Lets Get Physical How Women Discovered Exercise & Reshaped the World

A captivating blend of reportage and personal narrative that explores the untold history of women’s exercise culture — from jogging and Jazzercise to Jane Fonda — and how women have parlayed physical strength into other forms of power.

For American women today, working out is as accepted as it is expected, fueling a multibillion-dollar fitness industrial complex. But it wasn’t always this way. For much of the twentieth century, sweating was considered unladylike and girls grew up believing physical exertion would cause their uterus to literally fall out. It was only in the sixties that, thanks to a few forward-thinking fitness pioneers, women began to move en masse.

In Let's Get Physical, journalist Danielle Friedman reveals the fascinating hidden history of contemporary women’s fitness culture, chronicling in vivid, cinematic prose how exercise evolved from a beauty tool pitched almost exclusively as a way to “reduce” into one millions have harnessed as a path to mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

Let’s Get Physical reclaims these forgotten origin stories — and shines a spotlight on the trailblazers who led the way. Each chapter uncovers the birth of a fitness movement that laid the foundation for working out today: the radical post-war pitch for women to break a sweat in their living rooms, the invention of barre in the “Swinging Sixties,” the promise of jogging as liberation in the seventies, the meteoric rise of aerobics and weight-training in the eighties, the explosion of yoga in the nineties, and the ongoing push for a more socially inclusive fitness culture — one that celebrates every body. Ultimately, it tells the story of how women discovered the joy of physical strength and competence — and how, by moving together to transform fitness from a privilege into a right, we can create a more powerful sisterhood.

"It is all too easy to look at the history of women’s fitness as an unconnected timeline of fads and celebrities. In Let’s Get Physical, Danielle Friedman weaves together the cultural history of a movement that is nothing less than the story of the modern American woman — and she does it with fascinating and fun storytelling that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered why thighs need to be mastered or buns should be made of steel." Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World and Every Minute Is a Day: A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege

"There are few areas of American culture as complicated — and as understudied — as women's exercise. Which is why I feel like I've been waiting for a book like Let's Get Physical for decades: something that takes the history and importance of fitness seriously, but is also incisive and curious and readable and fun." Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

"Fascinating…persuasively encapsulates the relatively recent history of women’s fitness and the wide-reaching impact its trailblazers had. Let’s Get Physical is packed with stories of people who come to classes because of how they want to look, but stay because of how those classes make them feel: strong, supported, engaged, and empowered." The Atlantic

"Friedman’s engaging stories of the women who created and transformed the fitness industry illustrate an evolution built upon strong female shoulders." The Washington Post

"Fact-packed but bouncy…Most enjoyable is when Friedman shines light on less hallowed figures, like Judi Sheppard Missett, the relentlessly upbeat founder of Jazzercise, whose classes 'changed the rhythm of women’s days;' and Bonnie Prudden, 'the lady in the leotite' and a descendant of Davy Crockett…[Friedman’s] book is very much “pro” exercise, but for the right reasons: not slimming down but mood management, community, spirituality in the corporal." The New York Times

Danielle Friedman is an award-winning journalist whose feature writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Cut, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Health, and other publications. She has worked as a senior editor at NBC News Digital and The Daily Beast, and she began her career as a nonfiction book editor at the Penguin imprints Hudson Street Press and Plume. She lives in New York City with her husband and son.