Moving Lessons

Moving Lessons is an insightful look at the origins and influence of dance in American universities, focusing on Margaret H'Doubler, who established the first university courses and the first degree program in dance. Janice Ross shows that H'Doubler was both emblematic of her time and an innovator who made deep imprints in American culture. An authentic "New Woman", H'Doubler emerged from a sheltered female Victorian world to take action in the public sphere, and she changed the way Americans thought, not just about female physicality but also about higher education for women.Ross brings together many discourses -- from dance history, pedagogical theory, women's history, feminist theory, American history, and the history of the body -- in intelligent, exciting, and illuminating ways. She shows how H'Doubler, like Isadora Duncan and other modern dancers, helped to raise dance in the eyes of the middle class from its despised status as lower-class entertainment and "dangerous" social interactionto a serious enterprise.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.