with ideologies. But these ideologies are not fixed; as they are repro-
duced in body techniques and practices, so they are modified. The ‘gov-
ernment of the body’ is never fixed but always contains oppositional
spaces.

The idea that embodiment is never neutral should be held in mind through-
out the reading of this book. It is an idea that is confirmed through examples
of the dialectic between body and society and between agency and constraint
in specific instances of physical culture. The following descriptions of the
chapters signal the range of usages of the body in physical culture covered
in the book and the complexities of embodiment in physical culture in
different historical, social, and political contexts.
With their focus on the dancing and sporting body, Chapters 2 and 3 both
take on, in different ways, Foucault’s complaint that the term ‘fascism’ is in
need of historical analysis. ‘There lies beneath the affirmation of the desire
of the masses for fascism a historical problem which we have yet to secure
the means of resolving’ (Foucault 1980: 139).

Chapter themes and outlines

In Chapter 2, Vertinsky points out that while Susan Sontag in ‘Fascinating
Fascism’ (1974: 79) has taken Leni Riefenstahl to task for her efforts to cast
herself during Germany’s Nazi years in the role of the individualist-artist
defying philistine bureaucrats and censorship by the patron state, bio-
graphers of Germany’s dance master Rudolf Laban have been more reticent.
By all accounts Rudolf von Laban was an extraordinary man: a visionary,
mystic, artist, modern dancer, choreographer, womanizer, charismatic teacher
and theorist. Like Riefenstahl, who herself took classes in creative dance,
he worked closely and willingly with the Nazis. It was only when he incurred
Goebbel’s displeasure on the eve of the 1936 Olympics that he felt compelled
to flee, finding refuge at Dartington Hall in southwestern England.
In her chapter, Vertinsky examines Laban’s later career in England and his
impact upon the gendered world of physical education and modern dance in
 Introduction 11
British schools, while questioning the influence of his professional relation-
ship with the Nazi leadership upon his approach to modern dance. Sontag
suggests that, with the turn of the cultural wheel, it perhaps no longer mat-
ters whether Riefenstahl’s Nazi past is viewed as acceptable or not, or
whether we believe that her stated concern for simple beauty underlay all
her work. Vertinsky argues, however, along with McDonald in the following
chapter, that the extent to which the dancing, or sporting body, hinders or
harbours a fascist aesthetic and ideology is worthy of investigation. She
suggests that a critical view of Laban’s work alerts us to provocative ways in
which expressive movement and dance might be viewed as forms of kinaes-
thetic imagination capable of transmitting cultural (and political) memory
through movement. From this perspective dance creators and their creations
can be understood as unavoidably taking part in contests over the construc-
tion of gender and race, class and age, as well as struggles between political
theories and regimes.
Laban elaborated the notion that modern dance could be a vehicle for
conveying important ideas through choreographed public festivals and move-
ment choirs which were ready receptacles for fascist propaganda and expres-
sions of party devotion in the Third Reich. Is it possible, Vertinsky asks, that
the creative dance activities promoted by Laban and his devoted assistants
for British children during the postwar years were similarly infected with
fascist aesthetics, or did the potency of his philosophy fade in the every-
day context of the primary school gymnasium and the changing realities of
educational policy and practice in the 1960s?
In Chapter 3, McDonald’s interest in fascism centres on the male sporting
body. Fascism certainly took the sporting body seriously, forcing consider-
ation of the extent to which the dominant culture of sport autonomously
but systematically produces bodily dispositions and cultural traits that are
prone to fascist aesthetics and ideologies. This is a much rehearsed debate
(Tannsjo 1998; Holowchak 2005), as are those drawing on issues surrounding
the role of physical culture in Weimar and Nazi Germany, but McDonald
provides a provocative and well-grounded analysis of the political somatics
of fascism which shows us how fascism was, and continues to be, used as a
powerful epithet in political debate.
To support his central contention that the sporting body is not inherently
‘fascistoid’ but rather takes on an ideological form that in particular contexts
can either serve or undermine the political culture of fascism, he draws upon
the example of boxer Max Schmeling whose triumphal victory over Joe
Louis in New York in 1936 became the stuff of legends. Indeed, the Louis–
Schmeling fights, with their extraordinary cultural and political significance,
have been analyzed more than any other boxing matches in history. Shrewd
enough never to have joined the Nazi party, in part because he was depending
upon American (i.e. Jewish-managed) boxing for a lucrative career, Schmeling
benefited from the patronage of the highest-ranking Nazis and the admir-
ation of Hitler. Like Laban, he readily gave the Nazi salute and never
12 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
appeared to have agonized over anything at the time. Till recently, their bio-
graphers have given them both what Margolick (2005) calls ‘an undeserved
free pass’, or have suffered what Judt (2005) claims is a case of Waldheimer’s
disease.3 McDonald accepts that Schmeling was, at different points, both
within and outside the Nazi camp and that this ambiguity shows how the
sporting body possesses a degree of autonomy that enables a range of pos-
sible articulations with fascism. From this perspective, the role of physical
culture and sport in postwar contemporary fascisms remains a critical focus
for students of the body. Fascism, he reminds us importantly, resonates
inside our democracies as well as outside them.
Hargreaves continues the focus on politics and the body in Chapter 4.
She addresses the sporting possibilities of Muslim women at a time when
in-depth and nuanced understandings of the cultures and peoples of the
Middle East are much needed by Western readers. She shows how the bodies
of Muslim women in sport are experienced and mediated through different
ideological interpretations of Islam, within the particular political arrange-
ments of specific countries in ways that are coloured in varying degrees by
patriarchal relations of power and control. This is a challenge given that
struggles within Islamic societies over political, cultural, and social differ-
ences ‘are entangled within a history of imperialism and resentments against
a modernity dominated by the same powers that have colonized the many
worlds of Islam for more than a century (and continue to do so with the
complicity of native elites)’ (Dirlik 2005: 18). Diversity within Islam is both
spatial and temporal – indeed Islam stands out for the impossibility of locat-
ing it within identifiable boundaries (Huntington 1997). Hargreaves warns
against monolithic assumptions about Islam and Muslim women’s identities
and their bodies, and reflects on one of the central questions facing women
in Muslim societies: combining Islam and modernity without embracing
Westernization in the creation of alternative modernities (see also, Ozyegin
2006).
An important issue for Hargreaves lies in the relationship between Islam,
women’s bodies, and feminism. The embeddedness of women’s bodies in all
areas of social life, she suggests, leads to a heightened self-consciousness
among Muslim women about the ways in which they think about and use
their bodies – specifically whether they want to or are able to enjoy the
pleasures of sport and improved health through exercise. Feminists have
generally not seen sport as a major theatre for gender politics and cultural
transformation and this is particularly the case in Islamic societies where
Muslim feminists have failed to construct a comprehensive politics of the
female body, physical exercise, health, and well-being. Instead they have
focused upon more pressing aspects of patriarchal control and the fraught
relationship between conservative Islam and the West. In particular ‘the
capacity of images of the veiled Muslim female body to provoke intense
reactions both from Muslims and non-Muslims, and to eclipse Muslim
women’s own diversity of voices and self-definition raises significant issues
 Introduction 13
for feminist debate’ (Macdonald 2006: 7). The symbolism of veiling which
encloses the body and greatly restricts freedom of movement is integral to
Muslim female identity yet is often seen to be directly at odds with the
physicality of vigorous exercise and displays of muscle and power character-
ized by Western sporting femininities where fitness is increasingly seen as a
feminist issue (Brabazon 2006). Islamic feminists, therefore, who are commit-
ted to operate within Shariah law, do not see eye to eye with secular feminists
who seek to reduce the shackles constraining Muslim women from the
healthy enjoyment of sport and exercise in places or circumstances of their
choosing.
