Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport

Book excerpt: Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport explores the historical role of sport in the prescription for mental and physical health through the epidemic of neurasthenia, a debilitating neurological disorder that afflicted American society throughout the latter nineteenth century. Gerald R. Gems argues that the practice of sport and sport spectatorship, which grew concomitantly with the onset and spread of neurasthenia, provided both a physical preventative and a psychological escape to redress the perceived causes of the epidemic. Sports such as baseball, boxing, cycling, and football offered psychological relief from the stresses of a rapidly changing economic and social order. Cycling, in particular, provided women with the means to challenge the prescribed gender order of female domesticity, male hegemony, and the dictates of physically restrictive fashion. In the process, sport became a key component in the rise of feminism and a prescription for the epidemics that followed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.