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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2022 'Well-researched and readable' - Financial Times 'An absorbing, pacy read' - New Statesman 'Canny and informative' - The New Yorker The untold history of women's exercise culture, from jogging and Jazzercise to Jane Fonda. Author of The Cut's viral article shared thousands of times unearthing the little-known origins of barre workouts, Danielle Friedman explores the history of women's exercise, and how physical strength has been converted into other forms of power. Only in the 60s, thanks to a few forward-thinking fitness pioneers, did women begin to move en masse. In doing so, they were pursuing not only physical strength, but personal autonomy. Exploring barre, jogging, aerobics, weight training and yoga, Danielle Friedman tells the story of how, with the rise of late-20th century feminism, women discovered the joy of physical competence - and how, going forward, we can work to transform fitness from a privilege into a right.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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To Daniel and Sam, for putting a spring in my step and moving me beyond words; to Jackie and Juliet, for lifting me up; and to my parents, Richard and Karen, for everything.
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A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.
—GLORIA STEINEM, MOVING BEYOND WORDS
Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands.
—ELLE WOODS, LEGALLY BLONDEviii
CONTENTS
Introduction
SWEAT
Five years ago I walked into a Pure Barre studio for the most predictable of reasons: I was getting married. In a few months I would be wearing a strapless lace gown in a hotel ballroom in my childhood hometown of Atlanta. For one night, I would be in a literal spotlight.
I was marrying a wonderful man, and I had spent my career as a journalist making the case that women should be valued for their inner selves and not their appearance. But weddings have a way of stirring up our most basic desires, and even feminists sometimes fantasize about greeting the world with a flat stomach and firm arms.
My local barre studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side promised, in loopy letters on a sidewalk chalkboard, to LTB—lift, tone, burn—my then thirty-five-year-old body into that of a ballerina. Sounded highly improbable and completely perfect.
I was drawn to the studio in the same way I’d been drawn to my high school’s cheerleading squad: desperate to join, but doubtful, in some core teen girl way, that I belonged. Or that I wanted to belong. This time, though, going for it wouldn’t mean attempting a sad split in front of the popular girls—or giving up Model UN. So I slipped into the boutique fitness uniform of moisture-wicking everything, handed over my credit card, and swallowed hard. xii
When the class began, a ponytailed instructor wearing a headset microphone ushered me and a dozen other women to a ballet barre, where we moved our thighs up an inch, down an inch until our muscles trembled. On cue, I squeezed my “seat” (barre-speak for butt) until it spasmed and planked until I thought I might pass out. When I looked around the room, every other woman was stone-faced in her Lululemon. Would one of them catch me if I collapsed mid-squat? For the last few minutes, we lay on our backs and thrust our pelvises to a stripped-down version of Rihanna’s “Umbrella.”
At the end, I didn’t die of embarrassment or exhaustion. I felt fantastic.
So I went back, again and again. The workout made me strong in parts of my body I hadn’t realized were weak. It allowed me, for the first time in my life, to carry grocery bags without stopping to rest after three minutes. I didn’t look like a ballerina, but I felt like one—light on my feet, energized, connected with my body in a totally new way. I came to understand that the other women in class weren’t unfriendly but intensely focused, in the one space where they had to focus only on themselves. I, too, developed a resting barre face.
A few months into my new Pure Barre routine, I became curious: Where did the barre workout, which had become a global phenomenon (and multibillion-dollar industry), come from? One internet rabbit hole led to another, and I discovered an origin story far richer than I was expecting. What had once seemed like a familiar rite of passage suddenly took on the feeling of a mystery waiting to be uncovered.
The workout was created in 1959 by Lotte Berk, a free-love revolutionary and former dancer who wanted to help women improve their sex lives. (This explained why many of the exercises in class felt comically erotic, from pelvic tucks to a move called “knee dancing.”) Almost as radical at the time, Berk encouraged xiii women to use exercise to strengthen their body—to create a “corset of muscle.” Her London studio was one of the first-ever boutique fitness studios, and she attracted a celebrity clientele of actresses, writers, and on one occasion Barbra Streisand, who allegedly never removed her hat.
I wrote about this history in a feature for New York magazine’s The Cut titled “The Secret Sexual History of the Barre Workout,” and the story went viral. Few of the workout’s devotees, including studio owners and instructors, knew about its roots. Some were scandalized, while others were delighted. For me, however, researching the piece opened my eyes to more than one workout’s wild origins: It felt like unlocking a portal to a hidden feminist history.
While fitness culture today can feel sleek and sometimes sterile, the story of how women’s exercise developed in the twentieth century until now, I discovered, is weird and messy and awkward and glamorous. It’s rich with cinematic characters and forgotten pioneers of what we now call self-care. But more than that, it’s the story of a paradigm shift in the way women, so long accepted as the “weaker sex,” came to view their bodies. Because when women first began exercising en masse, they were participating in something subversive: the cultivation of physical strength and autonomy.
Today, I exercise for energy, for strength, and for my mental health. I exercise to feel the endorphin high of accomplishment and to manage life’s lows. I exercise to remind myself I can persevere. And I am not alone. Most of the women I know—as well as the many women I interviewed for this book—consider regular physical activity essential to their emotional and physical well-being. My mom, who is in her early seventies, calls her weekly cardio dance classes a “surefire source of joy.” xiv
Before the coronavirus pandemic, some 184 million people belonged to at least one gym, studio, or health club. The pandemic shook the fitness industry, forcing scores of brick-and-mortar spaces to permanently close. (In the United States, nearly 20 percent shut down.) But it also led to a dramatic rise in home exercise: By mid-2020, more than 80 percent of fitness consumers had livestreamed workouts, compared with only 7 percent before the global lockdown began. For many, amid so much unthinkable tragedy, the pandemic brought a newfound appreciation for what their bodies could do, beyond how their bodies looked.
Women’s desire to test their strength and endurance through exercise is now widely accepted in most Western countries. But until relatively recently, the premise that an average woman would regularly break a sweat in the name of health—or even beauty or weight loss—would have shocked polite society.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, sweating was considered “unladylike,” and women tried to hide their muscles under sleeves. While women’s beauty guides advised that gentle calisthenics could help correct a woman’s “figure faults,” doctors cautioned against vigorous exercise, warning it would lead to exhaustion or make a woman’s uterus literally “fall out.” Until the early 1970s, common wisdom held it was dangerous for women to run more than a couple of miles at a time—a justification for banning women from road races. The average woman exercised so little for so long, the sports bra wasn’t invented until 1977. (All hail inventors Lisa Lindahl, Hinda Miller, and Polly Smith.)
