Nieuws uit Nederland @Nietlientje has just posted this 1932 photo from the Schiedam municipal archives of the Hygiea gymnastic association.
There's a rich history, of which I know too little, of gymnastic and calisthenic movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Swedish gymnastics, the "Battle of the Systems" in the USA, the Sokol movement in the Czech lands...these Dutch women belong to that history.
From which socioeconomic class or classes did associations like this draw their membership? Was this association enclosed within one of the three "pillars" - Protestant, Catholic, and social democratic -- of Dutch society at this time? Did this kind of association survive into the second half of the twentieth century? I suspect not.
I was also struck by the women's unshaven underarms. How pleasing to see a world in which axillary depilation has not yet become a norm!
#History #Gymnastics #Netherlands #Pillarization #Schiedam #History #Depilation #1930s #Beauty #Armpit