Fit Citizens - (Gender and American Culture) by Ava Purkiss

About the Book

"Ava Purkiss examines how Black women demonstrated their literal and figurative 'fitness' for citizenship through exercise. Using public health records, beauty columns, physical education reports, cookbooks, newspapers, and magazines, she centers race and gender; challenges how historians have written about the relationship between physical fitness, civic fitness, and national belonging; and provides historical context for numerous public health studies concerned with the health of African American women and girls"--

Book Synopsis

At the turn of the twentieth century, as African Americans struggled against white social and political oppression, Black women devised novel approaches to the fight for full citizenship. In opposition to white-led efforts to restrict their freedom of movement, Black women used various exercises--calisthenics, gymnastics, athletics, and walking--to demonstrate their physical and moral fitness for citizenship. Black women's participation in the modern exercise movement grew exponentially in the first half of the twentieth century and became entwined with larger campaigns of racial uplift and Black self-determination. Black newspapers, magazines, advice literature, and public health reports all encouraged this emphasis on exercise as a reflection of civic virtue.

In the first historical study of Black women's exercise, Ava Purkiss reveals that physical activity was not merely a path to self-improvement but also a means to expand notions of Black citizenship. Through this narrative of national belonging, Purkiss explores how exercise enabled Black women to reimagine Black bodies, health, beauty, and recreation in the twentieth century. Fit Citizens places Black women squarely within the history of American physical fitness and sheds light on how African Americans gave new meaning to the concept of exercising citizenship.

Review Quotes

"Purkiss deftly argues [that] the meanings of Black women's physical fitness during the late nineteenth and twentieth century often went well beyond the gymnasium. . . . In her engaging, analytical, and timely book, Purkiss explores how Black women historically negotiated exercise as a racialized and gendered project. . . . Fit Citizens rightfully foregrounds Black women's fitness history as part of African American history, sports history, and gender and women's history."--Journal of African American History

"An innovative study . . . steeped in questions of citizenship and national belonging as it discusses how Black women think about, talk about, and move their bodies. Purkiss offers a critical new reading of Black women's bodies and their citizenship."--Journal of American History

"Scholars have well documented the ways in which African American history is a history of movement (i.e., migrations, laboring, protests), and told tales of Black people taking up space in their ongoing fights for freedom. Through Fit Citizens, Purkiss adds another aspect--exercise and physical health--to that history."--North Carolina Historical Review

"The proliferation, in recent years, of excellent scholarly material that places Black women's exercise and sport histories at the center of analysis is enough to make one giddy with joy and excitement. Fit Citizens joins that growing roster of monographs and, in doing so, greatly advances a body of knowledge about Black women's history in sport and exercise spaces."--Journal of Sport History