Not Jane Fonda

Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week along with our colleagues Joanne Freeman and Nathan Connolly we explore a different aspect of American history.

Brian Balogh: Now close your eyes, relax your body, and take a deep breath. Breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.

Ed Ayers: And we thought we’d start you off this week with a little meditation courtesy of your favorite meditation teacher Brian Balogh.

Brian Balogh: Yes Ed. You’re the only person I know who speaks while he meditates. Let’s try it again. Breathe in, breathe out, breath in, breathe out.

Ed Ayers: I’m afraid you’ve put all our audience to sleep Brian.

Brian Balogh: It wouldn’t be the first time Ed.

Ed Ayers: Meditation has gone mainstream recently, promoted by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z. It’s part of a broader wellness craze that’s taken over the country and making lots of money. Recent estimates have it that the global wellness industry is worth some $4.2 billion and growing.

Brian Balogh: This week on BackStory, we decided to dive into the history of wellness and explore practices that were embraced or rejected throughout history.

Ed Ayers: We’ll bring you the story of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg who brought Seventh-day Adventist theology to his wellness center in the late 1800s.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll learn about how Dr. Sigmund Freud’s one and only visit to America carried psychoanalysis across the Atlantic.

Speaker 2: All righty. Here we go. Hopefully the microphone is long. Two, cooperate, over the chest, [inaudible 00:02:36]. Easy the punch.

Ed Ayers: What you’re hearing is a clip from a local aerobics class. Don’t worry, I’m not wearing my leotard.

Speaker 2: All right. Opposite side now, side to side. Stop and release.

Ed Ayers: People mostly women sweating it out, dancing, and jumping around to a choreographed routine.

Speaker 2: In four, three, run on the spot. [inaudible 00:03:09]

Ed Ayers: Today, aerobics has been eclipsed by more popular kinds of exercise like CrossFit and yoga, but it used to be all the rage.

Jenny Ellison: Aerobics was very popular on the 1980s and there’s a few ways that we can see this. One is simply by looking at the ways in which it emerges in popular culture and popular discussion of the decades.

Ed Ayers: That’s Jenny Ellison. She’s a historian who specializes in the history of aerobics and activism.

Jenny Ellison: We have films like Perfect featuring Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta sharing these kind of seductive glances in aerobics classes. We see the rise of competitive aerobics like the Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship, where instructors go and they compete. And so we just see this sort of emergence of aerobics as part of the culture and part of the discussion.

Jenny Ellison: Another way we can see it is true the popularity of someone like Jane Fonda. Between 1982 and 1987, Fonda sold 4 million copies of her workout videos in the United States alone.

Ed Ayers: Jenny says aerobics might seem frivolous on the surface, but it actually grew out of some big changes happening in American fitness and American culture.

Jenny Ellison: First, what we see in the 1960s is growing awareness of the health benefits of cardiovascular exercise and the rise of sports, like running that become increasingly popular through the 1970s. So there’s a greater understanding of the value of physical fitness. We see a transformation in the kinds of sport and leisure activities that become popular with the Baby Boomers. The Baby Boomers are the first generation raised on play. And as they come of age in the ’70s and 1980s, we see these sport crazes like jogging, like aerobics. We see new leisure activities that are playful, but they’re for adults. I would say aerobics is part of that overall trend of bringing greater playfulness and fun to adult exercise.

Jenny Ellison: Lastly, I’d say a big part of it is it’s an outgrowth of the feminist sport movement. Title IX is an example of that, an outcome of that activism. But just in a general sense that part of women’s liberation is a bodily liberation that gives them opportunities to play sport.

Ed Ayers: But not all women were on board with aerobics. Although it developed alongside second-wave feminism, some women took issue with the culture it perpetuated.

Jenny Ellison: The feminist critique of aerobics is that it encourages a culture of display, where women are encouraged to adopt a feminine appearance rather than focusing on their physical fitness. If we look at representations of aerobics especially pop culture representations, and I want to emphasize that they’re here because we don’t have images of women in rec centers and church basements doing aerobics. But if we think of the popular image of aerobics, it’s Jane Fonda. And although Fonda positioned herself as … She positioned herself as an ally to her audience and you know, “I’m just like you. I’m looking for exercise to make me feel good.” It was a way to achieve bodily liberation through self-control. Feminists didn’t see it that way. They saw Fonda as a slim white woman, who was perpetuating this norm and this pressure to be slender among American women.

Ed Ayers: For many women, the Jane Fonda look was impossible to achieve no matter how many classes they attended or how many diets they tried out. But it didn’t stop some from adapting aerobics to make it their own.

Jenny Ellison: In the 1980s, as part of the fat activist movement, we see the rise of aerobics classes created by fat women, taught by fat women, and attended by fat women. And so this is aerobics for fat women only. The term ‘fat’ just depended on the person. So the aerobics movement, it takes different shapes across time and in different places. So the groups that I studied often use the word ‘large,’ but we also see examples of the use of the term ‘fat.’

Jenny Ellison: In California in particular, there’s a really robust and exciting fat activist movement from the late 1960s. And the aerobics classes that were popular there were a branch out of that community of feminist in California who were critiquing feminine and bodily norms. And aerobics for fat women only emerged from this movement, because it emerged with this idea that fat women should have safe spaces to exercise.

