Social history: the body, the fashion and physical activities in São Paulo in the first years of the last century

Abstract

This work had as objective to analyze the relation between social history, body, fashion, and the physical activities of the woman of the paulistana elite in the first twenty years of the last century. It’s a social-cultural, descriptive and qualitative research, whose data were published by means of general and specific literature, booklets, articles, theses and iconographic resources, of the time, to elucidate which were the ideas of body, fashion and physical activity. The woman of paulistana elite looked at herself as the european ones. Gaining public spaces, little by little, developed necessary habits for the performance of the functions and expectations that was imposed to her by modernity. Being more and more and more active she ‘transited” the social world of the parties and night meetings, but during the day she practiced physical activity – gymnastics – according with the medical social hygienist and social ideas of the time.