Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

*A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2022*

A CAPTIVATING BLEND OF REPORTAGE AND PERSONAL NARRATIVE, LET’S GET PHYSICAL 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 many 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. 

 

PRAISE FOR LET’S GET PHYSICAL

“Danielle Friedman’s fact-packed but bouncy new book about women and exercise in 20th-century America … [recounts a] relay race of about two dozen female fitness evangelists and entrepreneurs, passing the baton of well-being to each other over the decades. … Her 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

 

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

 

“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