Hanne Wassermann-Walker on Fitness, Form & Fashion
Hanne Wassermann-Walker on Fitness, Form & Fashion
Lea Lassen
Abstract
This article puts Hanne Wassermann-Walker’s 1940 New York lectures in the context of the socio-cultural developments and views of the period, especially those relating to female physical appearance, fitness, and fashion. It also explores the role that Hanne Wassermann-Walker’s stance had on female advancement in sports, self-perception and self-esteem.
Introduction
Perceptions of appearance are shaped by beauty ideals that are transmitted via socio-cultural channels, notably through family, friends and media. Visual media like magazines and films are found to be particularly pervasive and influential in this regard (Cash and Smolak 13, 16; Harper and Tiggemann 650). Meeting image ideals is often associated with attaining success in love and career, which can drastically affect one’s sense of self-worth and self-confidence in social functioning. Individuals internalize these received ideals and measure themselves, as well as others, by them. The process becomes a self-reinforcing cycle (Cash and Smolak 174, 263).
Body transformation to match societal ideals for social acceptance and personal fulfillment is a common narrative of consumer culture. The pressure to improve is felt by many and has only been exacerbated by various developments. The Western female body ideal of the 1930s, for instance, underwent a transformation amidst the advent of changing clothing styles and new materials that adapted to women’s increased participation in physical activities. The body and its shape became much more visible in public. And where more was visible to others, there was also more to monitor, to criticize, and to improve upon (Arnold, “The American Look,” 42, 64-65). But the body ideal came to inhabit a notably intermediate space, as represented by two side-by-side 1939 Vogue features titled “How Not to be so Thin” and “How Not to be so Fat” (64-65). Perfecting the figure, thus, entailed more than a general adjustment in weight; refinement of proportion to attain a desired figure came to be associated with a wish to appear thin as well as shaped (“Get a Sense of Proportion” 56). As one advertisement for women’s undergarments put it, “Let your figure have its points—but in the right places” (William Carter 10). Exercise and diet were branded as a solution to erase the excess pounds that were deemed to plague women in areas like the midriff, while clothing, among a plethora of other products, offered a means to camouflage and accentuate (Arnold, “Movement and Modernity,” 345).
This model image seems barely attainable, yet browsing through many 1930s and 1940s Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar fashion magazines tells a different story: such a figure can indeed be attained. Numerous issues feature stories and images of society women, college girls, sportswomen and actresses/models who embody these standards. Their bodies are framed as natural in these accounts. This would only have “heightened women’s awareness of cultural desires […] and expectations of their bodies” (Arnold, “The American Look,” 44). The fantasy of the achievable ideal body had to be cast as reality in a bid to exploit the marketable commodity the female body had become (Arnold, “The American Look,” 70, 65). A market appeared surrounding body culture that did not necessarily concern itself with wellbeing; instead, it thrived upon an ideal that would in reality be scarcely attainable. And yet, the guise of it being within reach was enough to oil the gears of consumerism.
Hanne Wassermann-Walker (1893-1985) was a proponent of exercise as a means to reach an ideal human (female) body. She developed and taught exercises aimed at strengthening various muscle groups to ease the ailments of pain, incorrect posture, and rough/awkward movements attributed to a weak body. Correcting these would also notably make the female body appear and conduct itself in a more harmonious and pleasing manner (Wassermann and Dr. Frankl). This article focuses on how her work corresponds to the aforementioned body culture of her time.
Wassermann-Walker was born in Vienna, Austria, but fled the country in 1938 in the wake of Nazi occupation and integration of Austria into the German Reich and the subsequent outbreak of World War II. Before eventually coming to live in Vancouver, British Columbia, she lived in the United States, where she spent her first year in New York. There she held a number of lectures relating to form, fitness, and fashion (Blackwell; Wassermann-Walker). These were advertised in a 1940 announcement (that UBC Library’s Rare Books & Special Collections acquired in 2019 along with an extensive archive documenting her life and work, see Blackwell 2019). This announcement forms one basis on which to begin uncovering how Wassermann’s work (heretofore understudied), fits into the body-related ideas and practices of her time.
Lecture “Every Woman her own Sculptor”
“Showing how the body can be moulded into the desired form at any age” is the title of one of Wassermann-Walker’s lectures (Wassermann-Walker). This lecture establishes that women have control over their figure, and that age is not a hindrance in this endeavour. The content of this lecture focuses on “appearance control beliefs,” which help convince individuals that the cultural body standard can be met with enough personal effort (Cash and Smolak 50). Conversely, the failure to meet this standard by implication stems from personal negligence.
