Female Equestrians, Spectators, and Laborers: Creating Separate Spaces in 19th-Century Riding Schools

During the nineteenth century, horsemen operated riding schools across the northeast United States in large numbers. These institutions prided themselves on preparing young, bourgeois women to be public horsewomen. The popularity of riding schools in urban areas and among bourgeois families reflected the nineteenth-century belief that riding was a proper female accomplishment. This rhetoric made it acceptable, and even expected, for young ladies to attend riding schools. However, since western cultures had long associated horsemanship with masculinity and given men worked at these institutions as instructors, stable hands, and trainers, riding school proprietors had to work diligently to ensure that their academies maintained an air of strict propriety for female pupils. One important way they accomplished this goal was by designing the physical space of riding schools to separate female pupils, their escorts, and their lessons from the coarser elements of riding instruction like the stable. Through the presentation of fire insurance maps, published lithographs, and early-twentieth century photographs, this poster will show how horsemen carefully constructed riding schools in Boston and New York City so they would appeal to bourgeois women and their families. This analysis reveals how proprietors constructed nineteenth-century riding schools with women in mind, showing how changing ideas about horsemanship and women’s growing participation in equestrianism shaped the very structure of equestrian education during this time. Viewers will be able to contemplate how space reflects gender and class ideologies while considering how human-animal co-embodiment evolves when occurring within carefully curated spaces as opposed to natural environments.