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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Women's Body Consciousness and Political Ideologies in Finnish Exercise Culture

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For over one hundred years, women’s gymnastics has been one of the most popular sports in the Nordic countries. Since the beginning of the 20 century, hundreds of gymnastics festivals have attracted thousands of gymnasts in Finland alone. Gymnastics has been taught weekly, monthly, and from year to year, in gymnastic clubs and at schools around the country. When teaching gymnastics according to the standards of the day, the gymnasts and their teachers considered the norms of gymnastics self-evident; in other words, as if the movements exercised and the body consciousness born out of the movements were neutral and value-free. Women’s gymnastics cannot, however, be examined separately from the political ideology prevailing in the exercise culture. The starting point of this article is the thought that instead of “pure gymnastics”, there is good reason to emphasize exercise imbued with different systems of meaning. According to Henning Eichberg (2004), different types of sports and forms of exercise correspond with different political identities. In his opinion, ideologies do not make use of sports and exercise culture, but they are, nevertheless, the same form as the exercise corresponding with the ideology. That being the case, women’s gymnastics has also been an institution and a form of activity that has created and maintained values and norms pertaining to the body consciousness of the gymnasts. Through gymnastics, though, women have the kind of movement they are allowed to use in everyday life. In this article, I will concentrate on examining the struggle of women’s sports and the development of women’s body consciousness. The essential dimensions of all exercise are space and time; in other words, how space is taken over by For over one hundred years, women’s gymnastics has been one of the most popular sports in the Nordic countries. In the article, two styles of Finnish women’s gymnastics will be studied. Of them, the former one was in use from the beginning of the 1900s, and the latter one from the 1930s on. In the article, it will be analyzed, how each style of gymnastics, with the rhythm and spatiality of its movements, has created a model of how the gymnasts have been in time, and in space. In the same time, by exercising the gymnasts have generated and maintained ideas about the use of space and time in social circumstances, in their normal life. This way, gymnastics has been an institution and a form of activity, which has created and maintained values and norms concerning not only the bodies but the personalities of the gymnasts, as well. women’s gymnastics, sport history, Finnish exercise culture, psycho physicality, Finnish gymnastics theoreticians at the beginning of the 1900s