PROFILE: Mabel Lee
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Mabel Lee: Pioneering physical education innovator, women's advocate, and author
Copyright © 2005 by Jean SandersAhead of her time in the field of physical education, Mabel Lee felt women could accomplish physical feats that were deemed either impossible or inappropriate. She also felt that physical education programs should be available to everyone, not just a favored few who seemed to have special skills.
Up through the first part of the twentieth century, women were generally considered to be, or were treated as, "the weaker sex." For instance, women's basketball rules limited the movements of each player to half court. School athletic departments often required women to refrain from physical exercise during "that time of the month" because it might affect their health negatively. Many sports were dominated by, or considered to be, for men only. Mabel Lee strove to change those foolish attitudes and rules.
Born August 18, 1886 in Clearfield, Iowa to David Alexander and Jennie Aikman Lee, Mabel was the second of four daughters. As a child she was small, underweight and often ill. Regardless, she enjoyed participating in physical games and activities. Although there were few organized children's sports, there was also no TV and, therefore, few couch potatoes. As Mabel described her childhood in Memories of a Bloomer Girl, "We children of the 1890s had a rich play life, full of physical activity. Even home chores added to our physical development." She cited climbing trees, swinging on wild grape vines, and walking to school as "natural gymnastics."
A favorite childhood memory involved her fourth grade teacher, Mr. Brower, a Civil War veteran. He had his students march around the school, swinging their arms and singing. Sometimes they would sing the multiplication tables to the tune of Yankee Doodle. Mr. Brower felt "this was good exercise and an antidote to natural restlessness."
The first children's bikes were manufactured during the 1890s and Mabel won one in a contest. Because it was the first child's bike in the neighborhood, her parents insisted she share its use with other children so all could benefit from the exercise.
One of Mabel's childhood friends was Hygiene Sawyers (yes, Hygiene was really her name). Hygiene's father, a doctor, purchased and installed some exercise machines, including a rowing machine and pulley weights, in the basement playroom of his home. Several times a week, the girls worked out on them, experimenting with and inventing various exercises.
By 1893, the Lee family had moved to Centerville, Iowa. It was there that Mabel graduated from high school in 1904.
She attended Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, partly because Coe had a girls' basketball team and a new gymnasium was under construction. She majored in psychology, minored in biology, and took courses in anatomy and physiology, which were fairly new to college curricula then. During her senior year she taught gymnastics to girls at Marion High School, located in a town six miles from Cedar Rapids just a trolley ride away.
Lee wanted to teach physical education, so after graduation magna cum laude from Coe in 1908, she enrolled in the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (BNSG). Here she was introduced to new ideas that were not being taught in most schools.
One of these was the study of health and hygiene and their potential impact on physical fitness. Following a physical examination, Mabel was told she needed "corrective exercises" for spinal curvature and a slight difference in the length of her legs. Because of this, "correctives" became a focus for her own teaching, especially in the areas of posture and special needs.
Lee had little interest in dance as a physical education activity until she studied with an instructor who required his students to choreograph and perform for his classes. Then she began to appreciate its educational value and later, as a teacher, she developed and presented pageants.
She also formed definite ideas about the overall purpose of physical education. In today's highly competitive sports-minded environment, her philosophies seem somewhat out of sync. She was adamantly opposed to intercollegiate sports and their emphasis on developing a few elite players. In her opinion, intramural sports were fine as long as all students who desired could participate equally. She felt strongly that sports were essential for improving individual physical fitness and should be engaged in by people of all abilities.
In 1909, at the end of her first year, the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics became part of Wellesley College. Upon graduation in 1910, Lee accepted a teaching position at Coe College. There, due to the straitlaced climate of the times, she withstood controversy when she instituted health and hygiene courses as requirements for freshmen women, and insisted that they take comprehensive physical examinations so she could classify them for "corrective" work. However, she was forced to discontinue the examinations temporarily until she could convince parents, students and faculty that they were necessary and would be conducted with privacy and modesty.
