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This article examines U.S. Women’s Gymnastics both as a contemporary site of public fascination and as a historically situated discourse. In doing so, the article argues that early U.S. women’s gymnastics functioned as a means of subjection that was understood to cultivate desirable (White, bourgeois) femininity. Nevertheless, elegance, beauty, and perfected femininity do not adequately explain the appeal of U.S. women’s gymnastics. Instead, U.S. women gymnasts also function as limit figures that mediate cultural anxieties and conflicting desires regarding national identity in the U.S. popular imagination.

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From 1830 to 1870, texts promoting gymnastics sought to prevent and cure gynecological and alimentary disorders among U.S. women by strengthening their abdominal muscles, fostering wide waists and convex abdomens, lifting and toning their (floating) uteri, raising their digestive organs, and purifying their blood. Gymnastics discourses thus encouraged participants to incorporate anatomical characteristics associated with the Venus de’ Medici and to become healthy, buoyant women who were robust, substantial, and relatively weightless. This article shows how those texts sought to reform corseted women by enabling them to materially (re)contour and (re)constitute themselves as social subjects—as healthy, true women who had retained important attributes of republican motherhood. Not only does this study identify the particular improved and fortified species of true womanhood that gymnastics endorsed, but it also reintroduces the materialization of (gendered and sexed) subjectivity into the history of sport.