worked out at home and in gyms for nearly three decades. She is the author of Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture, and her work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. She is coproducer and host of the acclaimed podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy and cohost of the Past Present podcast. She lives in New York City.
Petrzela applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, and reported the following:
Page 99 begins with a reference to a 1960s article in a Black periodical expressing concern that Black teenage girls aren't exercising enough, and that when they do, it is for the wrong reasons -- beauty and weight loss -- rather than health and self-discipline. It concludes with a reference to Bonnie Prudden, who just a decade before had had to plead with policy makers to pay any attention to the need for American youth, especially white suburbanites, to exercise. She made the case in terms of physical health and national security, and first encountered intense resistance to the idea that exercise should be an individual or civic priority. In between is a description of the sensibility shift that gathered steam in these intervening years: "a revolution in ideas and attitudes about exercise was afoot, as many Americans came to recognize exercise as imperative not only to physical health and civic duty, but to social and emotional thriving."Visit Natalia Mehlman Petrzela's website.
I am in disbelief at how well this page crystallizes the essence of this book! First, one overarching goal of Fit Nation is to explain how exercise evolved from a "strange subculture" to a "social imperative." While I offer multiple explanations of how this shift occurred, a crucial one is the intellectual transformation described in the center of page 99. While exercise was considered narrowly physical, and thus superficial and even a narcissistic distraction for much of the 20th century, in the 1950s this began to shift, as a surprisingly wide swath of Americans embraced the notion that mind and body were inextricably connected, and that physical cultivation was important to overall civic and personal physical, psychic, and even spiritual health. Furthermore, people were increasingly expected to take an active role in pursuing this higher state of holistic health. This idea was appealing across the political spectrum, from progressive activists, many of them who had felt marginalized by the medical system and embraced this opportunity for self-determination and bodily autonomy, to conservatives who relished the emphasis on personal responsibility. Skepticism of experts, a longstanding American tradition, had cross-cultural appeal. Prudden was an important figure in initiating this shift by mobilizing the state to promote physical education and public recreation in the 1950s as a civic project, and by the late 1960s, the change she helped spark was felt far beyond the upper middle class New York suburb where she first noticed children’s bodies paradoxically becoming weaker due to American prosperity, and thus unfit to defend the nation. The 1968 quote from the Milwaukee Star, a Black Wisconsin newspaper, emphasizing the need to encourage more Black teenage girls to exercise, reveals how widespread the ethos that exercise was imperative was becoming. Lastly, page 99 hints at the range of the book. I am chronicling a lofty shift in attitudes and ideas, and doing so by drawing on the diverse lived experiences of Americans in cities and suburbs, of varied backgrounds and politics, and whose perspectives I sought out through sources from the newspaper you see quoted here to policy, television, diaries, business records, periodicals, and more.
Fit Nation spans over a century to illuminate how the idea of exercise as salutary became a national fixation — and a consumer good rather than a human right — and page 99 exemplifies my approach to telling this story as richly and inclusively as I could over the remaining 423 pages! Enjoy!
The Page 99 Test: Classroom Wars.
--Marshal Zeringue
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