Women Becoming Manly, Men Effeminate, Foppish

1910

Woman Developing Strong Arm

While Men Are Changing to Effeminate, Foppish Persons

Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 28 — Dr. Dudley A. Sargent, a celebrated authority on physical development, declares that woman is fast assuming the physical proportions and mental characteristics of man. Dr. Sargent is director of the Harvard and Sargent gymnasiums in this city. He cites from a model of a composite woman, molded from measurements made from 10,000 women, all taken prior to the year 1890. On the other hand, he avers that man is inclining toward effeminacy.

"Although I've no actual figures to verify the statement," Dr. Sargent says, "I know for a fact that the women of today are more mannish than the women of that time. Women, in the savage state, are so like men in form that it is well nigh impossible to tell them apart. Then, as civilization progressed, their especially feminine characteristics became accentuated, until the exaggeration was almost painful to look at.

"Then the pendulum began to swing the other way. Women are again beginning to look and be more like men. Great changes in this direction have been made since the molding of that statue. The women from whom the measurements for it were taken were different in conformation compared with those of today. The composite was the extreme type of femininity. She was woman overwomanized. Her hips and all the pelvic portion were overlarge. Her waist was oversmall. Her feet were undeveloped. So were her back and neck.

"Since that time her physique has been thoroughly made over. It is approaching that of man. The sloping shoulders of her grandmother's time have disappeared. They are no longer in fashion. In their place we find well-knit, athletic shoulders, broad ones. Her back, likewise, is better developed. Her hips are not so large as they once were. The entire pelvic region has decreased in size and the result has been an enlargement of the waist. The small waist is a thing of the past. Her neck is thicker and more muscular; her limbs more smoothly developed; her hands and feet are larger in every respect. Her chest has been said to be flatter. I should hardly wish to endorse that last opinion. It is true, however, that her chest may appear flatter, because I am glad to say the corset, which formerly forced it upward, has of late, been somewhat modified.

"Another reason for the change in woman's physique is that within the past 10 years women have done a great deal more in the way of athletics than they did formerly. Golf, tennis, running and swimming have done much to improve woman's physical development.

"It is a rule that one may take few exceptions to, that if a woman devotes herself to the activities of a man, there is bound to be a loss of sex. This approximation of man's physique is, from an anthropological point of view, a bad thing. It is to be hoped that men and women do not grow to be more alike than they are today. The same may be said of men. From the overdeveloped Sandow, man has changed to the effeminate and the foppish being. The assimilating of the sexes by each other is a possibility to be decried."

—Olean Evening Times, Olean, NY, Nov. 29, 1910, p. 2.