Muslim sport feminists have made significant gains for sporting women,
however, and Hargreaves shows how their struggles and negotiations (albeit
within an Islamic framework) have resulted in changes and advances for girls
and women. Led by Faezah Hashemi, an outspoken advocate for girls’ and
women’s rights to engage in sport, Iran has become (at least for now)
the leading Muslim nation for women’s sport. Muslim female Olympians,
although few and far between, navigate complex clothing and modesty
restrictions to overcome negative attitudes toward female sport and take
pride in their achievements and their symbolic reconstruction of Muslim
womanhood.
In Chapter 5, third-wave feminist Leslie Heywood introduces the new
term ‘Girl Studies’ – a subdivision of Women’s and Gender Studies – and
examines the language of empire and globalization as it has ‘produced’ girls
in the United States, with sport being used to further that particular form
of production. She interrogates Hardt and Negri’s claim that today’s global
empire is fundamentally different from older forms of imperialist and capit-
alist expansion built upon traditional arrangements of male power and
control.4 The new convergence of neo-liberal and feminist discourses has
instead led, she claims, to a growing reliance upon self-policing and active
participation in consumer culture that together construct girls in terms of a
‘can-do’ or ‘girl power’ model. Thus power, opportunities, and success are
all expected to be modelled by the future girl who can take charge of her life
and her body with ‘all the sport she can do’. Indeed, sport becomes the place
where girls learn to take personal responsibility for their own lives, including
physical, economic, social, and sexual health. This is a big responsibility in
a tumultuous world where American girls come from diverse communities
presenting multiple barriers to achievement and offering very different
chances in life. It is easy to see how the ideology of individualism and per-
sonal responsibility has a noticeable disregard for social systems and institu-
tions for it hides both the material and the discursive forces shaping identity
and the ways these gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized identities provide
risk or benefits.
Heywood puts a critical eye to the Women’s Sport Foundation’s GoGirlGo
programme, suggesting that its ‘love yourself’ message might be seen by some
to be empty rhetoric in a culture that is constantly evaluating and judging
14 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
and presenting idealized images against which girls have to compare them-
selves. Sport is touted as the panacea of all problems where the image of
the female athlete does the cultural work of advertising equal opportunities
and demonstrating that anyone can achieve this if they only work hard
enough. For those urban girls who desperately need to be the recipients
of fundamental social change, such programmes may help with personal
change, but it is unlikely that they will change the political, economic, and
cultural structures that surround them.
In Chapter 6, Ross takes up the image of the female athlete and her (sup-
posedly) wholesome lifestyle and compares it with the sexualized persona of
the female stripper in an era that preceded the popularity of lap dancing,
champagne rooms, and stage fees. Focusing upon three decades in the
mid-twentieth century she listens to the stories of a number of physically
talented, sexy strippers in Vancouver, Canada. Viewing female striptease as
embodied exhibition, she discusses the ways in which the dancers’ tales
about their craft, expertise, and physical talents unsettle the stubborn ‘whore
stigma’ that she believes continues to conflate striptease with prostitution.
Furthermore, she explores how women of colour, transsexuals, lesbians/
bisexuals, and several very large women cleverly subverted the industry’s
strict conventions of (white, straight, buxom) female physical beauty and
desirability. It is tempting here, following from Hargreaves’ focus on the
Muslim veiled woman, to draw attention to Western traditions that read
sexual availability against displays of the body and historical associations
between unveiling and sexual fantasy – where a system of looking encour-
aged by the veil paradoxically turns the objects of the look into eroticized
subjects (Naficy 2003).
Ross then investigates parallels between the identities and careers of pro-
fessional striptease dancers and elite female athletes during the same period
by focusing on their touring schedules, earning power, skill and training, and
career trajectories. Acknowledging that the sexualization of the female ath-
lete has a long and vexed history, she nonetheless underscores a potent con-
tradiction. While postwar female ‘bump and grinders’ self-consciously and
deliberately marketed and exploited their overtly sexualized persona on
stage, they were (and still are) refused membership in the community of
athletically trained female performers whose expertise and embodied exhib-
ition of sporting skills were judged to uphold ideals of graceful, agile charm-
ing femininity, and by extension upstanding patriotic and hetero-normative
womanhood indispensable to the health of the Nation. In other words, given
the creative athleticism consistently displayed by female striptease dancers in
the postwar era in Canada and elsewhere, Ross asks what was (and is) at stake
in the persistent and pernicious material and discursive abjection of these
performers.
It is interesting, in light of her analysis, to see the continuing popularity
of burlesque in Vancouver, and reflect upon its staying power into the
twenty-first century. Ross believes that it has a lot to do with the new hold
 Introduction 15
of third-wave feminism – women want the same licence to be sexual that men
have always had. As she shows so well in her chapter the idea of being
empowered, beautiful, sexy, and smart is really appealing, and burlesque
today continues to encourage this through making fun of traditional social
stereotypes.
In Chapter 7 – an edited excerpt from Body and Soul: Notebooks of an
Apprentice Boxer (2003) – Wacquant explicates ‘the social machinery of spar-
ring as a means of inculcating the pugilistic habitus’. He does so by position-
ing himself as a performer so that we can follow in an unusually intimate way
the experiences, feelings, rituals and strategies of the boxer. This is an insider
story about the physical and emotional aspects of sparring, especially the
boxer’s relation to his body which is described by Wacquant as the veritable
‘subject’ of pugilistic practice.
Much of the debate on boxing, Wacquant says, has tended to turn on the
concerns of outsiders to the game, such as the reasons why people should
not box as opposed to the reasons why they do it. It focuses on the negative
determinants, from economic deprivation and school failure to family dis-
organization, racial prejudice, and social isolation, that allegedly funnel men
into the ring by constricting other options. And it authoritatively imputes a
host of individual motivations to boxers, such as a thirst for material success,
worldly anger, or masculine pride. However, it seldom inquires into the col-
lective dispositions that provide a public theatre of expression and incline
some young men from working-class backgrounds to devote themselves to it.
Wacquant further describes how testimony about boxing, whether for or
against it, is characteristically gleaned from the pronouncements of cham-
pions as described by sports writers. Only exceptionally do boxers and club
fighters, prospects and contenders, journeymen and opponents, trial horses
and bums who comprise the overwhelming majority of practitioners, and
without whom the boxing economy would instantly collapse, speak of their
own experiences. Boxing has been described by some as the most pitiless of
sports, ‘primarily about being and not giving hurt’ (Oates 1987: 25), but,
through Wacquant’s eyes and those of his informers, it becomes the most
dazzling sort of pugilistic dialogue, a ‘fistic conversation’, an ever-renewed
duel where, at their best, body and mind function in total symbiosis.
Some years ago, Lennard Davis, in Enforcing Normalcy (1995: xi) claimed
that ‘disability is the bodily state that dare not speak its name in professional
circles’. Because of this, he said, and the strong control of the subject by
medical and psycho-social experts, disability is under-theorized and the con-
nections between disability and the status quo under-explored. In Chapter 8,
Sparkes and Smith address both these issues through their exploration of the
use of narrative in their study of three men who suffered spinal cord injuries
and ‘crossed the border’ to become disabled through playing the contact
sport of rugby football union. The traumatic injury sustained by each was
the result of one moment in their life that propelled them from the world of
the able-bodied into the world of disability, which they continue to inhabit.
16 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
Sparkes and Smith seek to illuminate their stories about becoming and
remaining disabled by focusing upon time – or rather the ways in which
personal experiences of embodied time are framed by and embedded within
larger socio-cultural constellations of meaning. Lives, they point out, have
to be understood as lived within time, and time is experienced according
to narrative. Living with a disability is living a life dominated by time and
narratives – of past, present, or future – which then become the means by
which biographical experience is given meaning. Identity is constructed via
narrative, and the self in time can only exist as a narrative construction.
From this perspective, the complex connections between narrative, time, and
identity can play an important role in how we relate to ourselves and others
as embodied beings in different contexts.