In 1911, Lee started a tradition of pageants at Coe that incorporated dance in spite of public outcry that dance was immoral in any form. Especially notable was the first annual May Queen celebration that almost didn't happen. Just as the orchestra was ready to play, the sheriff came to arrest her because a Grand Army of the Republic commander complained that she was dishonoring Memorial Day. Following a meeting with the sheriff and college president, the show was allowed to continue.
Two years later the pageant was halted temporarily because the girls wore silk hosiery instead of cotton. Another year the show was interrupted because a girl wore a leopard skin costume. Each time Lee was called to the president's office and reprimanded before the performance could continue.
Lured by a better salary, Lee accepted a position with the Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis (now Oregon State University). It seemed like a good idea, but because World War I troop training was being held on some college campuses, Lee's physical education classes were relegated to the basement laundry room of the home economics building. There faculty and students had to work around large immovable laundry tubs.
With the onset of the 1919 flu epidemic, the campus health service also headquartered in the laundry room. When Lee became seriously ill, she resigned and moved to her parents' home, which was then in Des Moines, Iowa.
Ready to resume work in1920, Lee spent four years as Director of Physical Education for Women at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, where she reorganized the department and instituted new programs.
Then she received an offer from the University of Nebraska and, in 1924, Lincoln became her home. At first, Lee had to cope with faculty and alumni who felt good athletes should be given special treatment and that intercollegiate sports should be a priority. This was antithetical to her philosophy that sports were essential for improving individual physical fitness, they should be engaged in by people of all abilities, and all students should earn their grades through their own hard work.
By reorganizing and innovating, Lee's work ethic and standards became those of the department. Again, controversy ensued. She turned a previously three-day-a-week class schedule into a five-or-six-day schedule, annoying some instructors who had liked their relatively work-free days.
Under her guidance, a program that had consisted mainly of gymnastics expanded to include a variety of activities including team and individual sports, corrective exercises, and a program for special needs. Some of her critics considered Lee to be a hard taskmaster, but she always took a personal interest in her students, listening to and counseling them about health issues, professional goal setting, and proper deportment for young ladies. She was an outspoken crusader against smoking, arguing from a health standpoint years before the general public was aware of its hazards.
Lee had no use for bigotry. During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan not only terrorized blacks, it also targeted and threatened Catholics. When Lee, who was not Catholic, accepted a bid for a new women's gymnasium from a Catholic-owned firm, Klan members harassed her with phone calls and letters.
It was during this decade that Lee began her long affiliation with professional physical education organizations, becoming recognized as an authority on the organization and administration of physical education departments. Serving as president of local, regional, and national groups, she reached a pinnacle when, in 1931, she became the first woman president of the American Physical Education Association.
Due to a paucity of written guidance on the subject of physical education, Lee wrote a book that her students could use as a teacher's manual. Her Conduct of Physical Education was an immediate success, became a textbook in colleges and universities nationwide, was translated into several foreign languages, and was acclaimed by the National Education Association as one of the sixty best educational books published in 1937.
Lee's influence on regional and national physical education was also underscored by her involvement as a committee member of numerous government-sponsored physical fitness programs. From 1941-1943, she served as a volunteer regional director of physical fitness for a national program established by President Franklin Roosevelt. In 1942, she became the first woman president of the American Academy of Physical Education. She was also active in the American Youth Hostel, serving as a member of the national board in 1944, served on the Board of Directors of the National Amateur Athletic Federation with Mrs. Herbert Hoover, and later General George Marshall appointed her to his civilian advisory committee for the first Women's Army Corps.
In 1948, the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (AAHPER) awarded her its prestigious Luther Halsey Award for outstanding service to the profession.
Her second textbook, Fundamentals of Body Mechanics and Conditioning, co-authored with Miriam Wagner, was published in 1949.
