Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

Product Description
A captivating blend of reportage and personal narrative that explores the untold history of women’s exercise culture--from jogging and Jazzercise to Jane Fonda--and how women have parlayed physical strength into other forms of power.\nFor American women today, working out is as accepted as it is expected, fueling a multibillion-dollar fitness industrial complex. But it wasn’t always this way. For much of the twentieth century, sweating was considered unladylike and girls grew up believing physical exertion would cause their uterus to literally fall out. It was only in the sixties that, thanks to a few forward-thinking fitness pioneers, women began to
move en masse.\nIn
Let's Get Physical, journalist Danielle Friedman reveals the fascinating hidden history of contemporary women’s fitness culture, chronicling in vivid, cinematic prose how exercise evolved from a beauty tool pitched almost exclusively as a way to “reduce” into one millions have harnessed as a path to mental, emotional, and physical well-being. \nLet’s Get Physical reclaims these forgotten origin stories—and shines a spotlight on the trailblazers who led the way. Each chapter uncovers the birth of a fitness movement that laid the foundation for working out today: the radical post-war pitch for women to break a sweat in their living rooms, the invention of barre in the “Swinging Sixties,” the promise of jogging as liberation in the seventies, the meteoric rise of aerobics and weight-training in the eighties, the explosion of yoga in the nineties, and the ongoing push for a more socially inclusive fitness culture—one that celebrates every body. \nUltimately, it tells the story of how women discovered the joy of physical strength and competence—and how, by moving together to transform fitness from a privilege into a right, we can create a more powerful sisterhood.
Review
Advance Praise for
Let’s Get Physical
“There are few areas of American culture as complicated—and as understudied—as women's exercise. Which is why I feel like I've been waiting for a book like
Let's Get Physical for decades: something that takes the history and importance of fitness
seriously, but is also incisive and curious and readable and
fun.” —Anne Helen Petersen, author of
Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation\n“Friedman takes a jaunt through the history of women’s fitness in her astute and entertaining debut...This zippy history is bursting with energy.” —
Publishers Weekly\n“Fascinating stuff.” —
Booklist \n“A fascinating and complicated history, masterfully shared.
Let's Get Physical made me grateful to the women of the past and hopeful about the future of fitness. My favorite read of the year!” --Kelly McGonigal, author of
The Joy of Movement\n“It's easy to critique the class, race, and gender stereotypes perpetuated by many fitness industry advertising campaigns, but Friedman reminds us how revolutionary it was, not so long ago, to encourage women to do strenuous physical exercise. An engaging account of the complicated, unconventional individuals who pioneered today's fitness culture for women.” --Stephanie Coontz, author of
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s\n“It is all too easy to look at the history of women’s fitness as an unconnected timeline of fads and celebrities. In
Let’s Get Physical, Danielle Friedman weaves together the cultural history of a movement that is nothing less than the story of the modern American woman—and she does it with fascinating and fun storytelling that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered why thighs need to be mastered or buns should be made of steel.” —Dan Koeppel, author of
Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World and
Every Minute Is a Day: A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege\n“Don't read this book because it's ‘good for you.’ Read it because it's an eye-opening cultural history of the fitness pioneers w