The authors draw from a number of disciplines to develop various con-
cepts and frameworks for understanding time in order to reveal how this
taken-for-granted aspect of embodiment and narrative plays a pivotal role
in the process of autobiographical identity construction. They then make
comparisons between the three men regarding their personal experiences of
time at specific moments in their lives: pre-injury; immediately following
injury; and as they live at the moment. To assist in this analysis they use
Arthur Frank’s framework of restitution (hope of returning to able-ness),
chaos (life will never get better), and quest (acceptance) narratives to show
how they operate to shape the post-injury experiences of each man in rela-
tion to their (now disabled) bodies. Finally, the implications of this complex
process for the identity (re)construction of disabled men are discussed.
The difficulties provoked by traumatic events such as spinal cord injury
focus particular attention upon the intimate connections among body, time,
self, and society and the important role of narrative in how individuals
make sense of these connections as they try to make sense of their own
changed lives. Disability is tied to a process that defines us all and the narra-
tive resources at our disposal within particular cultural settings intimately
affect the ways we view the ideal of physical wholeness and the category of
disability.
One of the most significant developments in sport over the last several
decades has been the expanding power of medical knowledge in the produc-
tion and regulation of sporting bodies. In Chapter 9, Theberge investigates
this process by examining the role of sports medicine, including allied health
professions such as physiotherapy and nutrition, in the construction of
athletic bodies and athletic identities. Her particular interest lies in: analyzing
professional discourses surrounding the scope and purpose of medical
interventions in sport; the political and social processes that enable sports
medicine to claim the athletic body as an object of practice; and how
medicalization is implicated in the construction of athletic identities.
The negative correlation between competitive sport and a healthy body
and the reduction of the sporting body to the level of a machine has long
been acknowledged.5 In Ancient Greece, Hippocratic treatises warned that
 Introduction 17
athletes endangered their health by paradoxically being in too good a condi-
tion. Given that such a condition could not persist for long, and since it
could not change for the better, it would inevitably change for the worse
(Kuriyama 1999: 141). In Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (1978: 17) Brohm
complained several decades ago about the way countries went about building
up their sport arsenal and the dangers of an obsession with winning which
could no longer conceal the fact that the risks of the game were on the
increase and accidents were becoming alarmingly frequent:

Every sport now involves a fantastic manipulation of human robots by

doctors, psychologists, bio-chemists and trainers. The manufacturing of
champions is no longer a craft but an industry calling on specialized
laboratories, research institutes, training camps and experimental sports
centres. Most top level athletes are reduced to the status of more or less
voluntary guinea pigs.
(p. 1189)

Indeed there is no denying that injury has now become an inescapable part,
not only of the careers of elite sportsmen and women, but of all athletes, as
a result of increasing specialization, intensity of training and resultant over-
use of parts of the body. As a result the penetration of medical intervention
in sport has deepened such that athletes are understood to require routine
medical supervision, not because they have a clearly defined pathology but
simply because they are athletes. As Safai (2005) points out, the growth,
organization, and institutionalization of sports medicine as we recognize
it today have occurred alongside the negation of the amateur athlete and
widespread transformations in the production of high performance sport.
Theberge’s particular focus in this growing culture of pain and injury is
upon the clinical practice of sport medicine and the complex negotiations
which take place between high-level athletes and health care practitioners
in reconciling the tensions between performance and health. She concludes
from the variety of practitioners with whom she spoke that they understand
that health has a different meaning for high performance athletes than for
the ‘normal’ population, and they adjust their practices accordingly.
Abdel-Shehid welcomes us to what he calls a ‘sportocracy’ in Chapter 10.
By this he means that the complexity of human life is reduced to a meta-
phoric zero sum sporting competition where someone or some group’s
win is always some other group’s or individual’s loss. One could liken the
situation to Marx’s ‘surplus extraction’ from the bosses, or the colonial
enrichment of the occupier, since sporting competition simply signals the
winners and the losers. From this perspective, the camaraderie, national
harmony and pursuit of excellence promised by sport is all just a myth – a
prison, as Brohm (1976) tells us, of measured time, for the reality of elite
competitive sport constitutes a huge blind spot for social consciousness.
Sport, Abdel-Shehid explains, naturalizes all of the bodies in its purview,
18 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
endowing them with particular truths and a particular voice. Thus the spor-
tocracy is able to accomplish two things: first it naturalizes the social body,
or body politic; and secondly, it freezes individual bodies into immutable
identity categories such as male, female, black, and white.
In particular, the sportocracy shores up ideas of ‘race’ through its ability
to singularize and naturalize bodies. More often than not, this chapter argues,
race refers to black subjects, such that the black male body in sport remains
over-determined as hyper-masculine and overly sexualized – ‘scene and not
heard’. The way out of this singularity of gaze, suggests Abdel-Shehid, is to
focus on the multiple and polyvalent nature of race in the contemporary
world, to incorporate notions of hybridity and to try to bring an end to the
innocent notion of the essential black subject. To move beyond the sporto-
cracy, then, is to engage with dissonance and to seek ways of reading black
masculinity as complex and beautiful. Seeing the beauty of black masculinity
clearly troubles the notion that black masculinity is masculinity constantly
at war – thus it might be used as a central plank with which to work against
the sportocracy.
In Chapter 11, Hoberman continues the discussion that nothing handed
down from the past could keep ‘race’ alive if we did not constantly reinvent
and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain (Fields 1982). Like Abdel-Shehid, he
points to the significance of the traditional Western habit of identifying
black people with their bodies and the consequences of black dominance
in some high profile sports which has reinforced this identification. Using a
rich array of popular and academic sources Hoberman discusses the signifi-
cance of the black athlete as paradigmatic of his race through the tropes of
evolutionary narratives and related ‘truths’ about racial athletic aptitudes.
Then he documents their effects through a stream of scurrilous racist utter-
ances in the marketplace of European sports venues where we are reminded
how even the most primitive tenets of nineteenth-century racial anthropol-
ogy continue to flourish in the sports cultures of the early twenty-first
century. Neo-fascist French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen is offered as one
such example. ‘The best sprinters at the Olympic Games are black’, he says,
‘the best swimmers are white. Is it forbidden, illegal or immoral to state that
those differences are real?’
The persistence of such aggressive racism and related violence obviously
raises many very difficult questions and Hoberman seeks explanations by
examining various debates about nature versus nurture that seem to force
a choice between genetic and environmental explanations for human traits
and behaviours. He looks at a variety of creative – one might almost call
them desperate – coping strategies employed by white athletes to explain
their apparent disadvantages in certain sports. And in a wide-ranging discus-
sion of national and global environments he shows how, although racial
folklore about athletic aptitudes flourishes or is more muted depending
on the racial make-up of the population, the stereotypes of aggression, vio-
lence, and primitiveness continue to be played out, sustaining sport’s racial
 Introduction 19
dimension in the twenty-first century. Race continues to be man’s most
dangerous myth.
Our final chapter completes Hoberman’s evolutionary narrative by focus-
ing on virtual bodies. Yet even here visions of biotechnologies continue to be
invested in a parallel physical reductionism, intensified through digital
forms. In her study of virtual bodies in popular digital culture, O’Riordan
underscores how the human body, and the female body in particular, has
traditionally been the marker of the natural. Indeed, naturalism has served
as deceptively in the modern world as supernaturalism ever did in the past.
Yet, although physical bodies, like the material world around them, really
exist, ‘by the very nature of their existence nothing is actually self evident
in the nature of the body’ (Lancaster 2003: 36). While the body has been
conceptualized and represented as ‘natural’ flesh to be formed, it has also
been socialized and conditioned by culture – a cultural tail wagging the bio-
logical dog so to speak. Furthermore, as O’Riordan points out in her chapter,
the body has never been tame; the excess of the body is that which disrupts
social structure, resists containment and thus remains under investigation in
scientific discourses.
