Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America

FAIN: FT-286260-22

Ava Purkiss
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)

Research and writing of a book about the intersections between Black womanhood, exercise, and citizenship from the 1890s to the 1950s. 

Fit Citizens explores how African American women used physical exercise to demonstrate their “fitness” for citizenship from the 1890s to the 1950s—a time when physically fit bodies garnered new political meaning. It will be the first monograph on the history of black exercise and seeks to expand conventional frameworks of health and citizenship in the humanities, particularly in the fields of history, Black Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies. The project shows that black women asserted their moral and physical fitness for citizenship through calisthenics, gymnastics, sports, walking, and other forms of cardiovascular exercise. In placing black women squarely within the history of American fitness, the book decenters labor as the primary mode of black mobility and physicality. It prompts humanities scholars to think more literally, and in effect more critically, about how African Americans actually “exercised citizenship.”

Associated Products

Fit Citizens A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America (Book)
Title: Fit Citizens A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America
Author: Ava Purkiss
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469672724/fit-citizens/
Primary URL Description: The University of North Carolina Press
Secondary URL: https://worldcat.org/title/1336991416
Secondary URL Description: Worldcat.org
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4696-727
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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