Lee retired from the University of Nebraska in 1952 and spent that summer as a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. Then, as a Fulbright Professor, she was physical education consultant for the Iraq Ministry of Education in Baghdad in 1952-1953.
Throughout her life, Lee kept copious notes about her work and the historical aspects of the physical education movement in the United States. No longer teaching, the ever energetic Lee sorted through boxes and boxes, files and files. For years, she had urged AAHPER to establish archives. Finally, she was offered the position of volunteer archivist. She accepted, stipulating that she be provided with necessary research and travel expenses. She served as AAHPER's first archivist from July 1960 to December 1969.
For the remainder of her life, Lee maintained an active schedule of speaking and writing. In May 1976, she was invited to her alma mater, Coe College, where she was crowned "May Queen" in honor of her work as a physical education instructor and to honor the tradition which she had helped to establish.
An Amy Morris Homans Fellowship Award from Wellesley College resulted in two books: Memories of a Bloomer Girl (1977) and Beyond Bloomers (1978). They are simultaneously autobiographies and histories of the physical education movement in the United States. A draft of another memoir, From Bloomers to Bikinis, remains unpublished. She also completed several other books and articles about physical education. Her book A History of Physical Education and Sport in the U.S.A. was published in 1983 when she was age 97.
It may appear that Lee's life was one long series of work-related activities and that she had no personal or social life. This was only partially true. With friends she enjoyed hiking, mountain climbing, cycling, canoeing, reading, gardening and travel. She was devoted to her family and after her father died, her mother joined her in Lincoln.
Because Lee defended her ideals steadfastly, and because those ideals did not always fit the public norm, she had detractors. One notable ongoing feud was with Louise Pound. A renowned English professor, Pound was another strong-minded woman who also excelled in athletics, triumphing over men as well as women in tennis and golf. Pound had played and coached intercollegiate basketball at the University of Nebraska before Lee arrived and was an avid proponent of intercollegiate competition. Pound's goals for physical education differed sharply from Lee's. At one point Pound tried to get Lee fired. As Lee reminisced in a 1977 interview with E. K. Casaccio, "She [Pound] thought I was going to revive the great games she put on in her day. She was not interested in those who did not excel, she had no time for them. She was a coach, rather than a sportswoman." In Lee's autobiographical books, she referred to Pound as "that woman."
Some of Lee's other writings include A Brief History of Physical Education, 4th Executive Director (with Emmett A. Rice and John L. Hutchinson, 1958); History of Middle West Society of Physical Education 1912-1960 (1963); History of Central AAHPER 1933-1963 (1966); 75-Year History of the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (with Bruce L. Bennett, 1960); A Brief History of Physical Education, 5th Executive Director (with Emmett A. Rice and John L. Hutchinson, 1969); Seventy-five Years of Professional Preparation in Physical Education for Women at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln: 1898-1973, Parts I-II (with Dudley Ashton and Madge Phillips, 1973).
In spite of instances where people with negative agendas attempted to thwart or destroy positive outcomes, educators universally respected Lee for her knowledge, tenacity, and ability. She received many honors, including an LL.D. Degree from Coe College (1939); Honorary Doctor of Physical Education from George Williams College, Chicago (1956); and Honorary Doctor of Humanities, Beloit College (1977).
Other honors included the Hetherington Award (1957) of the American Academy of Physical Education and the R. Tait McKenzie Award (1968) of the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation. An AAHPER Mabel Lee Award was established in 1975 to be given to women under age 36 who showed unusual promise in the field of physical education. In May, 1977 the University of Nebraska Department of Physical Education's new building was named Mabel Lee Hall.
She died December 3, 1985, at the age of 99.
Posthumous honors include induction into the Coe College Sports Hall of Fame in October 1997 and an entry in American National Biography, Supplement 1 (2002).
For more information, consult "900 Famous Nebraskans" on the Internet at www.nsea.org or www.beatricene.com/gagecountymuseum or www.nebpress.com.