Understandings of the body have been continually mapped, imagined,
contested, and transformed through imaging techniques in medicine, art, and
visual culture. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the scopic regimes
of digital imaging technologies have contributed to an ongoing technologiza-
tion of the body – ‘the conceptual wall between bodies and information
increasingly bleeding as bodies and information continually graft themselves
onto one another in a number of different cultural domains’ (Thurtle and
Mitchell 2004: 1). Through these regimes the body has been rendered simul-
taneously penetrable, opaque, malleable, wired, and networked. We have
entered an era where signifying practices and embodiment are no longer
practically and conceptually separate.
O’Riordan’s central question focuses on how simulations of naturalized
female bodies have been reproduced in cyberspaces through new infor-
mation and commercial technologies. She underscores the significance of
technologies of visual communication in this process of making the body
subject to a scopic control and connection. Drawing on visual culture she
outlines the ways in which technologies are intertwined with physical bodies,
producing understandings of those bodies as structured through technolo-
gized networks. She uses examples of mediated and virtual bodies to illus-
trate her argument that the body is not only restructured but also both
imprisoned and empowered by these transformations and technologizations.
In many respects, she suggests, and the animated digital beauty Lara Croft is
but one example, the frames for visualizing the female body in contemporary
communication technologies and bio-technologies remain locked into a
closer reiteration of the young, white, heterosexual, female body as the
‘normal’ female body. For game avatar Lara Croft, movement is central to
her character and her sporting body has much in common with the growing
20 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
popularity of the female form as active and toned, yet as O’Riordan shows,
the contextual language used to present figures such as hers also signals a
powerful force for normalization and containment. By means of cyberspace
bodies, concepts of nature continue to be used in the performance of
culture.

Conclusion
This book aims to challenge some of the old certainties about the body
and provide insights into ways in which the body is experienced and under-
stood and transformed. But understanding the body is fraught with difficulty
because, as we can tell from the different chapters in this book, it is the
very indeterminacy of the body that stands out as a major characteristic.
Furthermore, it is clearly impossible to separate bodily experience from
cultural meanings and it is the dialectic between the two that results in a
shaping of the body by the social world and vice-versa. The permeation of
the body with specific relations of power, its location within different polit-
ical and cultural fields, and the ways in which it is manipulated and experi-
enced through history, culture, and wider social discourses result in a huge
number of variations, complexities, and contradictions. As a result, we can
only understand the body as being multi-dimensional, constantly produced,
in process.
In 1993, Shilling summarized his approach to the development of a soci-
ology of the body by claiming that, ‘The body is centrally implicated
in questions of self-identity, the construction and maintenance of social
inequalities, and the constitution and development of societies. It is far too
important a subject for sociologists to leave to the natural sciences’ (p. 204).
It is certainly the case that since Shilling made this statement, what was at
the time a still emerging sociology of the body has become firmly estab-
lished in academia, attracting scholars from many disciplines. However, a
feature of this development has been a certain elitism that has tended to
prioritize highly theoretical and generalized discussions about the body,
with particular attention being paid to postmodern thinking and theorizing,
and to marginalize a wealth of material that has focused on the body in
movement – specifically in physical culture. For example, although the soci-
ologies of sport, dance, and education have developed in recent years into
very sophisticated sub-disciplines of mainstream sociology, there are very
few references to sport, dance, or physical education in the work character-
ized as the sociology of the body. Shilling’s publications (1993, 2003, 2005)
are an exception in this respect. Furthermore, in empirical studies, the trend
has been to focus on men’s sports, such as boxing and body building –
distinctive symbols of masculinity – and far less attention has been paid to
women’s bodies in sport and other forms of physical culture. What is also
surprising is that although the central players in the sociology of the body
have recognized the foundational contribution of modern feminism and
 Introduction 21
feminist theories to the more generalized recognition of the significance of
the body in social life, there has been a virtual silence about the work of
sport feminists. There has been little acknowledgement, either, from main-
stream feminists of the work of sport feminists, much of which since the
1970s has focused on the body, and specifically on the relationship between
empirical material about the personal body and specific historical and social
contexts.
In contrast to the unequal gender balance of most sociology of the
body publications, Physical Culture, Power, and the Body has an equal gen-
der balance, both in terms of content and contributors. This is an impor-
tant innovation towards a better understanding of the gendered body. But
we recognize that all the other social divisions, such as age, sexuality, dif-
ferent ethnicities, and disability should also be given equal attention and
that there should be much more notice taken of bodies outside the West-
ern world and of the specific effects of globalization processes on them.
Developments in the sociology of the body are already shifting in this
direction with an expanding corpus of work on bodies in other cultures
and more publications that take account of the global level of analysis as
well. However, it still remains the case that despite wide-ranging work on
the materiality of the body in contemporary thought, the question of the
body has not yet been posed as comprehensively as it could be (Wilson
2004). Looking to the future, there is a particular need for much more
attention to be given to the body in the field of physical culture across
the world.

Notes
1 In her role as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute
of Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia, Patricia Vertinsky
facilitated and organized the conference. The contributors had an exceptional
opportunity at the conference to interrogate the idea of the book, to share ideas
among themselves and with an audience, and to have some input towards its final
orientation.
2 The two editors of this collection were among the first sport feminists to focus
on women’s embodiment in relation to exercise and sport. These are among their
best-known publications: Hargreaves 1994; Vertinsky 1990.
3 That is an inability to remember what you did during the war, named for Kurt
Waldheim, Secretary General of the United Nations, Austria’s President in 1986
in a country of under 7 million inhabitants where there were still more than
500,000 registered Nazis in Austria at the end of the war (Judt 2005).
4 For Marx and Engels, globalization was a potentially liberating revolutionary
phenomenon subordinating men while also providing them with the opportunity
to rebel against capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2000).
5 Adorno and Horkheimer (1971) described how the oarsmen who cannot speak to
one another are each of them yoked in the same rhythm as the modern worker in
a factory.
22 Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky
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2 Movement practices and
fascist infections
From dance under the swastika
to movement education in the
British primary school
Patricia Vertinsky

Introduction
In drawing our attention to the legacy of a fascist aesthetic that underpins
the theatricals of contemporary politics, sports’ scholars have quite logically
focused on the hegemonic masculine sporting body (see, for example, Kruger
1999). Fascism certainly took the sporting body seriously, forcing consider-
ations of the extent to which the dominant culture of sport autonomously
but systematically produces bodily dispositions and cultural traits that are
prone to fascist aesthetics and ideologies (McDonald 2006). Hitler famously
expressed his total embrace of the masculine sporting body in Mein Kampf:

In my castles a generation of young men will grow up who will be the

terror of the world. I want forceful young men, majestic, awesome, fear-
less; without weakness or gentleness . . . I want my young men to be
strong and beautiful. They should have a physical preparation in all
sports. I want them to be athletic. This is first and foremost.
(Rauschning 1990: 100)

More recently, and in contrast to Norbert Elias’s theorization of the civil-

izing process, George Bush’s post 9/11 initiatives to instil a military spirit
into the bodies of American citizens make it increasingly difficult to dis-
tinguish civilian from militarized bodies, in sport as well as the military. Gym
culture, for example, has become a type of militarized labour where the
desire to continually work out encompasses both the longing to consume
and the yearning to surrender the body to state, God, or corporation. In this
sense, says Bryan Turner (2003), charisma and sacred violence still pulsate
today in the heart of human societies.
My intent in this chapter, however, is to shift the frame of reference from
sport, masculinity, and violence to other embodied practices that more
subtly might have the potential to be infected with fascist aesthetics using
the example of modern dance, especially its incorporation into physical
education in England in the years following WW2.1 Although sport and
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
of the Lutheran church. Mr. Koch married, December 4, 1901,
Matilda Kuehn, her father a gardener of Patton township, Allegheny
county, Pennsylvania, where he has resided since 1883. Children of
Edward and Matilda (Kuehn) Koch: Edna, Charles. The McElroys,
herein recorded, descend from an old McELROY family of Patton
township, Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, the original founders
coming from Ireland. They acquired a large tract of land then
covered with timber. This they cleared and where they wrought with
axe and plow in the early days are now the Cunningham, Gill and
Brinton farms. There Robert McElroy was born, the house in which
he first saw the light standing on that part of the original tract now
comprised within the bounds of the Cunningham farm.
