“Body issues,” began one of my male students on the first day of class, “always just seem to be about women. Why is that?” The awkwardness generated by his honest inquiry was unavoidable, even though his question only made explicit a dynamic already obvious in the composition of the class: he was one of just a few young men who had enrolled in an otherwise oversubscribed elective on American fitness cultures.

Body issues – be they about beauty, health, or ability – are of course not only women's concerns, but this student hit on an important, if troubling, cultural tradition that informs American history and, to a lesser extent, historiography. In a society long shaped by sexism and Cartesian dualism of mind and body, the more elevated cerebral realm has been defined as male, while women have often been consigned to the latter. (Until, that is, the care of the body was professionalized in the last 150 years, and new definitions of medical expertise delegitimized centuries of women's care work.) Historiography has at times reinscribed rather than challenged this dubious tradition, chronicling stories of American bodies as primarily a project of women's history in a way that overlooks the important ways that ideas, attitudes, and practices concerning the body are crucial to comprehending masculinity and gender writ large.

Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique, historian Rachel Louise Moran's first book, makes a crucial intervention in challenging this historical and historiographical fallacy. Acknowledging “it may seem strange that a study of weight, shape, and physique in the United States is heavily focused on male bodies” (7), Moran argues that, counterintuitively, “male bodies were more present in the public gaze and in public roles in the first half of the twentieth century.” In fact, because archetypal citizens have long been constructed as male, cultivating a hardy polity was imagined to mean building male strength, and it was civilian males whose bodies first came under state scrutiny and were thought to merit public funds. Focussing with particular insight on the pivotal role of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression in normalizing the construction of a muscular, able male physique and the state's role in encouraging it, Moran not only brings a new lens to one of the most familiar eras in political history, but also reminds historians of the body that “fitness culture” is not, in the main, a post-World War II phenomenon, or the domain of women alone.

Governing Bodies, however, is most powerful for its argument about how the state has shaped American body projects in consistent, if constrained, ways, for at least a century. What Moran styles “the advisory state” – policies that “cannot be explicitly legislated within the American political context” and are thus not implemented through “physical force or legal obligation,” but which nonetheless include “quantification, advertising, and voluntary programming” – is an invaluable conceptual model to historians and policymakers alike (2). The case studies Governing Bodies considers to chronicle the rise of the advisory state span more than a century, and include World War I nutrition recommendations, the CCC, World War II military conscription, the JFK-era President's Council on Youth Fitness, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and 1970s welfare programs, and each chapter could stand alone as assigned reading in courses on the history of welfare, fitness, gender, or policy. Yet the “advisory state” will prove an enduring analytical framework beyond these particular cases not only to inform historical research but also, as Moran points out, to nuance inflated “nanny-state” charges often issued from the political right. Governing Bodies is a fluidly written, deftly argued book that makes crucial contributions to the scholarship of policy and cultural history, realms that are too often artificially divorced in historical scholarship. Teaching us how public institutions have shaped the most intimate and private terrain of the body, Moran makes a vital methodological and conceptual intervention that will advance the work of scholars in the field of history and beyond.