Women in Motion: Fitness, Sport, and the Female Figure

January 26–April 24, 2011
The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum @ 10975 SW 17th Street + The Wolfsonian–FIU @ 1001 Washington Avenue

Can women achieve fitness and athletic prowess while conforming to the social norms of femininity? Even as opportunities to participate in sports have grown and individual women athletes have won recognition, both the media and popular attitudes encourage women and girls to believe that female bodies are as much for form as for function. The ideal athletic woman must be sexy as well as strong, trim as well as toned. By placing appearance before competence, such attitudes inhibit the development of athletic skill and self-confidence, and reinforce the notion that women are the “weaker sex,” with consequences that go well beyond sports.

Women in Motion explored how ambivalence about women’s physical activity is nothing new, and invited viewers to consider historical messages about femininity, through Wolfsonian objects displayed at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University. In the early twentieth century, increased participation in sports and other kinds of physical activity went along with strides towards political, economic, and social equality for women in the United States and Europe. Artwork, advertisements, magazine covers, and political propaganda celebrated the athletic and healthy woman, but for different purposes: as a source of sexual attraction, as a basis of national vigor, and—sometimes—as a figure of individual self-fulfillment.

The installation was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-curated by Laurie Shrage, FIU Department of Philosophy, and Women’s Studies Center; Dionne Stephens, FIU Department of Psychology, and African and African Diaspora Studies Program; and Jonathan Mogul, The Wolfsonian–FIU; with contributions from FIU graduate students. Women in Motion was also later presented at The Wolfsonian, May 17–September 29, 2013.