Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education. - Review - book review

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2000 by Merrill Leigh

Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education by Janice Ross. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 2000. 276 pages paper, illustrations. $24.95. ISBN: 0-299-16934-0.

She says she wrote the book because when she went to look for the information, it wasn't there. And so, author and Dance Magazine contributor Janice Ross began her methodical detective work on the myth and magic of Margaret H'Doubler, the woman credited with establishing the first dance degree program in a U.S. university. Conducting personal interviews, locating and sorting through uncatalogued, dusty archives and photographs, comparing ancient university catalogues, recognizing and retrieving untitled lesson plans, Ross carefully discovered and documented the growth of dance at the University of Wisconsin. But facts alone weren't enough for this scholar. Carefully analyzing the context in which a dance program was allowed, Ross sketches the end of the constraints of the Victorian age and the feminist liberation through changes in fashion, health practices and physical education for women. She relates H'Doubler's affinity with John Dewey's progressive education concepts, which emphasized not recitation of a body of facts to be learned but the personal growth of the individual through acquisition of knowledge and experiential discovery. Politically and strategically, H'Doubler maneuvered to prove that movement exists as a unique and valid way of knowing, and that such a personal education is valuable not only as a vocational objective but as a lifetime enrichment. Her philosophy is reflected in virtually every academic dance program in the United States today.