Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska begins by asserting that Managing the Body “draws on Foucault’s arguments [about state surveillance and discipline of the subject’s body] to analyze how the promotion of disciplinary techniques played out in the specific context of British history from the late Victorian period to the end of the 1930s and why this mattered politically” (7). As such, her work speaks to many of the same themes of governance and public health as James Vernon’s recent Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA, 2007), although Managing the Body is both more chronologically limited and more comprehensively detailed than Vernon’s series of case studies. Zweiniger-Bargielowska devotes considerable attention to the emergence of both private and state-sponsored schemes intended to improve the male physique and create an “A 1 nation” in the wake of the revelations about poor health among urban military volunteers during the Boer War. Here, she builds on previous scholarship on the Edwardian national efficiency movement that has linked interest in public health and physique to imperial concerns about the strength of the British race, while arguing that such concerns persisted into the interwar period.

Such persistence is visible through the National Fitness Campaign launched by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in September 1937. The campaign built on earlier initiatives such as the National Playing Fields Association (NPFA). Established in 1925 with cross-party political support, this organization dispensed grants for the provision of over 1,000 playing grounds throughout England in the interwar period. It cooperated with the trade unions “to improve the physique and maintain the morale of the unemployed,” and the Trades Union Congress was represented on the association’s governing council (297). The National Fitness Campaign, which combined limited funding for facilities construction and renovation, training for fitness instructors, and an aggressive advertising campaign to promote the value of physical fitness, melded the “racial improvement” aims of the prewar national efficiency movement with the morale-maintaining ambitions of organizations such as the NPFA. The campaign abjured class rhetoric and instead addressed itself to a vague and inclusive “man in the street” whose “first task” was “to conquer his own apathy and increase his effort to be fit … [as] to be fit and to help others to be fit is to make a very real contribution to the National well-being” (309).

Zweiniger-Bargielowska juxtaposes Chamberlain’s campaign with the simultaneous debates about working-class malnutrition during the so-called hungry thirties. While the government marshaled rhetoric and statistics behind a discourse emphasizing the ability and responsibility of the individual, with the support of the state, to maintain a “healthy” physique through diet and exercise, the opposition employed competing measurements to argue that state welfare policies were inadequate to meet the subsistence needs of the citizenry. Both sides in the debate took for granted that citizens’ health fell within the purview of the state, but each had radically different prescriptions for addressing the perceived malady.

The explicitly political chapters of Managing the Body are well documented and persuasive, but they are not the most interesting. Rather, the chapters devoted to forgotten faddists—life reformers, physical culturists, and the men and women who followed them—bring to life a fascinating early twentieth-century subculture. These chapters highlight the increased importance placed on normative ideals of male and female fitness and the emergence of a moralizing discourse that equated middle-aged spread in men with laziness and irresponsibility and condemned excessive slimming among young and middle-aged women as indicative of a woman’s failure as a “race mother.” They also emphasize the cross-class nature of the physical culture movement. Physical culturalists were a socially heterodox group, with, surprisingly, working- and lower-middle-class women among the most enthusiastic adherents.

The first chapter, “Modern Urban Lifestyles, Degeneration, and the Male Body,” begins by discussing the comparatively well-known turn-of-the-century dress reform and health food movements, including the advent of vitamins and vegetarianism. From there, it moves onto a discussion of Eugen Sandow, a Prussia-born bodybuilder and health guru who began his career as a strongman on the British music hall circuit in the late 1880s. Over the next two decades, Sandow went on to open his own physical development institute in St. James Street, catering to an elite gentleman’s club clientele; to launch Sandow’s Magazine for Physical Culture, the first of a series of physical culture magazines that would flood the market in the early twentieth century; and ultimately to be named as Professor of Scientific Physical Culture to the King in 1911. Sandow, like many of his successors, emphasized man’s ability, with hard work and application, to remake his physique along ideal lines.

While Sandow originally catered to a male audience, by the early twentieth century the physical culture movement had expanded to embrace female participation. Advocates for women’s fitness regularly spoke in eugenicist terms about the “Modern Women as Race Mother,” the title of chapter 3. Yet, Zweiniger-Bargielowska also emphasizes the link between those who supported reforming women’s bodies and supporters of women’s romantic, sexual, and biological emancipation, including the Glasgow-trained doctor Elizabeth Sloan Chesser.

Zweiniger-Bargielowska frequently repeats that the physical culture movement remained a subculture throughout the interwar period, but it was the contrast between the ample Venus de Milo physique advocated by female physical culturalists and the streamlined flapper physique of models, actresses, and socialites constantly featured on the pages of the popular and women’s press between the wars that really brought this home to me. Despite government support during the 1930s, physical culturalists remained a minority movement. Yet, their emphasis on the moral and social imperative to remain fit spoke to larger concerns about managing the body that would have even greater resonance in the postwar welfare state.