 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA 1187 There he grew to manhood
and built his house on the home farm, his share being now known
as the Brinton farm. He married (first) Miss McCahb, who bore him
Susan and James. He married (second) Margaret Gibson McGahey
and had issue: Sarah, John, Maria and Robert Graham. (H) Robert
Graham McElroy, son of Robert and Margaret G. (McGahey) McElroy,
was born in Patton township, Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, at the
old McElroy homestead, now known as the Brinton farm. His mother
died when he was eight months old and his baby wants became the
greatest concern of the maiden ladies, Maria and Susan Cole, who
lived at what is now the Cunningham farm, part of the original
McElroy tract. He was tenderly and lovingly cared for by the sisters
until he was no longer in need of their assistance. He grew to
manhood at the farm and there resided until many years after his
marriage. He then moved successively to Ligonier, Turtle Creek and
Pitcairn, ending his days, January 18, 1902. He married, March 29,
1854, Elizabeth Donald, daughter of James and Phoebe (Collins)
Donald, the latter a daughter of Joseph and Abby (By ram) Collins.
Abby (Byram) Collins was a daughter of Edward Byram, who with his
daughter, Abby, was taken prisoner by the Indians, April 7, 1779, at
his newly established home in Western Pennsylvania. Edward Byram
afterward escaped but Abby, then a child, was sold to the French
and did not return to her home until she was a young woman. This
Byram family, of Western Pennsylvania, descended from Nicholas
Byram, an Englishman of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, whose career
was a strange one. He was born about 1610, son of an English
gentleman of Kent, England, who left his estate and family in charge
of a trustee who proved faithless. Instead of educating the lad he
sent him to the West Indies in charge of a sea captain, the boy's
only fortune consisting of a few gold coins sewed by his mother
within his coat lining. Arriving at Barbadoes, he was sold to a planter
for his passage and seven years were required to work out this
indebtedness, the gold given by his mother remaining untouched.
After gaining his freedom he took passage for Boston, there arriving
in 1633 or 1634. In 1635 he married Susan Shaw and settled at
Weymouth, later becoming one of the proprietors of the town of
Duxbury. He died in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, in 1688, leaving
issue. The line of descent to Abby (Byram) Collins was through
Nicholas (2) and Mary (Edson) Byram, of Bridgewater,
Massachusetts, he a soldier of King Philip's war; Ebenezer and
Hannah (Hayward) Byram, of Bridgewater. he born 1692; Ebenezer
(2), born 1716, and Abigail (Alden) Byram, the latter a great-
granddaughter of John and Priscilla Alden, of the original Plymouth
colony; Ebenezer (2) moved from Bridgewater to New Jersey. His
son, Edward Byram, was the father of nine children, among them
Abby, the Indian captive, wife of Joseph Collins and grandmother of
Elizabeth Donald, wife of Robert Graham McElroy. (Ill) Robert Dunlap
McElroy, son of Robert Graham and Elizabeth
 ii88 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA (Donald) McElroy, was born
in Patton township, Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, near
Monroeville, April 29, 1864. He was educated in Monrocville public
schools and spent his early life at the home farm. He tlien left home
and worked a farm for an uncle. In October, 1890, he moved to
Pitcairn, where he was teaming for a time, then began taking
contracts for excavation and concrete work, a business that grew to
large proportions with satisfactory returns. He also bought and sold
considerable real estate. Later he purchased a farm of one hundred
and fifty acres in Patton township where he now resides (1915) and
ranks among the prosperous farmers and stock raisers of that
section of the county. He is a member of the Presbyterian church,
the Knights of Maccabees and the Modern Woodmen of the World.
In political faith he is a Republican, having served Patton township
as supervisor and Pitcairn as school director. Mr. McElroy married,
April 29. 1891, Mary Frances (Bebout) McGahiey, daughter of
Samuel Bebout and descendant of a prominent pioneer family of
Washington county, Pennsylvania. Her paternal grandfather, John
Bebout, was born in Somerset county. New Jersey, June 20, 1752,
died in 1835. He served as a "Minute man" of the Revolution, 1775
and 1776, in Somerset county militia, under Captain Piatt Boyle,
Colonel Stephen Hunt's battalion, of Brigadier-General Nathaniel
Green's brigade, of New Jersey troops. He also served in the
Continental army and was engaged at the battle of Monmouth, with
Somerset county troops of Captain Garvin M. E. Coy's battalion and
served later under Captain John Parker in the first battalion,
commanded by Colonel Benjamin Coy. John Bebout married, in 1777,
Mary Agnew, born October 23, 1757, died January 6, 1830. Children:
Peter, John, Ira C, Israel and several daughters. Ira C. Bebout, son
of John and Mary (Agnew) Bebout, was bom in Washington county,
Pennsylvania. February 3. 1800, died March 28, 1891, in Washington
county, Ohio, a farmer. He married, February 23, 182 1, Maria
Howley, who came from New Jersey in early days to Washington
county. Children of John and Mary Howley: Samuel, Ebenezer, Maria,
Jane, Ann, Sarah. Children of Ira C. and Maria (Howley) Bebout:
John, Israel, Samuel M. H., see forward; Jonathan L, Sarah, Mary
Ann, Catherine, Elizabeth. Samuel M. H. Bebout. son of Ira C. and
Maria (Howley) Bebout, was born in Washington county,
Pennsylvania, March 16, 1832, and for twenty-two years conducted
a drug store in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. He served in the Civil War
in Company A. Eighty-fifth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteer
Infantry, his brother, Jonathan L., serving in the same company, his
brother Israel in an Illinois regiment. Samuel M. H. Bebout married,
August 14, 1856, Sarah Jane Van Enan, born February 17, 1834,
died October 4, 1909, daughter of Joseph and Isabella (Logan) Van
Enan, of Van Enan Station, near Canonsburg; Joseph Van Enan, the
original settler there, born December 12, 1790, died September 22,
1873, Isabella (Logan) Van Enan, born September 15. 1791. died
May 21, 1870. She was a daughter of Samuel Logan, born in county
Antrim, Ireland, in 1759, died
 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA 1189 in Pennsylvania in 1845, a
soldier of the American Revolution, serving in the Pennsylvania Line
nnder General Lafa\ette. He married Rebecca Walker. Children of
Samuel M. H. and Sarah Jane ( \'an Enan) Bebout: Mary Frances, of
further mention ; George Van Enan, born August 14, 1862, now an
engineer, residing in Sheridan. Pennsylvania ; a son born January 17,
1866, died unnamed. Mary Frances Bebout, born July 27, i860,
married (first) February 3, 1880, Thomas McGahey. Children: i.
Estelle, born November 17, 1881, married F. P. Kunkle, a veteran of
the Spanish-American war; children: Sarah Estelle, born February 8,
1905, and Mary Elizabeth, May 13, 1908. 2. Elsie Lenhardt. born
February 18, 1884, married William P. Kunkle. Mary Frances (Bebout)
McGahey married (second), April 29, 1891, Robert Dunlap McElroy,
of previous mention. The name of Burgunder probably originated in
the BURGL'NDER province of Burgundy, France, and from thence
was brought to Alsace, Germany. (I) Diebold Burgunder, a native of
Alsace, Germany, was a laborer there. He came to America at an
early date, took part in the ^^'ar of 1812, and then returned to his
native land. (II) Sylvester Burgunder, son of Diebold Burgunder. was
born in Alsace, Germany, and there received his education. He took
part in the revolution of 1848, and after that came to this country,
where he worked in steel mills, having followed this calling in his
native land. He died in Alsace. He married Regina Schmidt, born in
Alsace, who emigrated to America with her parents in 1853.