But while much has been written about how the rise of women’s sports have empowered women, the role of women’s fitness in shaping our collective pursuit of strength has largely slipped under the historical radar. This, despite the fact that most women stop playing organized sports when they graduate from high school or college, whereas many exercise for a lifetime. xv
When popular media have explored the historical significance of women’s fitness culture, they have mostly treated it as a collection of disparate fads with little impact on women’s lives or society at large. It is often covered as kitsch—reminders of a past that women would just as soon forget, from vibrating belts that promised to eviscerate fat to neon leg warmers.
We can always find reasons to laugh at the choices made by our younger, less wise selves or forebearers—thong leotards? really?—but this popular treatment also surely stems from the fact that we live in a culture that diminishes women’s interests as silly and trivial. Dismissing the things women say they love as inconsequential allows our culture to stealthily ensure women remain subordinate to men.
Women’s fitness history is more than a series of misguided “crazes.” It’s the story of how women have chosen to spend a collective billions of dollars and hours in pursuit of health and happiness. In many ways, it’s the story of what it has meant to be a woman over the past seven decades.
For much of the twentieth century, most women didn’t move very much. They grew up being told they were physically limited. “For centuries women have been shackled to a perception of themselves as weak and ineffectual,” Colette Dowling writes in The Frailty Myth. “This perception has been nothing less than the emotional and cognitive equivalent of having our whole bodies bound.”
By the late sixties, however, women began to question whether they really were defined by their biology. A new wave of feminists wondered: What if women weren’t born physically weak, but became weak in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy? After all, little boys were encouraged to climb trees and throw balls, while little girls were rewarded for displaying poise and grace. Boys were encouraged to get dirty; girls, to keep their clothes pristine. Even clothes themselves discouraged movement: The xvirestrictive dresses, girdles, and high heels of mid-century women’s wardrobes made it difficult for them to bend, stretch, run, and sometimes even breathe.
Men enjoyed a lifetime of practicing how to use and trust their bodies; women did not.
In the early seventies, the authors of the seminal women’s health guide Our Bodies, Ourselves wrote: “Our bodies are the physical bases from which we move out into the world,” but “ignorance, uncertainty—even, at worst, shame—about our physical selves create in us an alienation from ourselves that keeps us from being the whole people that we could be. Picture a woman trying to do work and to enter into equal and satisfying relationships with other people—when she feels physically weak because she has never tried to be strong.”
The rise of women’s fitness offered a path to this strength.
For most of her life, the feminist icon Gloria Steinem actively avoided exercise, feeling more comfortable living in her head. “I come from a generation who didn’t do sports. Being a cheerleader or drum majorette was as far as our imaginations or role models could take us,” she wrote in her book Moving Beyond Words. “That’s one of many reasons why I and other women of my generation grew up believing—as many girls still do—that the most important thing about a female body is not what it does but how it looks. The power lies not within us but in the gaze of the observer.”
As she watched friends begin to exercise in the seventies and eighties, her perspective shifted. “For women to enjoy physical strength is a collective revolution,” Steinem later wrote. “I’ve gradually come to believe that society’s acceptance of muscular women may be one of the most intimate, visceral measures of change,” she also observed. “Yes, we need progress everywhere, but an increase in our physical strength could have more impact on the everyday lives of most women than the occasional role model in the boardroom or in the White House.” xvii
Steinem herself began practicing yoga and lifting weights in her fifties.
Of course, women’s fitness culture is far from universally empowering. As this book will make clear, it is deeply intertwined with beauty culture, which sells the idea that women must change to be lovable—or even acceptable. Over the decades, fitness purveyors promising to lift women up have instead held them back and held them down by exploiting their insecurities. And the fitness industry at large is a formidable capitalist force that has long tried to commodify women’s empowerment for its own gain. But to dismiss the rise of women’s fitness culture as only harmful is to deny the experiences of millions who consider exercise vital to their well-being. Put simply: It’s a lot more nuanced than good or bad.
Like my experience with Pure Barre, many women start exercising to change their appearance, but they stick with it after discovering more meaningful rewards. For some, becoming strong helps them overcome the desire to shape their body for anyone else’s pleasure. As journalist Haley Shapley writes in Strong Like Her, “strength begets strength,” and not just of the muscular variety.
By understanding women’s fitness history—the good and the bad, the silly and the serious—we can better understand ourselves. And we can better harness exercise in ways that truly liberate all women.
My own fitness history began nearly four decades ago. I grew up in Atlanta in the eighties and nineties, the era of Get in Shape, Girl! toy sets and Great Shape Barbie—who came equipped with a teal spandex catsuit, leg warmers, and heels that never touched the ground—and later, the ThighMaster and Buns of Steel home video series.
xviii While I knew early on that exercise was “good for you,” I mainly thought of it as a ticket to becoming thin and conventionally attractive. I was average-sized as a teenager, but I believed that once I became a leaner me, through conviction and discipline, I would be a better me. A fully realized me. Like so many ambitious girls, I wanted to be big and small at the same time—to live a big life in a small body.
From middle school through my twenties, I saw exercise more as a chore, a female duty, than as a fun and invigorating way to spend my time. I saw my body—my arms, abs, thighs, and “buns”—as parts that needed to be mastered, Suzanne Somers style. I hoped I could jog and crunch and squat my way to perfection.
As I entered my thirties, exercise began to play a more profound role in my life. My dad is a lifelong runner, and his enthusiasm for the sport is contagious. I had always liked running, but running toward a “bikini body” took some of the joy out of it. When I stopped focusing on how running might transform my appearance, I began to enjoy the experience itself. Since turning thirty, I’ve run a dozen half-marathons and one full marathon, and I consider the sport core to my identity. I’ve taken cardio dance classes and felt the ecstasy of losing myself in the music. Barre classes, it turned out, offered me my first real taste of fullbody muscular strength.
