Strenuous Life Essay

Emergence of the Strenuous Life

The strenuous life was an idea and lifestyle that came about during Victorian America. This was an overall concept of how society should live their lives based around the idea of therapeutic ethos (The Strenuous Life: Race, Sports, and Gender at the Turn of the 20 Century). This philosophy stated people should live their life through the idea of self-fulfillment rather than the Victorian idea of self-control. Self-fulfillment was a lifestyle that would help save yourself, save your health, and allow you to prove yourself as a man through your daily actions and behavior. The lifestyle of self-control valued individuals keeping control over their emotions while living a modest life. With this self-fulfillment way of thinking the gender roles for men, football, and the wild west became key factors in the emergence of the strenuous life in Victorian America. Male gender roles were one key factor that led to the emergence of the strenuous life. During the beginning of Victorian America males had become “brain workers” (Go West Young Man: The

During this time men would go out and participate in “barbarian virtues” meaning that they would fight savages on the land that the savages occupied and knew so well in order save themselves from the idea that middle white class americans were going extinct, save their health from dreadful disease of Neurasthenia, and prove themselves as men (Our Little Brown Brothers: Race and American Imperialism). They would also search for these fights in order to prove themselves to be hearty Americans with true American ideals (Our Little Brown Brothers: Race and American Imperialism). This helped promote the strenuous life idea that to be a hearty American man you needed to fight battles to save yourself, save your health, and prove yourself as a man (Our Little Brown Brothers: Race and American