Exercise, hygiene and fashion regimes became mass-marketed by the 1930s. As a result, participation in these practices as a notion of caring for the self, “a duty to be performed in order to shape the physical self to imply an orderly and well-structured life,” were arguably instilled in larger portions of the population (Arnold “The American Look” 40-42). Improvement of the body, however, was not only geared towards personal improvement but was similarly made into “a construction, to be assimilated” (Arnold “The American Look” 70). One feature in Vogue’s August 1938 issue boldly compared college girls, who do not adopt changes in beauty practices to mice. “Are YOU a mouse? Are you timid about such modern improvements as, say, lipstick pencils—or, worse, do you think of them in a vague, impersonal way, as you would the war in Spain?” (“Extension Course” 146). Those who do not match current conventions are shamed and are appraised to be indifferent to and out-of-touch with society at large.
Wassermann-Walker’s lecture speaks to moulding one’s figure into the desired form, supporting the idea that there exists a primary societal ideal to strive towards with methods such as fitness. The lecture claims to teach how to attain society’s sought-after figure at any age and suggests that it is attainable. Which, as previously stated, may be far from reality.
Lecture “How to Wear your Fashions”
“The relation of Fashion to form and movement: how to choose the most suitable dress, and how to wear them to the greatest advantage” is another lecture by Wassermann-Walker (Wassermann-Walker). Women’s fashion in the 1930s sought to return to a more feminine figure compared to the boyish and boxy silhouettes created by garments of the previous decade. Hemlines were dropped and garments become more closely fitted the body, once again accentuating features like the waistline (Palmer 63, 67; Trocchio 520). Movement also accompanied significant developments in clothing as designers like Madeleine Vionnet, Augusta Bernard, and Madame Grès created pieces that favoured the bias cut (fabric cut at a diagonal, 45-degree angle across the grain). In particular, their garments sought to “emphasize the wearer’s every movement” and flatter the figure while increasing fabric flexibility (Arnold “Movement and Modernity” 341-342; Trocchio 518-522; Palmer 176). Sportswear designs like those from Claire McCardell drew inspiration not only from these designers but from the toned bodies produced by dance and exercise (Arnold “Movement and Modernity” 341-342). Sportswear became further popularized through its applicability to a wide range of pursuits—both active and passive—and in the ways that it could signal “a subconscious link to the elite, leisure lifestyle from which it originated” (Arnold “the American look” 23, 35).
Wassermann-Walker’s lecture could certainly have taken up some of this discourse. In her writing, the developments of fabric and its functionality find expression in similar fashion. Instructive here is the broader history of Lastex, which is a yarn of “latex thread wound with threads of cotton, rayon, nylon, or silk and used to give a one-way or two-way stretch to fabrics and garments” (Merriam-Webster) was invented in 1931. It provided fabric with a flexibility that would not come to lose its shape as classical fabrics did. Sportswear, notably swimsuits, benefited greatly from this yarn compared to fabrics previously employed—e.g., wool that would sag when wet (Ibbetson). Lastex also came to be prized for its light seamless and form-fitting qualities that made its incorporation in women’s undergarments such as girdles by brands like Munsing Wear and Carter’s Foundations most suitable. This fashion culture promoted “Contour Control … to glorify your figure” by creating “slim, curving hips, accented, feminine bust, cleverly indented waist, restrained thighs and flat rear profile” (Munsingwear 16f; Munsingwear 111). Wassermann-Walker’s recommended clothing for fitness aligns with the assumptions surrounding Lastex use. Beyond her writing for the lecture, however, she further elaborates on fabric’s centrality for fitness culture in Tägliche Gymnastic, a guide she co-authored with Oskar Frankl. In this book, she notes that the best workout clothing is no clothing at all. But, in the case that the “Adamskostüm” (nudity, literally meaning Adam’s suit) was not possible, light and thin swimwear was advised (Wassermann and Frankl 8). Given this, swimwear and potentially Lastex would have been featured in her lecture, forming an important component of how she popularized some sportswear fashion practices for women.