But it wasn’t until I became pregnant, at thirty-six, that I began to truly appreciate the value of movement and strength. During most of my pregnancy, I felt powerful knowing I was growing a new life inside me. But after my son was born, I felt diminished. I’d endured a third-trimester blood pressure spike and an emergency C-section. For the first time, I didn’t trust my body. For weeks that turned into months after giving birth, consumed by caring for a newborn, my husband and I rarely left home, and usually only to shuffle to the drugstore for diapers. Over time, the muscles I’d cultivated from running and barre became soft. My xix legs became tired. When I tried to locate my abs, I couldn’t find them. I don’t mean in the mirror. Standing in my bedroom one morning with my breast-milk-stained Gap sleep shirt raised, my son already a few months old, I poked and pressed, attempting to flex and feel at least a remnant of resistance. Instead, I felt only a void.
But I didn’t want my pre-baby body “back.” I didn’t feel like the person I was before I gave birth, and trying to re-create her felt like going backward. Yet I did want to feel in control again, to feel strong again. Strong enough to nurture a baby and marriage and career. The pursuit of physical power now felt urgent. When I was ready to start exercising again, doctors, family members—everyone who cared about me—cheered me on.
While writing this book, I learned how fortunate I am to be living in an era when women are encouraged to move. But I also gained deeper insight into the reality that because of systemic inequality and discrimination, exercise is not a right but a privilege in many countries. The fitness industry has a history of exclusion, catering to middle- and upper-class white people with disposable income. The costs associated with working out make it inaccessible to millions. Exercise also requires time and a safe space to move around in—luxuries millions more don’t have. Just as the rich often get richer, the fit often get fitter, while the poor get sicker. And then there’s the problematic fact that exercising has, for several decades, been linked to virtue, creating stigmas against people who can’t or don’t want to or even don’t look like they work out.
Examining how and why these injustices came to be—and spreading awareness—can help to make fitness more inclusive of and accessible to all women. There are signs of progress, as a new generation of pioneers is dedicating their lives to this goal.
xxThis book tells the story of how the Western world transformed from viewing vigorous exercise as “unfeminine” to the reality we live in today, where so many women consider physical activity a way of life. It reveals how the pursuit of fitness and beauty became so intertwined. And most of all, it showcases the pioneers who, through each era of contemporary history, fought for women’s right to move. These trailblazers—inspiring, outspoken, complicated women—shaped the substance and rhythm of women’s daily lives and laid the groundwork for today’s fitness landscape. While they were media sensations in their day, “viral” before viral was a thing, most have been overlooked by popular histories.
Our story begins in the fifties, when the first real women’s fitness celebrity, Bonnie Prudden, pitched exercise as a novel solution for housewives who felt trapped in their homes and struggled to find purpose outside their roles as wives and mothers. We’ll travel to London in the Swinging Sixties, when miniskirts and the brewing sexual revolution helped to fuel Lotte Berk’s barre classes.
From there, we’ll see how, in the seventies, women found liberation through jogging, and how Jazzercise and aerobic dancing became American institutions. We’ll trace Jane Fonda’s extraordinary path from film ingenue and anti–Vietnam War activist to Hollywood’s first celebrity fitness influencer.
We’ll explore why women started lifting weights and eventually wanted “buns of steel”—and why, after years of striving for hard bodies at the gym, they turned to yoga by the tens of millions. Finally, we’ll look at the new vanguard of women’s fitness pioneers, embodied by Instagram and yoga superstar Jessamyn Stanley, who are working to bring exercise to every body.
I hope you find this history as engrossing to read as it was to research—a journey that included interviewing bona fide fitness legends, scouring more than seven decades of fitness books, poring through archival women’s magazines, sweating to home xxi workout tapes, and speaking with dozens of exercise enthusiasts who ran, danced, lifted, tucked, and stretched through the events in these pages. And I hope, like me, you will find that understanding how and why we move can help us better understand ourselves.
All right, ladies. Are you ready? Let’s go.
Chapter 1
REDUCE
Pat: I’ve been around physical ed for years. Mike: Physical Ed? Who’s he?
—KATHARINE HEPBURNAND SPENCER TRACY INPAT AND MIKE, 1952
America, manpower conscious, is almost oblivious of the potential of its neglected womanpower.
—EUGENE REGISTER-GUARD, 1962
New Yorkers who spotted Bonnie Prudden striding through midtown Manhattan in August 1957 couldn’t have known they were glimpsing the future. With the space race revving up and new technological marvels emerging every day—color TV! Teflon pans!—who would give serious consideration to a petite forty-something woman going about her day in a stretchy jumpsuit? She was an anomaly, a head-scratcher. They couldn’t have known that someday their city would be filled with Bonnies, sheathed in workout clothes that allowed them to move as they pleased.
But that summer, after weekly appearances on NBC’s Home show, she knew she was onto something. The morning show was hosted by Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs, and featured her, America’s leading fitness expert, alongside some of the biggest names of the day—Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Dear Abby’s Abigail Van Buren. “We are raising a nation of children with muscles of 2custard,” Bonnie told the hosts. She had a gift for dramatic exaggeration that annoyed her critics. The whole country was falling apart, she said.
Now the editors at Sports Illustrated seemed to agree, asking her to appear on the cover of their August 5 issue as both a model of physical fitness and its number one champion. So what if they’d be featuring her during the languid final stretch of summer? A cover was a cover.
It would be the latest in a string of platforms to promote her controversial message: Everyone should exercise. Everyone. Every day. Even the mostly male readers of a magazine devoted largely to golf and baseball highlights—who thumbed through issues while smoking cigarettes and sipping scotch, or grabbing 25-cent burgers at a coffee shop counter on a lunch break, only to commute via train or bus or car home, where they would plop into an easy chair and watch a few hours of television. Even their girlfriends and wives, who were raised to believe ladies should never sweat. (Horses sweat, men perspire, but ladies merely glow, went the old adage.)
For the cover, shot at her “fitness institute” in the suburb of White Plains—a predecessor to the kind of gyms that would become a fixture in America decades later—Bonnie slipped into her trademark workout uniform, a one-piece wool outfit of her own design called a “leotite,” covered in a jaunty star pattern.
