Ava Purkiss's "Fit Citizens"

Ava Purkiss is assistant professor of women's and gender studies and American culture at the University of Michigan.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is toward the end of the third chapter, ‘“Plenty of Good Exercise’: Beauty, Fatness, and the Fit Black Female Body in the Interwar Years,” which examines how and why middle-class African Americans used exercise promotion and fat shaming tactics to influence Black beauty culture. Page 99 appears in a critical section of the chapter that explores how Black print culture contributed to Black anti-fat sentiment and shifting Black corporal values after WWI. I include examples from well-circulated Black newspapers, like the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News, to demonstrate how African American columnists encouraged exercise and admonished overeating for the sake of beauty. These columnists advised their Black readers to “count your calories,” “avoid all fat forming foods,” “walk early in the mornings and after meals,” take advantage of weight-reducing records, practice “simple calisthenics,” “work in the garden” for exercise, and avoid “eating for four” as opposed to eating for two when pregnant. Page 99 explains further:

The aforementioned articles’ invocation of evening gowns, flower gardens, and a presumed control over one’s appetite indicates a middle-class fixation with beauty and body size. Body weight, among other qualities, served as a metric to judge African Americans’ attractiveness and character. The fat and idle Black female body represented pernicious racial and gendered ideas that many (particularly elite) African Americans disdained.

I believe the Page 99 Test works well for Fit Citizens. This page explores the interplay between tropes of Black women (as so-called mammies) and the ways in which Black people rejected these tropes and worked to create alternative visions of themselves through Black physical culture. Page 99 is a snapshot of how Black women used physical exercise to challenge notions of African Americans as unfit citizens, which is the larger project of the book. This page is attentive to the intersection of race, gender, and class, noting that primarily middle-class Black women participated in anti-fat rhetoric and behavior. While the book is not exclusively concerned with middle-class African Americans, it thinks about differing levels of access to exercise based on one’s socioeconomic status and region. Finally, page 99 includes several kinds of historical actors—a woman named Cora seeking advice from beauty expert Madame Creditt-Ole, unnamed newspaper columnists, and a “hygiene author” named John A. Diaz—who all contributed to a Black beauty culture that prized thinness. This inclusion of various perspectives is reflective of the book, as numerous actors—teachers, homemakers, students, medical professionals, activists, reformers, writers, and sharecroppers—exercised for health, beauty, and recreation, and staked their own claims to physical and civic fitness.

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--Marshal Zeringue