History of Black Women & Physical Fitness in the United States

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. In February, 2010, Michelle Obama, the first Black First Lady of the United States, launched "Let's Move," a nationwide campaign to solve the problem of childhood obesity. As Obama said at the time, "The physical and emotional health of an entire generation, and the economic health and security of our nation, is at stake. This isn't the kind of problem that can be solved overnight, but with everyone working together, it can be solved. So let's move!" Michelle Obama, while, by far the most visible, was hardly the first Black woman to publicly prioritize health and fitness. During the 19th century, as reformers began to worry about the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of Americans, German immigrants to the United States brought with them the gymnastics based physical culture that they had followed in Germany. German immigrant Charles Beck, a Latin teacher at the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, opened the first gymnasium in the United States there in 1824. In 1851, the Young Men's Christian Association, or YMCA, which had started in London seven years earlier, opened its first US location in Boston, which included a fully equipped gym with features like wooden dumbbells and pommel horses. Just two years later, Anthony Bowen, who had formerly been enslaved, opened the first YMCA for African Americans in Washington, DC. However, the YMCA and its gymnasium facilities weren't open to women. In 1858, a group of women opened the first YWCA in the United States in New York City. Its mission was to provide housing and educational resources for young women, not gymnasium space. Nearly two decades later, in 1877, the Boston YWCA began offering calisthenics classes for women at a time when many people still considered women too weak to exercise. Black women, however, were unwelcome in either the African American YMCAs or the whites only YWCAs until 1889, when the first African American branch of the YWCA finally opened in Dayton, Ohio. Compared to their white analogues, however, African American YWCAs were underfunded and often rundown, with little in the way of workout equipment. Even without access to resources and facilities, Black women in the United States still participated in the physical culture movement. As today's guest, Dr. Ava Purkiss, argues, "Black women used exercise to demonstrate their fitness for citizenship during a time when physically fit bodies garnered new political meaning." One of the earliest proponents of Black women's fitness was Olivia Davidson, the second wife of Booker T. Washington. Davidson was born free in Virginia in 1854. After her family moved to Ohio in search of better opportunities, she was able to attend school, and she became a teacher at age 16. In 1881, Washington asked her to join him in building the Tuskegee Institute, where she was both teacher and vice principal. In 1886, in a speech to the Alabama State Teacher Association, Davidson encouraged the physical development of Black women, and suggested that educators teach physiology and hygiene. For Davidson, "The young women and girls are the hope for the race," making their physical fitness a matter of importance for all African Americans. By 1894, Mary P. Evans, the editor of "Women's Era," a Black women's magazine, was making an explicit appeal for Black women to exercise, writing that exercise, "keeps the body in the best condition for throwing off disease," and, "is a great aid to clear quick and right thinking." Encouraging Black women's physical fitness in speeches and writing was one thing, but racist and sexist conditions often made it hard to achieve. As physical education was adopted in more school systems around the country, training programs for physical educators were established. In 1881, Dudley Allen Sargent opened the Sargent Normal School of Physical Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the early years, Black women attended the school, eager to learn to teach physical education. Maryrose Reeves Allen graduated from Sargent before teaching physical education at Howard University, and then founding the Negro Women's Intercollegiate Athletic Association. However, Sargent later stopped accepting applications from Black students. Many other training facilities had never admitted Black women in the first place. Although they were shut out of white institutions like Sargent, Black women and girls were trained in physical education at Black institutions. Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, now called Hampton University, in Virginia, was founded in 1868, and by the 1890s, it had developed a physical education program that included exercise and physical exams. In a 1921 report, the physical examination was said to be a chance to, "study the needs of the individual girl, and to interest her in reaching a higher level of health by controlling her own habits of exercise, eating, sleep, study, and recreation." At Howard University, Lucy Diggs Slowe, the Dean of Women, noted that students complained about how strenuous the physical education work was, but her response was, "Students have to take it." The YMCA World Conference passed a resolution in 1931, calling for all YMCAs to end segregation. That was followed by the YMCA National Council passing a resolution in 1946, that said that local associations should, "work steadfastly toward the goal of eliminating all racial discriminations." The National Council stopped making racial designations on its publications, but some YMCAs remained segregated all the way until 1967, when integration was finally enforced. Women started to be welcomed into some YMCAs in the late 19th century, and by 1946, around 62% of YMCAs allowed women members, but it wasn't until 1978 that gender discrimination was completely banned by the YMCA. The Obamas left the White House in January 2017, but not before Michelle Obama became a very public face of a Black woman exercising, tweeting about her weekly workout plan, participating in group exercise at the White House, and even making a video dancing with a turnip. Joining me now is Dr. Ava Purkiss, Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and American Culture, at the University of Michigan, and author of, "Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America."

Hi, Ava, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  10:44  
Thank you, Kelly. I'm really happy to be in conversation with you today.