Children: Regina, lives in Alsace: Remy, of further mention;
Dominick, and Richard, live in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania; Cecelia
and Joseph, deceased. (III) Remy Burgimder, son of Sylvester and
Regina (Schmidt) Burgunder, was born in Alsace, Germany, October
29, 1857. He was educated in the schools of his native province, and
at a suitable age commenced to work in the steel mills with his
father. About 1882 he emigrated to America, after having served
three years in the German army. At first he made his home at
McKees Rocks, and for a period of four years was in the employ of
an ice company. He then rented a small place near McKees Rocks,
where he engaged in gardening, with a very satisfactory amount of
success. In 1903 he purchased a piece of land of fifteen acres in
Schaler township, and has been located there since that time. He
cultivates the place for general market gardening, has made many
improvements on it. and is doing an excellent business. He is a
member of the St. Anthony's Catholic Church, at Millvale. Mr.
Burgunder married, February 21, 1887, Catherine HofTer, who
emigrated to America, remained here two years, then returned to
her native province of Alsace, and later came back to America. She
is a daughter of Joseph and Kate (Munch) Hofifer, who came to
America later, and located at McKees Rocks. Children of Mr. and Mrs.
Burgunder: Joseph, Paul and Richard.
 II90 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA The Briggs family, of
Western Pennsylvania, represented by BRIGGS James Briggs, of the
village of New England, Mifflin township, Allegheny county, have
been for many generations residents of the village of Kenninghall,
county of Norfolk, England. James is a favored name in the family
and no generation lacks one or more of the name. (I) James Briggs,
great-grandfather of James Briggs, of Mifflin township, was a
gardener and on his tombstone there is carved two implements of
his craft, a hoe and a rake. He was a member of the Church of
England. He is buried in Kenninghall church yard. (H) James (2)
Briggs, son of James (i) Briggs, also lived and died in county Norfolk,
England, as did his wife, Jane (Young) Briggs. Children: I. James, a
fanner, enlisted in the British army and lost his life in India. 2.
William, of further mention. 3. Robert, a merchant dealing in
mason's materials. 4. Charles, a farmer. 5. David, a manufacturer of
brick and tile and one of the first manufacturers of tile for drainage
purposes in England. 6. Mary, married in Suffolk. 7. Sophia, married
Job Fuller, and lived at Kenninghall. (III) William Briggs, son of
James (2) and Jane (Young) Briggs, was born in Kenninghall,
Norfolk, England, in 181 1, died in 1884. He was employed as a
farmer on the Kenninghall estates all his life, his death resulting from
a kick from his horse. He married Maria Youngs, born in King Lynn,
Norfolk, England, in 1813, died in 1861, daughter of Thomas and
Jane (Oliveur) Youngs. Her father, Thomas Youngs, and all his family
were solid, well built, powerful men, over six feet in height, and all
farm workers on the Kenninghall estates. Jane (Oliveur) Youngs was
a daughter of Thomas Oliveur, an English Gypsy, who with his outfit
traveled all over England. Thomas and Jane (Oliveur) Youngs had
children: Thomas and Harry, farmers ; John and William, seamen in
the English naval service; Robert, a soldier of the English army for
twenty-one years and was never called into battle ; Maria, married
William Briggs ; Sarah, married Thomas Whip, and lived in Banham,
England. Children of William and Maria Briggs: i. Mary, married
Charles Gregory, and resides at Tottenham, London, England. 2.
Elizabeth, married William Land, and lives at Lapham, England. 3.
James, of further mention. 4. William, died aged forty years in
Bolton, England, leaving a family. 5. Robert, a farmer in England,
holding the position on the Kenninghall estate that his father held ;
married Mary Potter. 6. George, died in New England, Pennsylvania,
in 1912, a coal miner. 7. Charles, died in England. 8. Sophia, twin
witli Charles, now residing in England, unmarried. 9. Sarah, died in
infancy. 10. Maria, married and residing at Tottenham, England. 11.
Emma, married John Alderson, a brick layer, has resided in the
United States, but is now living in Australia. (IV) James (3) Briggs,
son of William and Maria (Youngs) Briggs, was born in Kenninghall,
county of Norfolk, England, December 25, 1835. He never attended
school a day in his life, but secured early education from
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 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA 1191 his mother, who taught
him to read in the evenings when his day's tasks were ended. He
learned rapidly, the Bible being his text book and ere long he was
able to read any part of that holy book intelligently. At six years of
age he was employed in the fields of the estate of the Earl of
Albermarle to drive crows oiif the newly planted crop. The Earl
maintained a library for tlie use of his tenants and men and the lad
availed himself to the extreme limit of the opportunity to obtain
good books and further education. He read a great deal of history,
modern and ancient, obtaining a perfect foundation for a
subsequent, continuous course of reading that has made him an
authority among his neighbors on all historical questions. He has
added to this an extensive knowledge of the geography of the world
and by a course of scientific reading has mastered the works of such
writers as Darwin. To continue the story of how this uneducated boy
has developed into a cultivated and cultured man, strong in history,
geography and science, solely through self study and reading would
be to spend an interesting hour. After he had grown too large for his
crow driving job he became driver of a delivery wagon for a local
merchant, then learned the art of thatching roofs for houses and
stacks, then for three years worked on a farm for John Coleson. All
this before he was seventeen years of age. At that age he left
Norfolk and went to the coal mines in Shipley, Derbyshire, and there
mined five years for Squire Munday and five years for Richard
Barrow. On March 4, 1862, he took passage for the United States on
a sailing vessel, arriving in New York, May 7, following. He made his
way west, finally settling in New England village, Mifflin township,
Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, where he worked in the Aliquippa
coal mines for forty-five years. In 1873 he bought a house in the
village, and in 1894 bought twenty acres of land in addition to what
he had. In 1885 he was county tax collector, but altliough many
offices have been offered him he has never accepted but that one.
He has a wonderful memory and thus treasures the contents of the
many books he has read. In a spelling contest at which college
graduates and well informed men and women participated, he
spelled down the entire class. Although Mr. Briggs is in his eightieth
year, he is a clear-headed, quick thinker and so well informed in
general history, geography and science that he is a local authority on
these subjects. He is a Republican in politics and served as a
Republican county committeeman. He was early trained in the
Church of England and was dean of that committee of Allegheny
county and attended the convention held in Harrisburg. He married,
December 25, 1854, Maria Fretvvell, born in Derbyshire. England,
November 28, 1838, died January 10, 1909, thirteenth of the
fourteen children of James and Maria (Henshaw) Fretwell. Children
of James and Maria Briggs: i. Charles, born in Derbyshire, England,
September 25, 1855, now a resident of Jefiferson township,
Allegheny county, Pennsylvania. 2. James, born December 23, 1858,
died young. 3. William, born in April. i860, died in September, 1863.
4. Henry, the first of the children born in the United States, was born
at Rock Run, Pennsylvania, March 12, 1863,
 1 192 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA now a resident of
Washington county, Pennsylvania. 5. James, Jr., born September 30,
1864, now storekeeper of New England, Pennsylvania. 6. George,
born March 15, 1866, was injured in the coal mines, and died in
1894. 7. William, died young. 8. Hengist, born January 4, 1869, now
resides at Meadow Lands, Pennsylvania. 9. Mary Belle, born August
13, 1871, married William Minford, superintendent of mines. Rich
Hill, Pennsylvania. 10. Pauline, born February 2, 1873, married John
A. McGowan, and resides in the village of New England. 11. Millicent,
died young. 12. Elmina, born March 20, 1875, married B. H.
Forsythe, a hero of the SpanishAmerican War, injured in the
Philippines and now deceased; she now resides with her father. 13.