It was a novel concept, both the outfit and the notion that a woman would prioritize comfort and flexibility in her wardrobe. After all, it was a moment when most of the decade’s fashions were shaped by girdles and petticoats. Once, when Bonnie was late to an appointment, she ran through the streets of Manhattan in one of her leotites, covered only by a thin white medical coat. A well-meaning police officer stopped her—Was she okay? he wanted to know. It was highly unusual for a woman to be running in public, and especially one so scantily clad.
Sports Illustrated assigned staff photographer Richard Meek, 3 whose previous credits included baseball great Ted Williams and hockey legend Gordie Howe, to her cover shoot. Bonnie styled her close-cropped brown curls into a no-fuss ’do and wore just a smidge of makeup. Her leotite advertised that her arms, legs, stomach—every inch of her five-foot-three-inch frame—were harder than those of most women her age (or any age). Her boundless energy belied her forty-three years, the challenges of raising two teen daughters, her chronic loneliness.
For the winning photo, Bonnie got down on the ground, shot a toned leg high into the air, and smiled. Click! The move was so familiar to her, but so exotic to most Americans. Inside the magazine, the reading line accompanying her feature would offer this mantra: Bonnie Prudden says: You are NOT too young, too old, too full of aches, too fat, too thin, too far gone, too lazy, too flabby, too anything to have fun keeping fit. She would devote the next few pages attempting to convince a skeptical nation.
“The secret is simple,” she told readers. You “substitute activity for inactivity as much as you can during the course of a normal day and take a few minutes of each day to do some easy exercises.” It was straightforward enough. “For more fun and best results do the exercises to music,” she added. “Use Leroy Anderson’s ‘Sleigh Ride’ or ‘China Doll.’” Women should “never wear girdles while exercising,” she warned, “but should wear a brassiere.”
She demonstrated four floor exercises to get readers started, the first in a pictorial column that would run in more than forty issues of the magazine.
The secret may have been simple, but it was a tough sell in postwar America. What would daily exercise look like for Americans in the late fifties? For men, it would mean reconsidering the three-martini lunch. For women, it would mean something more profound: taking time out of their day to care for themselves, when nearly every social institution stressed that a woman’s sole purpose in life was to care for others.
4 Unless exercise could be sold as a wifely duty—and a path to winning the Cold War.
Americans had long prided themselves on being a hardy people. They were puritans and pioneers and immigrants, tough and industrious. They were can-do workers and strivers. But by the 1950s, they were moving less than ever before, and the lack of activity was taking a toll. Politicians and pundits questioned whether the nation was becoming soft.
Gone were the days when Americans’ survival depended on physical competence. As the twentieth century progressed, the growing middle class embraced what it called “our modern way of life.” It was a lifestyle defined by ease and abundance, which felt like a balm after the Great Depression and World War II. It prized comfort, convenience, efficiency. It also made Americans’ bodies “largely irrelevant,” writes historian Shelly McKenzie in Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America.
The rise of the suburbs transformed nearly every aspect of middle-class life, as a single-family home with a yard in a well-groomed neighborhood became the new American dream. From 1950 to 1960, the country’s suburban population exploded from twenty-one million to thirty-seven million. But over time, those living in the new sprawl succumbed to what Bonnie Prudden liked to call “the tyranny of the wheel.” Walking was replaced by driving, as cars were now required to get around. Kids who in previous generations had been active since they could scoot were now pushed in strollers, then shuttled to school in buses. (No more walking a mile, uphill both ways, in the snow, to class.) Children also had fewer open spaces for playing and fewer trees for climbing, as land was paved into parking lots. In many towns sidewalks were narrowed or eliminated completely. 5
Suburban homes themselves were built and furnished to minimize physical exertion. The decade’s popular one-story ranch houses eliminated the need to climb stairs. Air-conditioning units and central heating and new push-button appliances required only the touch of a finger. By 1960, three-quarters of families owned cars and washing machines, and 90 percent owned a television, as sitting in front of the small screen became a favorite American pastime.
Women still did plenty of housework, of course—a woman’s work truly was never done—but as anyone who has ever cleaned a home knows, the physical labor it requires doesn’t always benefit the body. Bonnie Prudden warned as much. “Housework won’t raise a bosom to where it belongs or keep it there,” she told a reporter in 1956. “Housework is no good for all-round muscular fitness.”
Then there was the matter of the dinner table. Americans were eating more, and they were eating worse. In the fifties, the “golden age of food processing,” the food industry churned out mass quantities of products rich in sugar, salt, fat, and preservatives. The decade saw the birth of McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Dunkin’ Donuts. Swanson introduced the “TV dinner” to the masses in 1954, after the company found itself with a surplus of 260 tons of turkey after Thanksgiving, and it sold ten million in the first year. Supermarkets expanded to house the vast quantities of new, modern cuisine. As Cold War fears grew, the government drilled home the message that democracy was defined by abundance—and communism by scarcity—which turned purchasing into a patriotic act. Madison Avenue admen and -women reinforced these values by linking factory-made food with positive emotions: family, celebration, and love.
When Americans went to work, they sat some more, as desk jobs surged. In many professions, drinking on the job was accepted or encouraged, and considered a necessary lubricant to 6 woo clients and conduct daily business. (The Time & Life Building that housed Sports Illustrated offered staff a dimly lit room where employees could lie down during the day if they overdid it at lunch.) Factory jobs didn’t involve as much sitting or imbibing, but they did become more automated.
To top it all off, more Americans were smoking more cigarettes, too. Smoking had gradually increased throughout the century largely thanks to Hollywood, which portrayed cigarettes as sexy, sophisticated, and glamorous. By 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General first revealed cigarettes could cause lung and laryngeal cancers, 40 percent of adults smoked—not to mention hordes of teen baby boomers.
The “modern way of life” was starting to impact American bodies. While the rise of vaccines and antibiotics had dramatically lowered rates of contagious and infectious diseases, the country now saw a surge in disease borne out of abundance. More Americans began to suffer from hypertension, diabetes, gallbladder disease, and heart attacks. Meanwhile, military generals reported that new recruits were weak, raising fears about America’s ability to defend itself. During World War I, the military turned down 37 percent of potential draftees for being physically unfit; by the Korean War, it rejected 52 percent. As Bonnie Prudden was discovering through her own research, even the country’s kids had grown weaker and less limber.
