Amy Morris Homans
Week of January 29, 2001

Late in the 19th century women were seldom welcomed in professional positions, and physical education was not viewed as a profession - Amy Morris Homans fought to change both of these attitudes.

Amy Morris Homans was born in Vassalboro, Maine, on November 15, 1848. She briefly attended the Vassalboro Academy and may have had private tutoring as well. She taught briefly in the local schools before enrolling in the nearby Quaker academy, Oak Grove Seminary.

In 1869, as one of a number of Yankee teachers who went to the South after the Civil War, Homans moved to Wilmington, North Carolina,. Her aunt, Amy Morris Bradley, who had arrived in Wilmington two years earlier, was running two schools there. They had been established with aid and support from Freedmen's Bureau and Northern philanthropists, notably Mrs. Mary Hemenway of Boston. Homans stayed in Wilmington for seven years. At first she was a teacher, then the principal of an elementary school. Finally, she became the head of a normal school that Bradley opened, with Hemenway's support, in 1872.

It is unclear when Homans and Hemenway met, or how their friendship developed, but in 1876 Homans moved to Boston to help Hemenway manage her philanthropies and other projects. Increasingly, these projects focused on improving the lives of Boston schoolchildren. In the 1880s the two women gathered information on health and physical education. Both came to disagree with the public perception that strenuous exercise for women was improper or "unfeminine." On the contrary, they believed that exercise for girls could improve the lives of women and future generations.

Homans and Hemenway helped sponsor a landmark 1889 conference in Boston for educators and the leading proponents of various systems of gymnastic training. The conference included a lively discussion of the different systems of gymnastic training available, and how to best meet the need for teachers.

That same year, Hemenway endowed the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, and Homans began to manage it. As Betty Spears noted in Leading the Way: Amy Morris Homans and the Beginnings of Professional Education for Women, Homans "quickly moved beyond Hemenway's original object of preparing gymnastics teachers for Boston's public schools to creating a national effort to better women's lives through physical education. She intended to make BNSG the leading normal school of gymnastics, training generations of teachers who, in turn, would train their students to spread physical education as part of the good life." Homans also worked to promote the formation of local, state, and national organizations of women physical educators.

Mary Hemenway died on March 6, 1894. Her will provided only another 15 years of endowed funds for the operation of the BNSG. Homans, and the Hemenway trustees, had to find a new sponsor for the school.

In 1909 the BNSG became part of Wellesley College. In exchange for the Hemenway endowment, Wellesley College agreed to build a gymnasium, named after Mary Hemenway, to support graduate study in physical education, and to accept Homans as the director of the program. Homans got the connection with a strong liberal arts curriculum that she wanted - she believed such a connection was essential for physical education to gain acceptance as a profession.

Homans was a stern taskmaster. According to Betty Spears, Homans "demanded excellence both in and out of the classroom. In addition to their academic courses, the students learned social graces, professional etiquette, and 'womanliness.' For Homans, 'womanliness' did not imply a passive, submissive, wan woman, but a healthy, vigorous, competent woman with flawless manners who was faultlessly dressed and immaculately groomed. Insisting on perfection, she summarily dismissed students who did not meet these standards. Many of those who survived became administrators and leaders in the emerging profession of physical education for women. By the 1920s, scores of BNSG/Wellesley alumnae directed programs of physical education across the United States and in several foreign countries."

In 1918 Homans retired from Wellesley College. She continued to live with her sister, Gertrude, in the town of Wellesley until her death in 1933.

For Homans and Hemenway, the goal had not been merely to produce teachers. "From the outset," Homans said in 1929, "we saw the need of something which would lift the life of the masses to a higher level of health and vigor, to a more sane and wholesome outlook, a more rational, self-controlled way of living. The comparatively new field of hygiene and physical education seemed more promising in these directions than anything else. I am more than ever convinced that the choice was a wise one. For in the activities of physical education the young human reveals and expresses his fundamental self perhaps more truly and more completely than in any other way."

For more information about Homans see Leading the Way: Amy Morris Homans and the Beginnings of Professional Education for Women, by Betty Spears [New York : Greenwood Press, 1986]

Written by Wilma Slaight