Margaret Newell H’Doubler (1889 – 1982)
by Dr. Janice L. Ross
Margaret Newell H’Doubler is widely
regarded as the founder of dance in the
American university, yet she was not a
dancer and never took more than a handful
of dance classes in her life. H’Doubler’s lack
of first-hand dance experience proved to be
a shrewd strategy for success, freeing her to
shape dance education as a vital means
toward social transformation for the
American college woman. When she started
the nation’s first dance class at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, in the
summer of 1917, the athletic H’Doubler’s
most extensive qualification in movement
was as a women’s basketball coach. In the
climate of fear that was endemic in early20th-century society with regard to active
women (physically, socially, and
educationally), H'Doubler succeeded in
making creative dance not only a safe
discipline for college women, but a popular
and respected one as well.
of her life. Since there was no such major as
women’s physical education at the time,
she put together her own comprehensive
course of study. Four years later, in May,
1910, H'Doubler graduated with a B.Sc. in
biology and minors in chemistry and
philosophy. She was promptly hired as an
assistant P.E. instructor.
H’Doubler’s family valued the arts,
invention and social idealism, although
neither her mother, who was a normal
school teacher, and her father, who was a
writer, poet, inventor and photographer,
had much formal education. Born in Beloit,
Kansas, to Sarah Emerson Todd and Charles
Wright H'Doubler (the surname is an
Americanized version of the original Swiss
family name Hougendoubler), Margaret
Newell H’Doubler was the second daughter
and the third and last child of this middleclass Protestant family. The Hougendoubler
relatives emigrated from Switzerland to
Illinois and Pennsylvania in the early 1700s
and fought in the American Revolution,
while the Todds arrived in America from
England in the 1600s. H'Doubler entered
the University of Wisconsin in 1906,
intending to study either biology or
medicine. However, when she took her
obligatory freshman physical education
class she discovered a passion for the
physical that would animate her for the rest
The result was that H’Doubler began
teaching dance in the 1917 UW-Madison
summer session with only the germ of an
idea – gleaned primarily from watching
children’s dance classes taught by an
idiosyncratic children’s dance educator, Alys
Bentley. H’Doubler had found Bentley at
the end of her year in New York and was
impressed with Bentley’s radical ideas of
creative movement. The philosophy of John
Dewey, with whom H’Doubler studied at
Columbia, must also have helped inform
what she knew she didn’t want: dance that
was stiff and imitative and that sparked no
special experiences or discoveries for the
students involved in it.
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
H’Doubler’s search for a model of dance she
could teach in the university actually began
as an assignment she was given by Blanche
Trilling, the chair of women’s physical
education at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison. In the summer of 1916, as
H’Doubler was about to leave for a year of
graduate study in philosophy at Columbia’s
Teacher’s College in New York (she
completed her M.A. at the University of
Wisconsin- Madison in 1924), Trilling asked
her to “find some dance worth a college
woman’s time” (Ross, 102).
In H’Doubler’s classroom, dance became a
way for the college woman to find her
expressive side and explore a physical self
that was novel for the majority of women in
early-20th-century America. H'Doubler
belonged to the first generation of
professional American women, women who
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substantially rejected traditional female
roles to accomplish what they did.
H'Doubler didn't marry until August 5, 1934,
when she was 45. She and her husband,
Wayne L. Claxon, a Wayne State University
art professor, remained childless, so she led
a life of deep dedication to a profession
rather than to domesticity.
H’Doubler’s classes began with the students
lying on the floor, a radical notion for
proper college women in 1917. There on
the floor, free from worries about balance
and falling, the women (all of H’Doubler’s
early classes were for women only) began
to discover their bodies and movement.
H’Doubler also imported her most famous
prop from her experience in the sciences –
a human skeleton -- which she used in all of
her dance teaching to demonstrate to the
students the anatomical logic of how the
body moves.
By the time she retired from full-time
teaching in 1952, H’Doubler had effectively
succeeded in franchising dance education
across America. H’Doubler’s students
headed major dance programs in colleges,
universities and public and private schools
throughout the country, and her 1940 book,
Dance: A Creative Art Experience, remained
the most widely used book on dance
education in the nation. H’Doubler’s
approach to movement explorations
informed not just college dance, but dance
in public schools and the theater as well.
H’Doubler was persuasive as a dance
educator in part because she was able to
argue compellingly for dance as a laudable
and vital practice in every young college
woman’s life. Most importantly, H’Doubler
made her case for dance by showing what it
had to offer in the way of lifelong learning,
and by offering valuable lessons for how
each dance student might use the
experiences of the class to help shape her
approach to the world outside.
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
The 1917 summer session changed the
course of dance in America. It initiated a
new discipline known as dance education.
Here, free from the negative associations of
dance as a sinful, sexually promiscuous
social practice, one mostly focused on
displaying women’s bodies, H’Doubler could
establish new links between female
athleticism, health and morality, and all
through dance. H’Doubler, however, had to
invent the kind of dance that could do just
this. In part because she was staunchly
against the physically injurious training that
passed for much ballet in America at this
time, and because she was more focused on
creating dance teachers rather than
performers, H’Doubler gravitated toward
creative movement, movement that
resembled problem solving, movement that
made the wondrous biology of the moving
body come alive. In her lifetime H’Doubler
received many awards, including the
AAHPER Gulick Award, the Dance Magazine
Award, and an honorary Ph.D. from the
University of Wisconsin in 1972. H’Doubler
died from natural causes in a retirement
home in Springfield, Missouri in 1982. Her
ashes were scattered in the waters of Green
Bay Wisconsin, outside Waymar, her
beloved weekend home.
For full references to works cited in this
essay, see the annotated bibliography in
Selected Resources for Further Research.
Janice Ross, Professor, Drama Department,
and Director, Dance Division, at Stanford
University, is the author of Anna Halprin:
Experience as Dance (UC Press 2007),winner
of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special
Citation, San Francisco Ballet at 75
(Chronicle Books 2007) and Moving
Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and The
Beginning of Dance in American Education
(University of Wisconsin 2001). Her awards
include Guggenheim and Fulbright
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Fellowships. For ten years she was the staff
dance critic for The Oakland Tribune and for
twenty years a contributing editor to Dance
Magazine. Her articles on dance have
appeared in The New York Times and The
Los Angeles Times among other
publications. She is past president of the
Society of Dance History Scholars.
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
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