Louisa, born June 27, 1877, married Thomas Winklevoss, and resides
at Large, Pennsylvania. 14. Darwin V., bom December 9, 1879, killed
by the kick of a horse, October 28, 1905; was unmarried. Many
communities in the state of Pennsylvania are comMcGINNIS posed
of Scotch-Irish people and their descendants, and among this
number is included the McGinnis family, the present representative
of which is John C. McGinnis, a prominent citizen of Pitcairn. (I)
Roderick AIcGinnis, grandfather of John C. McGinnis, was a native of
Ireland, of Scotch-Irish origin, and after his marriage he emigrated
to the United States and settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where he
followed the shipping business, subsequently removing to
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His wife, also a native of Ireland, bore him
a number of children, among whom were John, of whom further;
Edward, who served in the War of 1812, participated in the battle of
Lundy's Lane, he being among the survivors, and Charles, entered
the war between Mexico and Texas and never came back. (II) John
McGinnis, son of Roderick McGinnis, was born in Baltimore,
Maryland, 1798, died in Pitcairn, Pennsylvania, June 15, 1874. He
was the first manufacturer of tobacco and cigars in the city of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this proving a successful enterprise, and he
continued the same for a number of years, then purchased a farm
consisting of seven hundred acres, which is now the town of
Pitcairn, but which was then mostly timber land, the houses of today
taking the place of the cabins of that day. He cleared a portion of his
land, and the remainder of his days were spent in farming and stock
raising. He also purchased extensive tracts of land in Illinois. He
married Ellen Ramsey, born in Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, her
parents, who were natives of Ireland, being among the early settlers
on the Monongahela river, settling near Pittsburgh, where her father
followed the occupation of farming. Ten children were born to Mr.
and Mrs. McGinnis, among whom were William R., and John C., of
whom further. (III) John C. McGinnis, son of John McGinnis. was
born in Pittsburgh, Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, September 4,
1831. The knowledge
 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA 1193 acquired in the common
schools of his neighborhood was supplemented by attendance at an
academy in Wilkinsburg and an academy in Turtle Creek. For some
time thereafter he followed agricultural pursuits, after which he
studied civil engineering and followed that profession for many
years. He has also been actively interested in the real estate
business, in which he has been successful. Mr. McGinnis served for
nine years as a councilman of Pitcairn and ten years as a justice of
the peace of the same place, and was also school director in Patton
township for twelve years. Although advanced in years, he takes a
keen interest in community affairs, and keeps well informed on
current events. Mr. McGinnis married, May 21, 1896, Susan Brinton,
born February 21, 1857, daughter of George M. and Susana (Funk)
Brinton. Children: John C, Jr., born May i, 1897: George Brinton,
born February 16, 1900. They reside with their parents, John C.
having graduated with first honors from the local high school. The
derivation of this surname of frequent occurrence is DAVIDSON
evident on sight. Many surnames were at first patronymics, and the
original Davidsons were simply sons of David. Several other names,
equally often met with, have the same meaning, as Davison, Davis,
Davies, also, probably, Dawson. These names are found in England,
Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and have been borne by a great
number of emigrants to America. (I) EHas Davidson, son of Colonel
Hugh and Catharine (McDowell) Davidson, the former of
Revolutionary fame, the first of this branch of the Davidson family of
whom we have definite record, was born February 10, 1788, in
Pennsylvania, and died May i, 1840. He was of Scotch-Irish descent.
He married Martha Meanor. (II) Samuel Davidson, son of Elias and
Martha (Meanor) Davidson, was born in Plum township, Allegheny
county, Pennsylvania, April 6, 1831, and died October 25, 1889. He
was engaged in general farming in Plum township, where he owned
a farm of one hundred and ten acres. At the outbreak of the Civil
War he enlisted in Company G, One Hundred and Thirty-sixth
Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, and served until 1864. He
was wounded in the foot by a bullet at the battle of Fredericksburg,
and at that time lay in the hospital for several weeks. He gave his
political support to the Republican party, and was a devout member
of the Methodist church. Mr. Davidson married, on September 24,
1874, Susanna Wright, born May 29, 1855, daughter of William and
Eva (Sarver) Wright, the former named having been a farmer in
Plum township. Children: Anna Eva, bom November 26, 1876;
William Franciss, born December 4, 1878, died in infancy; Samuel, of
whom further; James Abram Garfield, born November 25, 1881, lives
in East Pittsburgh, married Katherine Wiant, and has two children,
James Wiant and Katherine Roberta ; Elias Bedford, born March 31,
1886; Harrison, born January 30, 1889, now a senior of the
University of Pittsburgh.
 1194 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA (III) Samuel (2) Davidson,
son of Samuel (i) and Susanna (Wright) Davidson, was born in Plum
township, Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, January 17, 1880. He and
his brothers cultivate the homestead farm, in which enterprise they
attain the success which their energetic methods well merit. He
takes a deep interest in all matters that concern the welfare of the
community in which he lives, is Republican in political opinion, and
the family are members of the Presbyterian church. Mr. Davidson is
unmarried. The Cornelius family is a very ancient one of Holland,
CORNELIUS where the father of the American progenitor of the
family had charge of the standard time in Amsterdam, a very
responsible position, as the time throughout the country was
regulated by this clock. (I) Cornelius, born in Amsterdam, Holland,
where, as stated above, he had charge of the official Government
Clock of Holland. (II) Christian Cornelius, son of Cornelius, was born
in Holland, but in early life emigrated to the United States, settling
first near Lancaster, but soon moved to Philadelphia, and started
there the manufacture of lamps. (III) Robert Cornelius, son of
Christian Cornelius, was born in Philadelphia, where he became one
of the most prominent business men. He associated himself with his
father in the manufacture of lamps and gas fixtures, and his eight-
story factory became well known throughout the country, being the
first complete fire-proof building built in that city. He married Harriet
Comley, and both died in Philadelphia. (IV) Robert C. Cornelius, son
of Robert and Harriet (Comley) Cornelius, was bom in Philadelphia,
and there acquired his education, graduating at the University of
Pennsylvania. He became associated with his father in the
manufacture of lamps and gas fixtures, and carried on the
manufacturing and retail end of the business. The family was
formerly of the Presbyterian denomination, but are now members of
the Episcopal church. In political matters he gave his consistent
support to the Republican party until his death. Mr. Cornelius married
Elizabeth Cox, born in Philadelphia, now living in McKeesport,
Allegheny county, Pennsylvania. She is a daughter of Justice and
Mary (Malony) Cox, the former born in Philadelphia, and a
descendant of an old family of Sweden, who settled in ■ Philadelphia
in the early Colonial days. Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius had children:
Harriet Comley, deceased; Henry Robert; Justice Cox; William Albert,
of further mention ; Edith Maud. (V) William Albert Cornelius, son of
Robert C. and Elizabeth (Cox) Cornelius, was born in Philadelphia,
December 22, 1867. His early years were spent in the city of his
birth and in Stamford, Connecticut, and he acquired his education at
the Germantown Academy, and H. U. King's private school, in
Stamford. Having been thus thoroughly prepared, he matriculated at
the Lehigh University, and was graduated from this insti 
 WESTERN' PENNSYLVANIA ii95 tution in the class of \88g
with the degree of Mechanical Engineer. His first appointment was
with the Homestead Steel Works, where he remained twelve years,
starting in the drawing office and advancing till he became
superintendent of the Structural Mills. He left Homestead in 1900,
and came to McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and became superintendent
of the steel works and furnaces. He then became superintendent of
the steel works, furnaces and rolling mills, and assistant manager of
the National Works of the National Tube Company, and later
manager of the National Tube Company, National Works, and
general manager of the McKeesport Connecting Railroad. He is a
director of the First National Bank of McKeesport and interested in
other enterprises. Politically he is a Republican, and in religion a
member of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church of McKeesport. His home
is owned by the National Tube Company and known as the
manager's residence, and situated at No. 1121 South Park street,
McKeesport, Pennsylvania. The fraternal affiliations of Mr. Cornelius
are as follows: Franklin Lodge, Free and Accepted Masons ;
McKeesport Commandery, Knights Templar ; is a Thirty-second
Degree Mason ; and a member of the Psi Upsilon College fraternity.
Mr. Cornelius married, in 1900, Eleanor Roberts W^agner, of
Phila•delphia, and they have had children : George E. W., William
Albert, Jr., Robert Comley III, Eleanor Roberts, John De Benneville.
