ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the career of influential professor Dudley Allen Sargent (1849–1924) to demonstrate how universities in the United States incorporated an idealised rural working bodily image into their physical culture curricula. Sargent used his own life history, the science of anthropometry and famous examples of masculine health to create a physical culture curriculum modelled on the activities of rural working men. Rural workers were targets of emulation in curricula because their environments, gender performances and types of labour were seen as health building when compared to the ‘emasculating’ types of work and environments found in American industrial cities. Sargent's curriculum and the physical culture profession more generally was reactionary in its early years. Embedded in this pedagogy was a criticism of the direction of early urban industrial life and work and a desire to revive elements of America's past.
