ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how nudity in some contexts was “respectable” and in other contexts salacious—the distinction was often created by racial stereotypes. Impresarios’ focus on circus women’s propriety at the turn of the century was particularly striking because they had downplayed the presence of female players. Physical-education reformers posited that female athletic activity was crucial to moral, physical, and even “racial” well-being. During the “bicycle craze” of the late 1880s and 1890s, thousands of women took up the novel pastime of bicycling. In the milieu of the women’s physical-culture movement, audiences could read circus women’s meager dress as a function of wholesome athleticism. The genesis of the American empire provided an important sociopolitical context in which circus proprietors could promote female nudity as instructive. Women’s costuming was another vehicle for domestication and eroticism. Circus media constantly justified bare apparel with stories about healthy, wholesome female circus athletes.
