Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport

Long before therapy apps and wellness culture, Americans turned to sport to steady minds unsettled by modern life.
Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport examines the historical role of sport as both a mental and physical remedy during the late-nineteenth-century epidemic of neurasthenia, a debilitating neurological condition that gripped American society. Gerald R. Gems argues that the rapid expansion of organized sport and sport spectatorship coincided with—and responded to—the anxieties produced by an accelerating economic and social order. Activities such as baseball, boxing, cycling, and football offered psychological escape and physical discipline at a time when modern life was widely believed to exhaust the nervous system. Sports provided not only therapeutic relief but also a means to challenge rigid gender norms, domestic confinement, and restrictive fashions that reinforced female subordination. As women claimed physical autonomy through sport, athletic participation became interwoven with broader feminist currents. Tracing these developments forward, the book shows how sport emerged as a recurring prescription for both mental health crises and social change well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Revealing sport’s enduring role as both therapy and catalyst, this work reframes athletics as a central force in shaping modern ideas of health, gender, and social reform.