Clio in Motion
Natalia Mehlman PetrzelaIt’s not fitness. It’s life. This is a marketing slogan of a high-end fitness center where I have worked as an instructor, trained as a member, and which I have marshaled as a scholar to argue that, by the turn of the 21st century, exercise had expanded to become not just a physical pursuit, but a worldview. Devoting oneself to exercise is now far from a strange subculture, as it was a century earlier, but a social imperative: to work out has become, as it remains, proof of one’s virtue and value as a consumer, a citizen, and a human.
The diverse, insightful essays comprising the Clio in Motion series bear out this slogan. Athletic clothing, exercise technology, an endorphin rush, a homemade ice rink, and a First Lady’s obscured dance expertise each reveal how movement is inextricably linked to our attitudes and values about ability, leisure, gender, race, propriety, politics, and capitalism, to name just a few salient themes. However, these scholars make a more profound contribution in their historical focus and collective impact, teaching us that fitness and movement are not just “life,” but history. We can better understand our history when we employ movement and physicality as a lens of analysis.
Studying the body in general, and exercise and fitness in particular, are still fresh, and even radical, topics for historical analysis. Much of this challenge is methodological. As Ava Purkiss writes, exercise can be a powerful avenue for understanding how the Black women she studies felt: their exhilaration and exhaustion at participating in exercise. Her book, Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America, relies primarily on the policy and published texts that are the stuff of archival research, but Purkiss thinks generatively about how we might apply the insights of contemporary exercise science to understand the affective and physiological experiences of exercise in the past.
Sportswear, as Einav Rabinovitch-Fox illuminates, does not often attract the scholarly attention that high fashion does, but is a fascinating lens through which to understand how the rise of women’s athleticism has both troubled and upheld gendered norms. Until well into the twentieth century, women had to fashion their own sportswear, since athletics and exercise were seen as unladylike. The 1977 invention of the sports bra, designed by three women sick of breast pain when they jogged, is perhaps the pivotal turning point in the women’s exercise apparel market. Since the 1970s, every sportswear company has a women’s line, and most of them offer many more styles than for men. This is not, arguably, due to their feminist consciousness, but due to the dominant idea that women like – and will spend – on style, and to the cultural acceptance of women’s exercise as a form of bodily management and discipline, as opposed to athletic endeavor. Predictably, the functional undergarment of the sports bra has evolved into a midriff-baring top expected to be worn alone. Today, the cutting edge of “inclusive” sportswear tends to be unisex and shapeless, a strong statement against the dominant idea that women’s workout wear should be tight and revealing, but one that obscures the long history of women advocating for sneakers, shorts, and undergarments tailored specifically to female physiques, not that of the presumed normative male athlete.
“Wellness creep” is what I call the encroachment of self-improvement into every nook and cranny of our lives, from our sleep cycles to our step counts to our sexual organs, and its close cousin is “consumer creep,” which needs no explanation. Wearable fitness technology in general, and pelvic floor strengthening devices in particular, as Emily Contois and Rachel Lousie Moran teach us, respectively, concretely reveal how intense and unremitting this incursion is. Contois reflects on the storied rivalry between American Rocky Balboa and Soviet Ivan Drago, and how the good, American, Rocky trains “naturally,” and with heart in the great outdoors, while Drago is a lab-built product, all cold quantification and no fire. Contemporary “wearables” have us all becoming Dragos, Contois worries, “obsessed with smartwatches and fitness metrics,” and resting only when it is reframed as “recovery.”
Elvie, the $200 pelvic floor trainer, typifies this obsession with self-improvement and productivity, and its packaging as a product. The phrase “sitting is the new smoking” did not make its way into conversation until the 2010s, but Moran cites 1990s women’s magazines that make its provenance clear. “Just” sitting in traffic or at your desk is time wasted, Glamour advised, if you’re not also counting out Kegel reps. But in 2024, the needle has undeniably moved on optimization, and the “vaguely democratic [Kegel] exercise” has been supplanted with a pricey device, the implication of women’s insufficiency to build their own strength without “technological and quantified interventions” loud and clear. The shift echoes 1950s discourse around store-bought baby formula as superior to breastmilk, as well as the contemporary boom in women’s sex toys, which are often framed as empowering but also imply that intimate sexual pleasure is incomplete without must-have accessories.
At the same time, Dan McCue invites us into his homemade, backyard ice skating rink to remind us that there is nothing inevitable about the commodification of movement experiences. Rather, we learn about the nuts and bolts of turning a backyard into a skateable rink with plastic liners and plywood sheets, in service of the heady power of transforming dreaded midwestern winters into a sublime experience, by one’s own hand. The pleasures of skating have both transhistorical and contextually specific qualities, linking McCue and his contemporaries (us) to the subjects of Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel’s Renaissance paintings and to midcentury Americans who experienced modernized versions of the same pastime – but offered with unprecedented uniformity, thanks to the new refrigeration industry (which gave us artificial ice and later, the Zamboni).
Importantly, studying the past and present of embodied experiences and the evolving wellness culture in which they arise in no way confines us as scholars to the esoteric or frivolous, as some assume is inherent to these topics. On the contrary, this expanded purview not only reveals layers of social significance in objects that can seem either quotidian or ahistorical, but it enriches our understanding of the most developed realms of history. M.A. Davis’ piece on Betty Ford’s life as a dancer exhibits this approach beautifully. Shifting the proverbial camera from the President to not only the First Lady, but her own creative passions, Davis teaches us both about Ford’s serious career as a dancer, including training with Martha Graham, and the careful way in which it was presented to the public: a photo of her gracefully perched atop a conference table was seen as too risqué, given her history with substance abuse. But dance, Davis argues, likely gave Ford the courage to cross boundaries — publicly discussing abortion, addiction, and her mastectomy — in a way that should inspire us as scholars. Indeed, giving serious attention to the embodied experiences of public, political figures provides a fuller picture of their lives and legacy: Rosa Parks’ long unstudied yoga practice comes to mind.
These essays help us appreciate the benefits of embodied research – not only studies about the body in general, but uniquely precise scholarly analyses that originate with specific experiences to which our own bodies have been exposed: from the endorphin rush of a run to the pinch of a pair of ill-fitting leggings to the precise slice of the blade of a skate against the ice, to a slew of devices that promise happiness through whatever bodily modification they provide. My contribution to the series, on aging in an increasingly online, algorithmically-driven exercise culture that fetishizes youth and can discern our every insecurity, began with my scrolling social media around my 45th birthday and explores my (continued) immersion into a neighborhood of Instagram about which I am still deeply ambivalent.
It is in the analysis of these intimate experiences, so long considered beyond the scope of objective research, or beneath the esteem of serious scholars, that we can better understand society and ourselves. These wonderful essays make this abundantly clear.
Featured image photograph courtesy cottonbro studio on Pexels.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is Associate Professor of History at the New School. She is the author of Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, 2015) and is working on a new book about American fitness culture. She is a co-host of the Past Present podcast. You can find more about her scholarly and popular work at www.nataliapetrzela.com.
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