Family tradition says that David Patton (sometimes spelled PATTON
Patten), the emigrant ancestor of the line herein recorded, was born
in Ireland, from whence he emigrated to this country, settling in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he married Nancy Anne or Anne
Stokley (sometimes spelled Stockley and Stokely), bom in 1770, in
Philadelphia, died July 30, 1841. They removed from Philadelphia to
the state of Ohio, lived for a time at a place called Scotch Ridge, in
Belmont county, Ohio, but after he inherited the estate of his
brother, Matthew Patton, he moved to the old Patton farm on
Patton's Run, Belmont county, Ohio, in 1822. He was a farmer by
occupation, and a Baptist in religion. He died October 20, 1848.
Children of Mr. and Mrs. Patton: i. John, bom 1799, died March 3,
1864; married Sarah V. Dutton. 2. Jane, married William Goodhue. 3.
David. 4. Anne, married John Stewart. 5. Maria. 6. Robert, of whom
further. 7. Elizabeth, born August 10, 1806, ■died, unmarried, May
16, 1841. 8. Mary, married Michael Ziegler. 9. Hannah, married
Stanley Givens. These dates were taken from the old Patton
Graveyard in Patton's Run, Ohio. (II) Robert Patton, son of David
and Nancy Anne or Anne (Stokley) Patton, was born in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, September 10, 1804, died January 31, 1864. His
education was acquired in a school in Philadelphia. Later he became
a distiller, operating a distillery on his own account, and in
connection with this he cultivated a farm, giving special attention to
the raising of hogs, and also operated a coal mine, floating coal in
flats or boats to Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky. He
amassed a fortune and
 II96 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA became the possessor of an
estate that, when administered upon his deatli, was the largest ever
settled in Belmont county, up until that date. He combined unusual
talents with a personality so pleasing and a cordiality of manner so
unusual that none thought of grudging him his success, and his
friends were innumerable. He was a Democrat in politics, a Baptist in
religion, and a member of the Order of Free and Accepted Masons,
affiliating with the lodge at St. Clairsville, Belmont county, Ohio. He
married, October 12, 1828, ceremony performed by Edward Smith,
recorded in the Court House at Wellsburgh, West Virginia (then
Virginia), Mary Vastbinder, born in the year 1795, daughter of and
Sarah Vastbinder, who were the parents of three other children,
namely : John, Ephraim, Asa. Mrs. Vastbinder by her first marriage
had a daughter, Mrs. Margaret Bell, of Bells Mills, Brooke county,
Virginia, in the vicinity of Wellsburgh, and Mary Vastbinder was
residing with her at the time of her marriage to Mr. Patton. Her
mother and brothers resided at Belvidere, Warren county, New
Jersey, but it is not certain whether her birth occurred there or not.
The Vastbinders also resided in Eastern Pennsylvania, and were
connected by marriage with the families of Dewitt, McClain and
Everitt, of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Sarah Vastbinder was said
to have been over one hundred years old at the time of her death.
Children of Mr. and Mrs. Patton: i. Eliza Jane, born June 14, 1829,
married Benjamin Franklin West; all their children died in early life
with the exception of Mary, who married David Garden. 2. Matthew,
of whom further. 3. Sarah Vastbinder, born August 22, 1832, died
May 16, 1908: was educated at West Alexander Academy, West
Alexander, Pennsylvania. 4. Nancy Anne, born April I, 1833, married,
March 7, 1854, John Alexander Armstrong; children: Robert Patton,
William Donaldson, Ida May, Eugene Hildreth, John Alexander, Jr.,
Sarah Alice, Amos Wright; Mrs. Armstrong was educated at West
Alexander Academy. 5. Clarinda, born January 29, 1836, died May
20, 1848. (Ill) Matthew Patton, son of Robert and Mary (Vastbinder)
Patton, was born in Belmont county, Ohio, January 6, 1831, died
May tr, 1888. He was educated at West Alexander Academy, West
Alexander, Pennsylvania, and at Duflf's Business College, Pittsburgh.
Pennsylvania. His business interest, after attaining man's estate, was
association with his father in operating the distilley, in mining and
shipping coal, and as time progressed he took charge of all his
father's business; owned and operated a tow-boat, towing coal down
the Ohio river, also operated a coal vard at Covington, Kentucky.
Shortly after his father's death he bought and moved to a farm on
Wheeling creek, near St. Clairsville, in the same county ; on this
farm he raised a family and in later years operated a coal mine,
shipping coal to Cleveland, Detroit and other destinations. He was a
large, spare man, weighing 220 pounds, of very few words, but well
liked and known for his honesty. His interest in politics was as a
friend of the Democratic party, which received the benefit of his
influence and of his vote. In religion he was a Presbyterian. Mr.
Patton married Catherine
 WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA ii97 Ferguson, born in Allegheny
county, Pennsylvania, daughter of Samuel Ferguson ; children :
Robert, Samuel, George, William, deceased ; Albert, of whom
further. (IV) Albert Patton, son of Matthew and Catherine (Ferguson j
Patton, was born near St. Clairsville, Belmont county, Ohio, March
13, 1868. He passed his youthful years in his native county,
attending public and night schools until he was eighteen years of
age. His business career began as an employee of the Baltimore &
Ohio Railroad, with which concern he remained for nine months. At
tlie end of that time, at the very beginning of his career, Mr. Patton
began a connection with the iron and steel manufacturing industry
that has continued to the present time. His service in relation to this
industry has been varied and in association with many companies,
until the present time (1915) as superintendent of the steel plant of
the National Tube Company, he has arrived in a worthy place,
competently and faithfully discharging his important duties as head
of the plant. Prior to accepting this position with the National Tube
Company, Mr. Patton was with the Riverside Iron and Steel Company,
of Benwood, West Virginia, for one and one-half years ; the
Wheeling Steel Company ; the Carnegie Steel Company, of
Duquesne, Pennsylvania, from December, 1889, until January, 1892;
the West Superior Iron and Steel Company, West Superior, Wisconsin
; the Carnegie Steel Company from August, 1893, to January, 1895 ;
the Ohio Steel Company, of Youngstown, Ohio, until 1904 ; the
Lackawanna Steel Company, of Buflfalo, New York, for a short time ;
the Republic Iron and Steel Company, of Youngstown, Ohio, from
March, 1905. to August 10, 1906. It was on the latter date that he
became affiliated with the National Tube Company. Mr. Patton is a
member of the American Iron and Steel Institute, and is learned in
all of the scientific aspects of the business he has followed during his
active life and practical in his application of this knowledge to the
operation under his daily supervision. He holds membership in Vesta
Lodge. No. 352, Knights of Pythias, of Duquesne. Pennsylvania, of
which he is a charter member, and fraternizes with the Masonic
Order, belonging to McKeesport. Pennsylvania, Lodge, No. 641, Free
and Accepted Masons, and McKeesport Chapter, Royal Arch Masons.
He is a communicant of the Central Presbyterian Church. Mr. Patton
married, July 12. 1893, Sadie B. Brown, born in Fond Du Lac.
\\'^isconsin. October 25. 1874, daughter of William A. and Sarah E.
(Hunter) Brown, her father born in Hunter's Mills. Maine, February
10. 1840. her mother born there July i. 1842. William A. Brown was
a son of Jacob and Elizabeth (Brooks') Brown, and Sarah E. Brown
was a daughter of Actor and Harriet (Cole) Hunter, the latter named
a daughter of Noah and Hannah Cole. Actor Hunter was a son of
David Hunter, born in 1786, died in Benton, Maine, in 1870, whose
name is perpetuated in Hunter's Mills, Maine. David Hunter was a
son of James Hunter, born in Topsham, Maine, in 1735, died in 1809.
He was the first white child born in Topsham, was colonel in
Washington's army and commanded a regiment most of the time of
the Revolutionarv War. He was a son of
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