But few Americans saw exercise as the solution.
Mid-century Americans loathed exercise. They considered it painfully boring, a silly way to spend one’s precious leisure time. “The mere mention of formal exercise is enough to bring a shudder to the average American spine, weak as it is alleged to be at present,” Robert H. Boyle wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1955. Besides, few medical experts were telling people they should exercise. Doctors were more concerned about the dangers of over-exertion than under-exertion, believing strenuous exercise 7 could lead to heart attacks in men and reproductive problems in women. “Whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes,” University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins famously quipped, and in the 1950s, he spoke for the mainstream.
Mid-century Americans with the time and means played sports and games, to be sure—tennis and golf, sailing and skiing. Young men played baseball, basketball, and football; young women rode horses, danced, or played volleyball or field hockey or half-court basketball in knee-length skirts. Some people swam, if they had access to a pool. Americans might accidentally break a sweat dancing the jitterbug or hula-hooping. And a few “kept fit” by doing calisthenics—a nineteenth-century term that comes from the Greek for beautiful strength—recognizing that stretching and moving their bodies made them feel good. But for most, exercise was the by-product of sport, not an activity unto itself. Few saw the point of exercising to maintain one’s health or quality of life. There was no such thing as training, unless you were an athlete preparing for competition.
American popular culture treated those who did devote significant time to exercising—and particularly to building muscle—as oddities, or worse. Thanks partly to Hollywood’s portrayal of muscular men as thickheaded, the public generally believed that brain and brawn were incompatible. Men with big, visible muscles were often cast as villainous henchmen, thugs, or simply dummies. In other cases, men who appeared overly concerned with their physique were viewed with suspicion. In a culture that was deeply homophobic, such behavior was thought to signal homosexuality.
Americans would learn, in time, the power of daily movement. But the summer Bonnie Prudden posed for her Sports Illustrated cover, her suggestion that Americans—men, women, and children—make a regular habit of exercising and strengthening their bodies struck most as ridiculous. 8
During a 1956 radio interview with journalist Mike Wallace, the future 60 Minutes correspondent asks Bonnie, with a chuckle: “You think that there should be a formal exercise, a kind of ‘joy through strength’ period for husband, wife, and family when the father gets home from work at six thirty at night, before the martinis? … You think that we should have a routine, all of us?” To which she responds without missing a beat: “I’m more convinced of it than you are.” For a country bracing for a war against the Soviets, however, becoming a nation of “softies” wasn’t acceptable, either. The lady in the leotite was offering a solution.
Ruth “Bonnie” Prudden was a descendant of Davy Crockett, the folk hero crowned “King of the Wild Frontier,” and she wore her lineage like a badge of honor.
She had been hyperactive as a kid. She never walked anywhere, she liked to say—she ran. In 1918, when she was four years old, she began a habit of climbing out of a second-story window of her family’s home at midnight and roaming the streets of their middle-class neighborhood in Mount Vernon, just north of the Bronx. Her father was concerned and suggested her mother take her to the family doctor. Why so much energy? she asked the doctor.
“There is nothing wrong with this child that discipline and exhaustion won’t cure,” the doctor said. He suggested they enroll Bonnie in a local Russian ballet academy, and it worked. “After my three strenuous dance classes each week, I was much too tired to wander in the night.” Her parents would soon supplement her dancing with classes at German and Swedish gymnastics schools as well.
As she grew up, Bonnie became a “scrubby little tomboy.” She went bare-legged in the New York winters, her knees covered in cuts and bruises from climbing, exploring, adventuring. “When I wanted to find out if I liked a boy, I’d climb a tree and challenge 9 him to follow me,” she would say. “If he couldn’t make it, he was out.”
Bonnie’s life indoors was lonely. Her mother’s worsening alcoholism and sharp tongue created constant stress. She could feel her mother’s disappointment in having birthed such an aberrant daughter. “I was not frail, not pretty, nor golden haired and blue-eyed. That was my little sister, Jeanne,” Bonnie wrote. “My mother’s repetitive question, Why can’t you be more like your sister?, was a thorn in my heart.” Bonnie preferred spending time with her father, who was an outdoorsman, but he worked in newspaper advertising and was rarely home. When he was, he liked to call his eldest daughter his “bonnie lass”—a nickname that stuck.
Bonnie loved to read, to be transported to other worlds through books, but her talent for dance would be the thing that would grant her access to real-life new worlds. After graduating in 1933 from New York City’s Horace Mann School, she spent a summer working at a ranch in Arizona, where her “well-trained body learned to break horses, brand and castrate cattle, and ride for days.” She returned to New York that fall and took a few college courses before joining a professional dance company. Bonnie loved performing; her mother wondered aloud what would become of her daughter. At twenty-one, she snagged her dream job—a role dancing in a Broadway musical revue called Life Begins at 8:40.
A year after joining the show, Bonnie married the man she had been dating since high school, an aspiring artist and Dartmouth grad named Dick Hirschland. Dick’s father had emigrated from Germany to America before his country descended into fascism. In their sprawling estate in the wealthy Westchester suburb of Harrison, his parents ran a kind of way station for German Jews seeking refuge, hosting them until they found their footing.
The elder Hirschlands believed their son and his new wife should live a conventional life. Dick wanted to be a professional artist, but his parents felt their family was better suited 10 to collecting than creating art, and arranged for him to take over a hundred-thousand-dollar manufacturing business “on its last legs.” Nor did they approve of Bonnie’s career. Her father-in-law “would not have a professional dancer in the family” and forced her to abruptly quit the show. Her place was in the home, her in-laws told her. The newlyweds set about forging a life neither of them wanted.
Still, for a while, they were happy together. Dick loved to ski and rock climb (he aced Bonnie’s tree-climbing test), and he encouraged Bonnie to join him on trips to the mountains. She showed an immediate talent for both sports. On their honeymoon to Europe, the couple climbed the famed Swiss-Italian Matterhorn. They spent many weekends ascending the Shawangunks, affectionately known as the Gunks, a mountain range about eighty miles north of New York City. They spent others descending ski slopes.