Although Wassermann-Walker favours shaping the body through gymnastics—deeming it a real and more honest method compared to various “artificial interventions from outside”—the lecture does nonetheless aim to show how to wear garments “to the greatest advantage” (“künstliches Zutun von außen”) (Wassermann and Frankl 1; Wassermann-Walker). Overly restrictive clothing articles would not have been promoted by Wassermann-Walker. In outlining how women attempt to retain or attain beauty, referenced is the practice of “squeezing the body into armour-like structures,” here, she alludes to the use of shapewear-like girdles (“Einzwängen des Körpers in panzerartige Gebilde”) (Wassermann and Frankl 1). Constricting and squeezing the body is a practice deemed unhelpful and one that would ultimately not truly yield the desired figure. Thus, what the lecture likely sought to articulate is how to achieve similar effects (e.g., slimming of the waist) with less restrictive garments.
Lecture “Is Sport Beautifying?”
Another one of Wassermann-Walker’s lectures focuses on how “Sport may have ugly results. What sports are best for women, and why? Deals with the improvement of skill; the right use of recreation; and the suitability of various sports to different ages” (Wassermann-Walker). The multifaceted construct of body image is one accompanied by both positive and negative attributes (Cash and Smolak 56). Wassermann-Walker displays both. On the one hand, she promotes health (hygiology) in aspects such as improving muscle usage to alleviate pains as a result of weakening. However, it is important to note that alongside practical aspects, she maintained an aesthetic interest in making women’s movements and posture more pleasing and attractive. On the other hand, the view that sports can garner ugly results (through larger muscle mass in women - which is considered undesirable) reinforces the perception that only certain bodies are beautiful (Wassermann and Dr. Frankl 4-7; Wassermann-Walker). Not only are programs that perpetuate exercise as a tool to improve appearance arguably not as effective as those that “help people set realistic and attainable goals and that teach people how to monitor progress in terms of functional fitness improvements”, but marketing towards specific societal beauty notions would also not have been reassuring for those who do not match these ideals—and perhaps are never able to do so (Cash and Smolak 383).
Wassermann-Walker’s suggested gymnastics for women (which she herself did not define as a sport) may not have been harmful in a physical sense as it was stressed they ought to adapt to and change with age and ability (skill/health condition), and should not under any circumstance cause feelings of “faintness, fatigue, shortness of breath, elevated heart rate, anxiety, headache, or dizziness” (“Unlustgefühle, Ermüdung, Atemnot, Herzklopfen, Beklemmung, Kopfschmerz oder Schwindel”) (Wassermann and Frankl 4, 9-10; Wassermann-Walker). But, her views and practices concerning exercise do echo and bolster the ideas of people like Paul Gallico who, in a 1936 Vogue issue, extensively outlined the activities suitable for women to participate in: “Only low-impact sports that involved as little visible exertion as possible were permissible” (Arnold, “The American Look,” 64). Despite an increase in female sports participation through college physical education programmes towards the end of the nineteenth century and in events like the Olympics of the 1920s and 1930s, traditional ideas of femininity attached to physical appearance and activity would actually have suppressed female participation and acceptance in sports (64-66). Especially given the physiques/muscles required and developed by many sports which would have undoubtedly gone against the idealized sylphlike figures for women of the time.
Lecture “How to Avoid Growing Old”
“A lecture of great importance to those passing middle years. Without crankiness and fads and irksome exercises the effects of age can be escaped. Full of sane and practical advice” is another lecture by Wassermann-Walker (Wassermann-Walker). From her writings with Frankl, we know that Wassermann-Walker presumed that “every woman wants to stay young as long as possible” (“Jede Frau will möglichst lange jung bleiben”) (Wassermann and Frankl 1). Compared to the vast expenses and efforts by women when it comes to beauty regiments and tools, Wassermann-Walker advocated for daily gymnastics as a powerful “means to uphold and promote health, to preserve and achieve harmonious body dimensions,” when performed correctly (“Maßnahme zur Erhaltung und Förderung der Gesundheit, zur Bewahrung und Erlangung harmonischer Körpermaße”) (Wassermann and Frankl 1-4, 7, 9). Her lecture attests to her interest in “practical advice” without “fads and irksome exercises” (Wassermann-Walker). This is not to say, however, that exercises would not have been a feature in this lecture but rather that there was much advice in circulation that was deemed impractical. By 1940, when these lectures took place, there had already been numerous articles published surrounding both exercise and dieting. Exercises found in magazines prescribed, for example, stretches and movements that one could do whenever one had spare time. This catered to those who found regular exercise tedious (“Exercises while You Wait” 62-63). These exercises would have been unguided throughout, likely irregular and unadjusted to an individual’s circumstances, all of which would have decreased their effectivity and subsequent value. Dieting, another practice that came to signal a fashionable woman’s “healthy” lifestyle, seemed particularly counter-productive to Wassermann-Walker (Arnold, “The American Look,” 49). For, as she expressed in her other writing, “just as the car engine requires petrol for its performance, the muscles also need certain substances to enable it to perform” (“Ebenso wie der Automotor für seine Leistung Benzin beansprucht, so bedarf auch der Muskel gewisser Substanzen, welche ihn zu seiner Leistung befähigen”) (Wassermann and Frankl 6). On a prolonged scale, dieting would not only lead to further weakening but likely to irritability as well.
