The women's exercise movement in 19th-century Boston

The Massachusetts Historical Society fills us in on the movement to get women moving, starting in the 1860s:

Bostonians such as Dr. Dio Lewis and Mary E. Allen, opened gymnasiums catering specifically to women and children. In 1860 Lewis opened the New Gymnasium, focused almost exclusively on promoting muscular development in children of both sexes, and his Family School for Young Ladies in Lexington, MA, which centered its curriculum around both intellectual and physical instruction.

Mary E. Allen continued this trend into the 1870s, opening the Ladies Gymnasium on Washington St. in 1877 and offering facilities for women and children to conduct slow, careful, and progressively more difficult physical exercise in the pursuit of 'symmetrical bodily development".

By 1899, girls at Charlestown High School were climbing the walls:

Photos from the Boston Public Library. Posted under this Creative Commons license.