Before long, Bonnie became a star in both the climbing and skiing worlds. She would later have a Gunks cliff named after her, when she became the first person to ascend a difficult climb now known as Bonnie’s Roof. She would also become a member of the Westchester ski patrol and the first woman to earn a safety award from the Eastern Amateur Ski Association. But the higher she climbed, the lower she felt at home.
Not long into their marriage, Bonnie suffered a skiing accident that would mark the beginning of the end of her relationship with Dick and the start of the rest of her life. While flying down a trail at the Suicide Six ski resort near Woodstock, Vermont, she crashed into a rock and fractured her pelvis in four places. Her doctor told her she would always walk with a limp and never ski or climb or dance again, nor have children. She was determined to prove him wrong. She had developed an intimate trust of her body through her years as an athlete. Come on, her body whispered to her. You’ve been busted before. You’ll be okay. 11
One day, when Bonnie was finally able to sit up in bed, her nurse put on a record of the fast-paced “Dipsy Doodle.” “Quite without any conscious direction from me, my feet started tapping,” she later wrote. She saw an opportunity. “In half an hour I had choreographed a foot and leg routine that felt wonderful. I was in a lather and needed a nap.” That afternoon she choreographed another “bed ballet.”
In the Gunks she’d met Dr. Hans Kraus, a renowned climber and orthopedist who trained in Vienna, and who would later become one of President John F. Kennedy’s White House personal physicians. At the time, Dr. Kraus worked at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital’s Back Clinic. Could he help? He prescribed her a series of exercises, and through her recovery, she discovered the benefits of daily stretching and strengthening. She began to wonder: Why didn’t more people exercise before getting injured, as well as after?
She got rid of her limp, started dancing again, and returned to the cliffs and slopes.
She also got pregnant.
Despite their excursions to the mountains, Bonnie feared her marriage to Dick was deteriorating. Dick was miserable in the career his father chose for him, and the misery seeped through to their relationship. Her skiing accident sent him further into a funk. When Bonnie told her husband he was becoming a father, he responded with: “Now you’ve spoiled everything.” How could they go to the mountains with a baby?
In 1939, Bonnie gave birth to their first daughter, Joan, and two years later a second daughter, Susan. Becoming a mother did not, as Dick had moaned, stop her from mountaineering. She raised her daughters to be as active as she was, teaching them to swim, ski, ride horses, dance, even climb: By six years old, both daughters had ascended two mountains. 12
Bonnie’s aspirations for her daughters would ultimately reshape the trajectory of her own life—and that of the nation. One fateful day when Joan was in the third grade, Bonnie decided to visit her daughter’s PE class at her public school in the Westchester suburb of Harrison. Bonnie had loved PE as a little girl, where she had learned marching and the Virginia reel. But now she watched, “horrified,” she later recounted, as a teacher in skirts and heels guided twenty-five little girls through circle games for twenty minutes. There was nothing physical about her daughter’s physical education.
Bonnie would pace a room while she thought or spoke, and she was surely pacing that night. She couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d observed. That’sit, she decided. She would start teaching her own physical education classes, the way phys ed ought to be taught. She would happily teach whatever kids were interested for free. She didn’t want another child to miss out on the joys of feeling physically competent.
Bonnie managed to recruit twelve neighborhood children—five girls and seven boys—to exercise after school. The girls’ moms balked at the suggestion, saying they didn’t want their daughters to “get muscles.” But Bonnie was persuasive, and she confidently told them, as she would later tell millions, that “under every curve is a muscle. No muscle, no curve.”* The parents of other kids politely declined—they couldn’t fathom making their children exercise.
Bonnie quickly rebranded, clarifying that she was teaching “conditioning.” More parents bought it. “No one had a preconceived idea of what that word meant.”
In six weeks, she had attracted dozens of neighborhood kids, then double and triple that. She used “wild and woolly music,” working hard to make the classes fun. “I got them to run and jump 13 and do all the things any child will naturally do if given a chance.” Local schools let her use their gyms, as long as she agreed to teach any child who showed up.
After a while, Bonnie wanted a way to track her students’ progress. She again consulted Dr. Hans Kraus, this time while the two rested on a ledge thousands of feet high in the mountains. What did he advise? Kraus told her about a strength and flexibility test he had developed with another physician at his clinic, Dr. Sonja Weber. The test included six simple exercises for evaluating the abdominal and lower back muscles, including sit-ups and bending over to touch one’s toes. But, he explained, it was designed for patients struggling with back and posture disabilities. Healthy children would pass easily.
Bonnie decided to administer the so-called Kraus-Weber Test anyway.
Not long into her testing, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing: More than half of her new students failed. However, among her more experienced and “conditioned” students, only 8 percent failed.
Kraus was astounded. “Can you test the whole town?” he asked.
Bonnie jumped at the assignment.
By the early 1950s, Bonnie and Hans had grown close. They climbed together—Hans was feet behind her when she ascended Bonnie’s Roof—supporting each other through adrenaline-pumping feats. Hans was handsome, rugged, smart, and successful; he loved women, and women loved him. With Bonnie’s marriage crumbling, they began an affair she knew was not destined to last, but that provided her with at least a modicum of the love and affection she craved.
“We fell in love,” she later wrote in her journal, “and I’m sure he was by far the more surprised. He had had so many loves … there must have been hundreds. I was just another admiring 14 woman … one who liked to listen to him … in whose eyes he too saw a mirror.”
Their professional affair would lead to more lasting rewards.
Around this time Hans joined the staff of New York University’s Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Bonnie officially became his research assistant. For seven years, “I tested anyone I could get my hands on between the ages of six and sixteen,” she wrote. This added up to more than 7,000 youngsters across the United States and half a dozen countries around the world.
In America, Hans and Bonnie found that young people consistently failed the fitness test at a rate of 58 percent, with urban kids performing slightly worse than their suburban and rural counterparts. But what they observed in Europe blew their minds all over again. During climbing expeditions abroad, they carved out time to test local children, and they soon discovered that kids in Italy, Austria, and Switzerland—for whom movement was still a big part of their daily life—scored significantly better than Americans: Their failure rate was only 9 percent.
