In recent years, Black women and citizenship have enjoyed significant scholarly attention. Ava Purkiss’s Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America adds a refreshing contribution to this rich literature by highlighting an understudied dimension of Black women’s historical experience: the quest for fitness. Purkiss tracks Black women’s engagement with exercise and fitness movements as U.S. society increasingly focused on health, thinness, and other corporal attributes as markers of individual character. As Purkiss argues, by demonstrating their fitness, Black women asserted their suitability for citizenship. At a time when physical health and vitality were imbued with various political meanings, Black women “made exercise instrumental to their ideas of health, ideal corporality, and civic inclusion” (2).
Purkiss relies on physical culture books, magazines, and other media to show how healthy bodies came to be linked to racial progress and citizenship. Purkiss uncovers little-known health, exercise, and diet texts that demonstrate the significance of – and even obsession with – physical culture in the United States. Likewise, Purkiss offers fresh insights through her reading of more familiar Black publications, such as the Chicago Defender, The Crisis, and the works of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.
The first chapter of Fit Citizens begins with the generation of Black women who, for the most part, did not experience enslavement but grappled with its legacies, particularly the insidious racial beliefs about the Black body. Purkiss’s analysis adds another dimension to the rich scholarship on Black clubwomen who saw it as their duty to morally uplift the race and to constantly embody virtuousness. Black women reformers were faced with an enormous task. “Dominant portrayals of problematic sexuality and perceived immorality made Black women appear ‘unworthy of the benefits of first-class citizenship’” (21). Black women were, therefore, compelled to exercise citizenship and for citizenship.
Black women, in response, increasingly pursued physical fitness, incorporating exercise into their public organizing and activism, which is the subject of chapter two. Legal segregation imposed challenges to pursuing physical fitness, as Black individuals were excluded from public exercise facilities. The color line, as Purkiss notes, “divided healthcare” (53). Journalists and physicians largely ignored how segregation marginalized Black communities, placing them within unhealthy and unsafe environmental conditions, and deprived them of better medical treatment. Rather than acknowledge structural racism, observers accepted Black people’s poor health as evidence of inherent inferiority. Circumventing their exclusion, Black women created community programs focused on exercise to improve Black public health. Purkiss shows how race women and Black educators promoted physical education to “properly ‘shape’ young Black women’s bodies and habits” (63). The world of physical culture was not often welcoming, as middle-class Black women reformers surveilled working-class Black women who already did strenuous work. Working-class women were stigmatized as sources of public health problems.
Chapters three and four track Black women’s evolving beauty culture and recreation in the interwar and Great Depression years. In an era when notions about being civilized were marked upon the slim white female body, Black women grappled with a mainstream beauty culture that was not only inflected with white supremacy but also increasingly hostile to fatness. Here, Purkiss carefully notes that not all Black women sought to “shed the liabilities of fatness” through exercise or other paeans to Western beauty standards; indeed, working-class Black women especially did not have the privilege of pursuing the lean ideal and, at times, rejected it entirely (79). There was a shift in Black women’s physical and beauty cultures as the nation dealt with widespread scarcity during the Great Depression. Black women contested myths about Black idleness by promoting and engaging in active recreation and leisure. To Purkiss, such practices allowed Black women to articulate “the relationship between recreation, fitness, and citizenship” at a time when directly participating in national politics – voting, enlisting, running for office, and so forth – were foreclosed to them (130).
The first four chapters are, in many ways, alike and have similar arguments. Chapter five stands out with its compelling take on how dieting intensified during the postwar era, a period of increasing consumerism; at this time, women’s aspirations turned toward figures that suggested moderation and self-policing. Here, Purkiss delves into the implications of affiliating slender and fit bodies to citizenship. The postwar period saw “Black political agents, image makers, the press, and laypeople [linking] Black progress to an expanding media culture. Portrayals of Black women’s beauty … served as a venue to cultivate postwar racial pride” (150). Pageants and other events meant to display Black women’s fitness became increasingly common. Purkiss highlights the performative aspect of being “fit,” as dieting was not just seen as a lifesaving measure but rather was also imbued with notions about one’s productivity and capacity to self-sacrifice—both attributes of a good citizen.
The problematic disassociation of Black women from fitness – physical, mental, and moral – remains consequential in recent history and the contemporary moment, as Black women’s bodies are cited explicitly and implicitly as evidence of their civic incapacity. Fatness, as Purkiss keenly argues, is still very much racialized. From Ronald Reagan’s invocation of the welfare queen in the 1980s to the intense scrutiny and criticism of Michelle Obama’s body in more recent years, Purkiss ponders in her epilogue whether fitness is unattainable for Black women. She asks, “was fitness reachable, or ever possible, for other African American women?” (168). It is a poignant question that leads to other inquiries. By pointing out that, aside from moral and mental qualities, physical fitness emerged as a qualifying standard for national belonging and/or citizenship, Purkiss opens new questions in disability studies: In what ways are (dis)abilities and (un)healthiness manufactured through a racial lens? How has physical fitness been weaponized against marginalized individuals?
While Fit Citizens has many achievements, perhaps the book’s neat chronological structure confines its important themes. The argument that Black women asserted their citizenship through fitness and health, placing civic value on their often devalued and racialized bodies, is convincing, and one wonders if a thematic structure would have allowed for a more comprehensive analysis. Food and sports are themes that figure in this book but not prominently. This is a minor, if not negligible, critique of an otherwise significant and unique contribution to African American history and health studies.
