Good health, then, is a code, meaning: tomboy now, successful breeder of white children later. She is only laying the foundation for future good health.” Let her ride, drive, row, swim, run, climb fences, and even trees, if she has a mind to. An 1873 article stated that parents should “allow a girl to be as ‘tomboyish’ as her inclinations lead her to be. Good health, then, is a code, meaning: tomboy now, successful breeder of white children later.īut the ultimate femininity of frailty wasn’t much good for procreation, and the birthrate was declining among these white women. This ideology promoted the ideal of women sticking to the private sphere, tending to children and cultivating piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Middle-class white women, in their 25 pounds of restrictive bustles, corsets, and crinolines, were largely constrained by the gender roles of what was known as the “cult of true womanhood,” sometimes called the “cult of domesticity,” in the Victorian era. Nineteenth-century tomboyism was, in fact, connected to one of the white middle class’s great projects of the time: breeding the white race. But another idea about the benefits of tomboyism took hold, one which promoted the opposite conclusion: that tomboyism was good for the womb.
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