Bess Mensendieck's Body Culture for Women, read more than a century on
In 1906 the Munich publishing house F. Bruckmann brought out a book by an American woman who had studied medicine and was teaching exercise in Europe. Its full title was Körperkultur des Weibes: praktisch hygienische und praktisch ästhetische Winke, which comes out in English as something like Body Culture for Women: Practical Hints on Health and Beauty. The author was Bess Mensendieck (1864 to 1957), and the book launched a system of exercise that would be taught for most of the following century across Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
It is not an easy book to find now, and as far as I know it has never been published in full in English. Her later American books, It's Up to You (1931) and Look Better, Feel Better (1954), are different works for a different audience. So this is a guide for readers who come across a copy, or who want to know what is inside before they go looking.
What the book sets out to do
The book has two halves, an argument and a manual. The argument is a long, forceful complaint about the state of women's bodies at the time and the reasons for it: corsets and restrictive dress, a culture that prized the mind and distrusted the body, and an upbringing that taught girls almost nothing about their own anatomy. Mensendieck treated this as a health problem and an aesthetic one at once, and she was not embarrassed about the aesthetics. Greek sculpture appears again and again as her standard for a well-used body.
Along the way she surveys the history of body culture and the American work she had learnt from, above all that of Genevieve Stebbins, whose version of François Delsarte's ideas about tension, relaxation and expressive movement fed straight into her own. For a Pilates reader this is one of the most interesting threads in the book. It is a clear statement, decades before Contrology was published, that good movement means switching on exactly the muscles a task needs and leaving the rest quiet.
Her working principles are set out early. They include economy of effort, control over the range of a movement, awareness of the body in space, alignment, rhythm and breathing, with tension and relaxation running underneath all of them. None of these would surprise a modern movement teacher. In 1906, addressed to women who had mostly been told to sit still, they were close to radical.
The exercises and the photographs
The practical half gives detailed instructions, mostly for exercises that are simple to describe and hard to do well. Many begin standing: reaches forward and to the side, twists of the spine, lifts of the leg. Others are done lying down, and a Pilates student will spot a shoulder bridge and leg circles among them. Mensendieck asks for slow, deliberate work that stops well short of exhaustion, and for a moment of stillness and concentration before each exercise begins.
She also introduces the idea of moving from the Zentrale, the area of the lower back and pelvis that she treated as the control centre for the limbs. She pinned it down more precisely in a later book, Funktionelles Frauenturnen (1923), as the sacrum, the pelvis and the lumbar spine. Anyone who has been taught to keep the pelvis steady while a leg circles will recognise the instruction, and it is the clearest bridge between her work and Pilates, as discussed in our piece on Kneipp, Mensendieck and Steiner.
The photographs are the part most readers remember. Gathered as plates towards the back of the book, they show exercises demonstrated by an unclothed woman, Mensendieck herself among the models, posed with the stillness of sculpture. She was explicit that this was teaching material, since the point was to see the muscles working. In 1906 it was daring, and it was one reason her system met resistance in some places.
How it reads now
Some of it has aged badly. Mensendieck framed women's health largely in terms of their duty to bear and raise children, and she used the language of race that was common in the health writing of her time. Several of her judgements about beauty are pure 1906. Those passages are best read as evidence of the period, which is what they are.
Much of the rest reads as surprisingly current. Her insistence that posture is a habit you can retrain, that everyday movement is where most of our real training happens, and that women should understand their own anatomy instead of taking instruction on trust would sit comfortably in a modern physiotherapy leaflet. So would her dislike of exercising to exhaustion. Her attention to the centre of the body, too, anticipates the way Pilates teachers now talk about the deep trunk muscles and the core.
Where the ideas went
The system outlived its book by a long way. Mensendieck trained teachers from 1910, and after the First World War, though she was based mainly in New York, she kept returning to Europe to run courses. In Germany her name became familiar enough to turn into a verb, mensendiecken, and her work featured in the 1925 film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Ways to Strength and Beauty), a survey of the body-culture movements of the day.
The deepest roots went down further north and west. In Norway a Mensendieck school opened in Oslo in 1927 and the method became an approved branch of physiotherapy, with its own training for more than ninety years. In the Netherlands it became the basis of a recognised profession, the Mensendieck exercise therapist. In Denmark, where she taught regularly and later lived, Mensendieck teachers still train.
Reading it yourself
If you want to spend an afternoon with the book, this order works well:
- Find a copy through an antiquarian bookseller or a large research library. Note the date on the title page, because she published several related books in Munich over the next two decades and they are easy to confuse.
- Start with the plates. Even without German, the photographs show the positions, and the stillness of the poses tells you a great deal about her priorities.
- Read the chapters on her principles next, with a translation tool if you need one. They are the part of the book that has dated least.
- Pick out the floor exercises and compare them with the photographs in Joseph Pilates's Return to Life Through Contrology (1945), looking especially at the bridge and the leg circles.
- Read the passages on motherhood and race last, as history, alongside the rest of the hygiene literature of the decade.
- Try one standing exercise her way before you put the book down.
That last step is the one that teaches most. Stand still for a few breaths with your weight even across both feet. Then raise one arm slowly forward to shoulder height, and notice what else tries to help: the neck, the opposite shoulder, the lower back arching. Lower the arm and lift it again with only the muscles the movement needs. It takes about ten seconds, and it is the whole of her argument in a single gesture.