What were the implications of the physical weakness of American kids? Hans and Bonnie dubbed the condition hypokinetic disease, meaning disease due to lack of movement. Their research revealed an increased risk of coronary heart disease, diabetes, duodenal ulcer, muscle tension, low back pain, and “psychiatric problems.” They compiled their findings in a paper titled “Hypokinetic Disease: Role of Inactivity in Production of Disease” and later published it in The New York State Journal of Medicine.
The world took notice slowly at first. Ladies’ Home Journal, which reached a staggering fifteen million readers, covered their findings in March 1954, in a feature headlined, “How Fit Are Our Children?” It teased: “School buses, television, sports for the few—these are part of America’s way of life. But what do they mean to 15 our children’s health?” Other magazines and newspapers asked, “Is your child a ‘softie’?”
A growing minority were becoming alarmed. But for a while, life went on as usual for Bonnie, and she turned her attention back to spreading her fitness gospel at home.
Bonnie had been teaching conditioning classes for six years, and she was itching to go bigger. When she learned about an abandoned two-story elementary school for sale in nearby White Plains, New York, she saw her chance—father-in-law be damned.
In 1953, she purchased the “gloomy old school” and gutted it down to its “beautiful brick walls and shining eight-foot windows.” She brought in reinforcing steel beams and painted the walls white and yellow. The polished hardwood floors were perfect for dance and calisthenics. She installed three large gymnasiums, two dance studios, a Finnish sauna, two massage rooms, a snack bar, locker rooms, and a massive Madison Avenue-style office for herself. She painted the equipment, “designed after the curbs, fences, railroad tracks of a less mechanized day,” in bright colors. Outside, she installed an obstacle course that included America’s first climbing wall, along with nets, hurdles, parallel bars, ladders, ramps, a maze, and a tightrope.
Bonnie opened for business in 1954, calling her school the Institute for Physical Fitness. In an advertisement announcing its opening, she promised to build “strong, flexible, attractive bodies” and raise “the fitness level of all.” (The ad noted the school was “especially equipped to handle ‘teen-age Awkwardness.’”) Bonnie’s potent combination of respectability and swagger was enough to convince dubious suburbanites to come and see for themselves.
That same year, she flew to Reno and divorced Dick Hirschland.
16Nearly a year after Hans and Bonnie published their report, an article about their findings would make its way to John B. Kelly Sr. a wealthy Philadelphia contractor and former Olympic sculler (and, incidentally, the father of actress Grace Kelly). He was appalled, and he shared the report with a senator friend from Pennsylvania. The senator, James H. Duff, brought it all the way to the Oval Office.
President Dwight Eisenhower was already concerned about the nation’s fitness. He had emerged as a national hero after serving as a five-star general during World War II and was disturbed by the fact that half of America’s men had been declared unfit to serve. He had also begun to worry that, with the rise of professional sports, too many kids (boys) were developing “spectatoritis”—watching others be active instead of being active themselves. The report set off alarm bells. The president would host a summit at the White House to discuss its findings.
On a balmy July 11, 1955, Bonnie, then forty-one years old, arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wearing a borrowed hat and dark suit. She was nervous, scared “spitless.” As she looked around the luncheon, she saw what Sports Illustrated would call “the greatest array of U.S. sport stars ever gathered together in one place.” There was baseball luminary Willie Mays and basketball phenom Bill Russell. There were golf stars, and the president of the Boy Scouts of America. She was glad to see John B. Kelly Sr., without whom none of them would be there. The only other woman invited was a golfer named Barbara Romack.
The president and his guests took their seats, and it was time for Hans and Bonnie to present their research. When Bonnie glanced at the president, he smiled warmly, and she relaxed. They talked the room through their findings, underscoring how poorly American youngsters fared and the potential long-term effects of the modern way of life.
The president took it all in, then responded: He was stunned. Something had to be done. 17
After the luncheon, a breathless media dubbed Hans’s and Bonnie’s findings “The Report That Shocked the President” and dubbed Bonnie the “gym teacher to the nation’s children.” Reporters from New York to Los Angeles began contacting her at the institute. It wasn’t just the nation’s children who were in trouble, she would say. “I don’t see this country lasting 30 years unless we get on the ball right away,” she told one journalist. “We were once the greatest nation, today we’re the weakest in the world. We’ve taken the physical life out of America.”
The report was not without its critics. In an angry letter to the president, one Democratic congressman wrote: “According to Dr. Kraus’ statement, the physical fitness of American children is eight times lower than the physical fitness of European children. Simply on the mathematical surface, this is a ridiculous statement, and I am very much surprised that you would dignify it.” Two physical education graduate students at Iowa State University who were initially interested in administering the Kraus-Weber Test themselves spoke out about what they viewed as a major flaw. In order to “pass,” participants had to pass all six exercises. Failing even one of the six meant they “failed” the entire test, which didn’t seem accurate. Indeed, the bar was high.
But many physical education leaders applauded them, and the president vowed to create a special council to improve the fitness of the nation’s kids. He gave the task of creating the President’s Council on Youth Fitness to his vice president, Richard Nixon. The White House would host a bigger fitness summit in late September 1955 at an Air Force base in Denver, bringing together more than a hundred physical education, medical, and sports figures. Days before the gathering, however, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack on a nearby golf course. His medical emergency spooked the country and seemed to confirm that America was suffering from a “cardiac crisis.” If the larger-than-life Army general was vulnerable, anyone was at risk. 18
The Denver summit was held as planned, followed by another summit the following year in Annapolis, Maryland. Bonnie attended both, but after the initial high of the White House luncheon, she felt discouraged. The problem of the nation’s fitness could not, it seemed to her, be solved by committee. The more so-called experts they brought in to address the problem, the murkier the solution became.
“Talk talk talk,” Bonnie told Sports Illustrated of the efforts. “The country is disappearing while we sit around and talk about it. It’s like the story somebody told me of the people who argued about which fire hydrant to use while the church burned down.”
After “The Report That Shocked the President,” Bonnie became a star—her name synonymous with health, fitness, and, perhaps most crucial, attractiveness. Where the county’s elected leaders were vague about how to be fit, Bonnie was specific and direct. Publishing houses invited Bonnie to write books detailing her regimens, and she churned out one guide after another: Is Your Child Really Fit? in 1956 and Bonnie Prudden’s Fitness Book in 1959. She made an exercise record, Keep Fit / Be Happy with Bonnie Prudden, for families to follow in their living rooms. “Fitness should begin in the cradle,” she would tell mothers, encouraging them to put away the playpens and let their kids run around to develop their muscles.