Jenny Ellison: There’s no single starting point for it. It gets taken up by women in different parts of the United States and Canada and different places. And many of these women didn’t even know that other people were doing the same thing. What they do in general is they have an instructor who gets training or is trained as an aerobics teacher and they invite other like-minded women or they advertise classes for fat women. They use images of larger women in the ads to draw women in, and they begin teaching these classes, and they they became quite popular for the 1980s, and we see them in most American states and in several Canadian provinces.

Ed Ayers: Deb Burgard was one of those women leading fitness classes for fat women in the 1980s. She was inspired by West African and Middle Eastern dance classes she’d taken, where the focus was on having fun and building community not losing weight. But then Deb relocated to the Bay Area and what was initially a setback quickly became an opportunity.

Deb Burgard: I was kind of looking around and thinking you know I’m not finding any places where larger people are going to feel like the activity is really paced for them. And I was thinking about how the traditional aerobics classes that I was seeing … I was trying to kind of try on the idea in my mind of, is like Jazzercise the sort of folk dance of our culture right now? Like it’s kind of a reflection of our culture, isn’t it? It’s sort of like … And if this is the version of our folk dance right now, like (beep) it. It’s terrible. I started teaching my class and I called it We Dance. I was not going to have any cutesy plays on words or anything, it’s just like, “We’re going to dance. This is We Dance.” That’s what it’s going to be called.

Deb Burgard: And I was teaching it in Berkeley and Oakland. And I did advertise it as a dance class for women over 200 pounds, and I did that somewhat ambivalently because I didn’t want anybody to be more weight focused [inaudible 00:10:01] there had to be some sort of weighing before you can come in to the class or something. But I really did want us to be very concrete about this is not a dance class for people who feel fat and who are not subject to these exposures to discrimination. I want this class to actually be paced for bodies that are heavier, and I want people to look around the room and see themselves in other people, and I want there to be this kind of saturation in our experience of each other, of people at higher body weights who are really just sort of seeing what it feels like to move in these bodies, and you give the opportunity to people to come and party. And that’s what we did. It was just so fun.

Ed Ayers: Deb says her classes were part of a broader movement with a radical vision.

Deb Burgard: There was a woman in San Francisco who had a class called Fat and Fit. Her name is Eliza [Mimski 00:11:08]. The other class that was going on at the time which is fabulous was called Light On Your Feet, which was also in Oakland. In my life, it was the beginning of my fat activism for sure. Like if you’re a member of a stigmatized group, the world is always telling you how your body is wrong and it’s telling you, “You have to do this in order for your body not to be wrong.” And some of what they’re telling you might be horrible information, but some of the information, like find a way to move, is not necessarily bad information. But if your experience as a member of that stigmatized group is that the movement is connected to repairing how your body is wrong, it’s not going to be a good experience, it’s going to be a traumatizing experience or stigmatizing experience, right?

Deb Burgard: And so I was trying to sort of think about what is the best chance of a good memory of movement for people? And I thought a lot of people, at least some people, have had terrible experiences of PE, but better experiences of recess. So I was thinking about, “All right so how do we bring back recess for adults?” But just really thinking about the idea of play as opposed to the idea of punishment, which is still a radical idea.

Ed Ayers: Nowadays, aerobics might not be the most popular class at your local gym, but Jenny and Deb say the fat aerobics movement offered some important lessons on wellness, public health messages, and body size.

Deb Burgard: I had to field a lot of calls. People would call, get information about the class, and they would just disparage themselves and say, “Oh, I can’t even climb up the stairs. I’ve gained 50 pounds you know. I can’t bring home my groceries.” And I would think to myself, “Well, come. Wait until you … ” I’m thinking, “Just come to the class. You’re going to see people who are 100 pounds heavier than you doing splits. So you’ll get it, you’ll get it.” That this is perspective that you’ve been fed from the dominant culture and you need to see your family, like your fat family. You need to see the fat family that you weren’t born into. You need to see the beauty in this fat family and the people who are figuring out how to sort of make a way even though there’s so much (beep) that is kind of inherently there day by day. It’s like recognizing how brilliant people can be at resisting this stuff and finding each other and making a party happen. I just wish I could transplant that experience into everybody’s brain.

Jenny Ellison: when we talk to people who participate in aerobics classes for fat women only, what we learned is that women spent years and decades and sometimes a lifetime, trying to lose weight and never did and felt badly about this, and then had a really negative impact on their interpersonal relationships.

Jenny Ellison: Once they had come to terms with the fact that they were fat and this was unlikely to change, they began to see their lives a lot differently. And so one of the questions that the movement raises for the medical profession is the general failure to find a solution for the challenge of obesity. If we take the analysis that obesity is bad for people, the medical profession has actually never been able to find a clear solution to this problem. And so for decades, men and women have struggled to lose weight because of this sense that being fat is negative, and yet the data show us that diets are rarely successful.

Jenny Ellison: What fat activism and aerobics classes for fat women only offer is a different model, and that’s a model of health at every size, where we meet people where they are and we don’t focus on weight. We focus on physical and mental wellness. And this is a different way of thinking about physical fitness and health than relying solely on metrics like weight to determine whether or not somebody is in good or bad shape.

Ed Ayers: That’s Jenny Ellison. She’s a curator of sport and leisure at the Canadian Museum of History and the author of several articles on aerobics and fat activism.

Ed Ayers: You also heard Deb Burgard. She’s a psychologist and fat activist. Deb is also one of the founders of the Health at Every Size Model.