Mass movements: A cultural history of physical fitness and exercise, 1953–1989

"Mass Movements: A Cultural History of Exercise and Physical Fitness, 1953-1990," reconstructs the meaning of exercise in the lives of Americans over a roughly 50-year period. Set against the background of advancing medical research and changing ideas within the field of public health and popular culture, this dissertation tracks changes in exercise habits and explores the cultural imperatives that have made exercise a primary leisure activity in the United States since 1953. Postwar interest in exercise should be viewed as a reaction to suburbanization and related lifestyle changes that significantly reduced physical activity in the years following World War II. This dissertation offers a corrective to previous scholarship on the recent history of exercise that has failed to take into account health promotion as a framework for understanding changes in American physical culture.

As a counter to histories that view the pursuit of exercise as a series of "booms," this project documents the regular and continuous interest in and promotion of health and fitness. The study begins with an examination of the motives of the President's Council on Youth Fitness, a federal effort to promote children's exercise in the 1950s. Even as it promoted fitness as a way of resisting consumer culture, the council's alliance with corporate sponsors promoted fitness as a commodity. The council unintentionally helped to establish the notion of personal physical fitness and laid the groundwork for the growth of the commercial fitness industry in subsequent decades. A chapter focusing on the 1960s demonstrates the breadth of the new burgeoning exercise culture and explores how gender differences influenced exercise promotion. For both men and women, expert opinion was widely divergent, as were specific details on exercise plans. It was the growing, but largely unchanneled, interest in exercise that allowed for the immense and immediate popularity of jogging. As an activity performed by millions of Americans jogging represented the fist form of exercise culture to become mass culture. Its identification with both mainstream and alternative cultural currents attests that exercise had become much more than a prophylactic health technique. A final chapter explores the history of the modern health club and the ascendance of the muscular physique in recent popular culture. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan's presidency ushered in an era of toughness that inflected exercise culture with a new intensity and emphasis on outward appearance. At the same time, however, gyms constituted a new kind of "third place" that allowed Americans the opportunity to find community in a new setting.