Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport

Gerald R. Gems (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

222 Seiten

2024
Lexington Books/Fortress Academic (Verlag)
978-1-6669-5506-4 (ISBN)

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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.

Gerald Gems is professor emeritus at North Central College and past president of the North American Society for Sport History.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Modernization: A Society in Flux

Chapter 2: Neurasthenia: A National Epidemic

Chapter 3: The Rise of Sport: The Expression of Physical Vitality

Chapter 4: Baseball; Creating the National Game

Chapter 5: Cycling: Upsetting Gender Norms

Chapter 6: Boxing: Reasserting Masculinity

Chapter 7: Football: A Surrogate Form of Warfare

Chapter 8: Sport as Therapy: Stress Relief

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author

Erscheinungsdatum	10.07.2024
Reihe/Serie	Sport, Identity, and Culture
Sprache	englisch
Maße	162 x 236 mm
Gewicht	449 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Sozialpsychologie
	Weitere Fachgebiete ► Sportwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-6669-5506-X / 166695506X
ISBN-13	978-1-6669-5506-4 / 9781666955064
Zustand	Neuware