The history of women’s physical fitness standards and their role in policing American femininity

Fitness for women has never been just about health and exercise. In Shaping Up, Amanda Regan shows how, in the late nineteenth century, the concept of physical fitness began to function as a political category to help define who was “fit” to participate in American society. Regan traces how elite educators, reformers, and government officials inaugurated fitness programs to regulate working-class and immigrant women’s bodies, and she demonstrates how measurement and discipline remained central to fitness culture across eight decades. From anthropometric charts in the 1880s to “figure analysis” sessions in the 1960s,  government-sponsored and private fitness programs continually reinforced standards of white middle-class femininity.

In addition, Shaping Up examines crucial moments when fitness became a tool for managing social change: working-class women in Boston’s municipal gyms, suffragists using “physical activism” to demonstrate citizenship, World War II programs balancing women’s strength for factory work with postwar domesticity, and Cold War campaigns positioning women as “watchdogs of family fitness.” By revealing fitness as fundamentally political rather than physiological, Regan transforms our understanding of how American culture has shaped and controlled women’s bodies.