SOURCE: "From Event to Monument: Modernism, Feminism and Isadora Duncan," in American Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 25-45.

In the following essay, Francis examines the ways in which Duncan contributed, through her theories about the female body in motion, to women's liberation and the modernist temperament.

Many intellectuals and artists who saw Isadora Duncan dance came away believing they had experienced the liberation they longed for in their hopes and dreams for the twentieth century. Duncan returned to the Greek emphasis on balancing ecstasy and harmony and made it "excitingly modern," as one critic put it. Her performances from 1908 and throughout the 1910s excited the imagination of American intellectuals who sought to tear down the barriers of class and sex in order to see their philosophies reflected in a praxis of art and life. Max Eastman, editor of the Masses, wrote, "She was an event not only in...