But it wasn’t too late for mothers, either.
Bonnie’s success convincing America that everyday women—girls, teens, mothers, and grandmothers—could benefit from regular exercise was perhaps her most extraordinary accomplishment. Its legacy, however, would have mixed consequences.
Bonnie had always thought of herself as being as capable as a man—more capable than many. She knew she was as talented as the men she skied and climbed with, and she didn’t much consider her 19 gender on the ropes or slopes. (Once, when she was climbing with Hans and another man, she told them: “Well, the time has come.” She needed to pee. The men lowered her cord down six feet. She did what she had to do, then kept on climbing.) She believed to her core that men and women were equal. She told skeptical mothers again and again that girls and women could and should do push-ups, that strength and flexibility would allow girls to get the most out of life.
But Bonnie also knew the rewards of being physically attractive and the allure of physical transformation. And so, in the same breath in which she proselytized about the importance of women being strong, she also sold the power of exercise to shape, or reduce, one’s figure.
When Sports Illustrated sent reporter Dorothy Stull to cover her Institute for Physical Fitness in 1956—a year before Bonnie would appear on the magazine’s cover—Stull was struck by the number of women exercising inside and outside the facility. “Under Bonnie’s magic spell, sophisticated suburban matrons delight in scaling mountainous walls,” she writes. “And some of them, victims of A-bomb era tensions, discover for the first time the blissful euphoria of purely physical fatigue.”
At one point during Stull’s visit, Bonnie steps into her office dressing room to change out of the white collared blouse and tailored shorts she’d been wearing to exercise and slips into “a soft silk low-necked dress that clung to her figure.” She leans in conspiratorially and offers Stull a cocktail from her bar cart.
“People think you shouldn’t drink if you want to be a good example of fitness,” Bonnie tells her, tossing her curls. “I say, the main reason for having a good body is to get the most out of life—and that means having fun, and it may mean having a drink now and then.”
Later, she throws out a novel notion: “Every woman needs to be attractive, but to be so is not our due for being born, it is our reward for physical activity.” 20
But what could fitness look like for women, when sweating was uncouth? When women’s magazines told them to pretend they needed a man to open the pickle jar? To never beat a man in sports (or anything)? When it was illegal in some states for a woman to wear “men’s clothing”? When many husbands had legal authority over their wife’s body? In the years after World War II, it was unthinkable that an average woman would openly take up exercise to become strong. After all, nearly every social institution told her she should relinquish her power—for the sake of the country and the proper social order.
It hadn’t always been this way for women. In the 1930s, as America recovered from the Great Depression, women were encouraged to be physically capable—athletic, even. During the war, the government enlisted Rosies to be riveters, taking the place of men who had been called into combat. In the iconic war propaganda poster, Rosie’s flexed (albeit small) muscle and her catchphrase, We Can Do It!, came to represent the nation’s resilience. But after the war, as traumatized GIs returned home, the country’s leaders told women to go home, too. “The war was over,” wrote media scholar Susan J. Douglas in Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, and women “were supposed to sashay back to the kitchen and learn how to make green beans baked with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup.” By the end of the decade, more than half of the women who had been drawn into the workforce during the war relinquished (or were fired from) their jobs.
Women were told to “act like women” and “look like women,” in part to fight the “paranoia that American women had become overly masculine during the war,” writes historian Elizabeth Matelski in her book Reducing Bodies: Mass Culture and the Female Figure in Postwar America. They married earlier than their mothers had a generation ago, and they had more children in rapid succession. 21
Looking and acting like women did not include training for a marathon or lifting weights; femininity was defined by weakness.
Besides, for generations, doctors had warned that a woman who overexerted herself would suffer reproductive problems and never be able to have babies—which, for most women at the time, would have rendered them irrelevant. Girls grew up hearing they needed to take it very easy during their period—for their own good—and that too much exercise would cause their uterus to “fall out.” (Bonnie liked to say, “I’ve observed hundreds of physical education classes around the world, and I have never seen a uterus on the gym floor.”)
For girls who enjoyed being active—swimming or playing tennis or running around with the boys—they often hit a wall in middle or high school, when no organized sports were available to them. Girls in some areas could play basketball, but they could use only half the court—running the full court was believed to be too taxing. At many schools, girls’ only formal outlets to be active were cheerleading and baton twirling. (It bears mentioning that cheerleading actually began as an exclusively male pursuit. Schools would select the most popular male students to rally up crowds with megaphones during games. It was only during World War II, when so many college men were drafted, that women began to replace them—a controversial move that some protested, fretting that for a girl to use her voice in such a way was unfeminine. When the men came back, they no longer wanted to participate in an activity that had been taken over by women.)
Young women who did have access and chose to devote themselves to organized sports risked being labeled a jock. In an era when “acting like a woman” was code for “pleasing a man,” being a jock was seen as deeply transgressive. It could also draw suspicions of lesbianism, deterring would-be athletes who didn’t want their sexual orientation publicly examined. 22
Another barrier to women embracing vigorous exercise was the brewing Cold War and the prejudices it instilled against visibly muscular women. In the fifties, Soviet men and women alike participated in a rigorous national fitness program, creating a citizenship who was athletically impressive. And that effort paid off; in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, the Soviets took home 103 medals to America’s 71, prompting more national concern stateside. Americans perceived Russian women as powerful but mannish—strong like bull. As much as America wanted to beat the commies, it was equally important to American women that they be whatever Russian women weren’t. “A fat, passive nation would be unable to compete with or combat Communism,” writes Matelski. “But because Soviet women were active and strong, American women had to be the opposite.”
But even as magazines and so-called experts encouraged women to hold themselves back emotionally, intellectually, and physically, they were also told they were never enough. “It is difficult for modern American women, steeped in the power of positive thinking, to realize how pervasive negative thinking was for women in the 1950s and early 1960s,” writes historian Stephanie Coontz in her book A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. No one was telling women they could be whatever they wanted or do whatever they wanted; instead, women’s magazines, which held enormous influence, continually told readers they should be doing more, more, more to be a better wife, mother, object of admiration.