It is intriguing that the lecture does not speak of escaping aging in its entirety but rather addresses what aging’s adverse effects can be on the body, which can be mitigated through exercise. This lecture was also aimed at a demographic that had perhaps felt underrepresented in cultural discourse or felt alienated by exercise culture. A letter written to Vogue discussed in the 1939 article “What About Me?...Asks the Older Woman” shows how some viewed the media as lacking true age and body representation. The article refutes the letter by providing clothing recommendations that would dignify the more mature women. Nonetheless, the article notes that “if an older woman has a young figure (as so many have, these days) she can wear dresses like those with the new Paris addenda about the hips […]” (36). While fashion for the more mature woman may have occasionally been regarded, the youthful body continued to prevail as the ideal. Alternatives to fitness, namely fashion, were available through further purchase. But, as fitness regimes emerged and gained prominence as a hallmark of the modern, healthy lifestyle, shortcuts were considerably frowned upon and viewed as a lack of discipline (Arnold, “The American Look,” 51-53). Wassermann-Walker shared similar views favouring fitness over other means of sculpting the body. However, compared to the disregard displayed in Vogue’s 1939 article-response concerning age-related changes that affect one’s ability to partake in exercises, Wassermann-Walker is more considerate. She promoted fitness that adapts to the individual while still leading to a more desired figure. This approach would have felt welcoming for women who found the emerging social ideals encompassing health and figure challenging amidst the natural development of age.
Lecture “Modern Beauty from Ancient Art”
The last lecture of interest to this article is “An account of the attention given to movement in ancient times and its contribution to the modern cult of the beautiful body” (Wassermann-Walker). It advances a theory about physical culture of the modern world as one that emerged from antiquity. The term “gymnastics” itself has roots in the ancient Greek word “gymnazein” meaning ‘to train naked.’ As previously mentioned, Wassermann-Walker recommended one exercise naked where possible (Harper; Wassermann and Frankl 8). Greek vase paintings show how music was attached to rhythmic and repetitive gymnastics movements in gymnasia and palaestra (Hawhee 133-138). And Greek sculptures commemorating the well-defined bodies of male athletes reveal the ideal proportions aspired to among the larger focus on health through diet, exercise and hygiene (Millington 26). The focus on creating a well-sculpted body, notably for women in the 1930s and beyond, is one that similarly connects to exercise, where ideal bodies were memorialized, perhaps not in sculpture but in mass/visual media.
Although the exact contents of this (and the other) lectures remain speculative, what this lecture does convey is that one can see past practices reflected throughout time. Just as there is much we can reflect upon today from a contextualized analysis of these lectures, we see that the ideas and concerns of the present are not far off from those conveyed in the past. In this regard, appearance, which has now become a matter so fixated upon factors like weight, was similarly made a matter of concern for women in the 1930s and beyond (see Cash and Smolak 12). Attitudes surrounding figure have also persisted, particularly those that regard appearance as the product of one’s choices. These choices are used as a means by which to assess each other and either signal a well-put-together life or one that needs improvement.
Beauty as an objective or subjective construct has been discussed and debated for centuries. Today, one can commonly hear that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote in her novel Molly Bawn (Duchess 140). Yet, how much are our perceptions of figure shaped by our surroundings or through media and the market? It is important to understand how we buy into ideals that do not serve our wellbeing and how we allow such ideals to influence our sense of self-worth, as we measure ourselves and others by them. This applies not only to women, who were the targeted audience for Hanne Wassermann-Walker and the focus demographic of this paper, but to all—including men, who are also often measured and burdened by traditional expectations and roles surrounding their masculinity.
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Lea Lassen is a student at the University of British Columbia pursuing a major in International Relations. Working with primary documents from UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections on Hanne Wassermann-Walker has allowed her to explore her interests in understanding how individual and societal perceptions surrounding ideas like beauty have evolved through history.
Picture: “Vogue June 1936 - photo by Edward Steichen” from Condé Nast Archive. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vintagevogue/8459592408. Distributed under a CC0 2.0 license. No changes have been made.
