Power to the posers: Delsartean women, the law of correspondence and the classical male body

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, female adherents of the Delsartean physical culture movement in the USA would perform statue poses as part of their training and public appearances, employing both male and female statues in their work. This article positions this practice within seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century historical trajectories of the visual, rhetorical and performing arts and the allegorical meanings that prior generations had mapped onto the bodies of these works of art. This article argues that the Delsartean ‘law of correspondence’ equating internal states with external expression allowed their statue posing to serve as a tacit statement of gender equality.