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:48  
Yeah, I really enjoyed your book. So I want to ask a little bit about how you got started on this topic.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  10:54  
Thank you for that question. It's one of my favorite questions. And I have a personal answer and a professional answer. So I hope it's okay to give you both. So I'll start with the personal. So for a very, very long time since I was a very young person, I've been interested in the intersection of race and gender and class and health, or maybe more specifically racism and gender and classism, and health. I had several family members growing up that got very ill. Some of them ended up passing away. And I began to ask questions about that intersection, and how that intersection limited the health prospects for some of my family members. So that's something again, I didn't articulate it in that way, as a teenager, but I started thinking about, then asking questions about that. And there were just some other happenstance events in my life that moved me to closer proximity of fitness. When I was in college, I needed a job for the summer, and there was a plaza that was very, very close to where my family lived. And there was I don't know, if you remember, there was a franchise called Curves, which was a gym only for women. Men were not allowed to join. And they were hiring, I needed a job. I wasn't looking for a job in fitness, but I got the job. So I worked there for a couple of summers. And that particular branch or location catered to middle aged and older, white women who were middle class and wealthy. And so again, I started asking questions about the intersection of race and gender and class and health possibilities and how that created health possibilities for some people. Fast forwarding ahead a little bit, when I graduated college, I needed a job again. I had a BA in psychology, and I knew I wanted to go to graduate school. But I needed some time to kind of figure out how I wanted to do this, where I was going to go, and I needed a job in the meantime. And I applied for all of these jobs that I thought would be really pleased with my BA in psychology, which weren't, weren't many. And I ended up applying to work at a weight loss clinic. I got the job. It was the only job I got. And so I became a weight loss counselor, for a weight loss clinic. And the particular branch I worked at was actually the kind of diametric opposite from Curves. It was in a low income area that catered to working class, Black and brown people. And so once again, um, I started asking these questions, and I saw a lot of the clients that I worked with doing incredible things to be able to pay for this weight loss program, right, like incredible things. That's a whole other podcast. And I ended up getting fired from that job, which makes total sense. So that's kind of like the the kind of like personal milieu, in which I had this proximity to the fitness industry. I had questions about these intersections as they pertain to health and health possibility. And I was really coming at those questions and that proximity from a space of critique. Right. So that's the personal piece, and the professional more scholarly piece is I went and did an MA in Black Studies and I did a thesis on Black domestic workers, and so I kind of fashioned myself as like a labor historian. And when I went on to do my doctoral studies, I actually wanted to do something really different and I became really seduced by looking at African American History and Black exertion outside of labor, like separate from wage labor, separate from like, even social how we think about social justice, labor activism. And so I was like, what does that look like? What does, what does physical exertion of physicality for the self look like in African American history? And I also was really curious about citizenship outside of the realms of voting, and military participation and state acts like I wondered, like, how do you show or fashion yourself a citizen outside of those really typical domains in African American historiography, particularly when those domains are not available to you, which is often the case for Black women? And like, how do they? How do they perform citizenship outside of like jurisprudence? Right? And, and so all of those questions, proximities, curiosities, and like scholarly seductions came together in this book about Black women's exercise and citizenship. It makes sense in my mind, Kelly. I hope it makes sense to you.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:20  
Yes, absolutely. So I, when I started thinking about this podcast, initially, two years ago, I was joking with people that like, I don't want to study presidents, I want to know like, what did people eat for lunch in Kansas in you know, 1940 or something? Yeah. So it reminds me a lot of those kinds of questions like, what is the everyday experience of people? And so how do you access that? Like, the the reason that we have so many biographies of presidents is because they have a million papers, you know, like, how do you access this sort of everyday history?

Dr. Ava Purkiss  16:52  
Yeah, another question that I really appreciate as an historian, because we love to go on and on about sources, right? Um, so I was like, "Okay, I have this idea. How do I like where do I begin to even look to see if this was a thing in African American history?" I intuited, I predicted it was because Black people have done everything that we can think of. But where do I go to look for it? And the first place that I always go is Black newspapers, always. Right? And the reason that I started there is because the Black press often reports on the seemingly mundane, in a way that shows great, like social and racial meaning, if that makes sense. Right? And they report on the every day, because that's what daily and weekly newspapers do, right? The every day, the what did the spectacular and the mundane, the, you know, what did this person eats at this dinner that they went to right? So I looked there, and I found more than I could ever ask for. I found evidence of Black people and Black women actually doing what we consider physical exercise like modern physical exercise outside of labor. I found the kinds of exercises they were doing. And there was commentary on why this was important. Why was this civically important? Right? So I looked there for the every day. I looked in Black magazines. And one of the reasons why I consulted Black magazines, particularly of the 40s and 50s and 60s, is that I was really interested in the visual culture of Black exercise. I, I just felt the great need, particularly in graduate school to prove to prove Black physicality through visual evidence because so much Black physicality, in my mind at the time, was about some kind of labor, some kind of social justice labor, some kind of wage labor, some kind of downtrodden image. And I wondered like, what does action photography look like, when it's not about performing work for someone else, although you can argue that exercise is another kind of labor? So magazines, my favorite, favorite favorite source to look for this was advice literature. So advice literature is basically texts that tell you how to behave, very popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. And how to comb your hair, how to arrange your furniture, how to, you know, raise your children, how to cook food, right, but also, what is health?  How do you exercise? Why is it important? It is so rich, it's been overlooked, but I looked there too, for the kinds of, what you should be doing every day, the prescriptive nature of the everyday, public health documents, Physical Education reports, obviously. Those are the more obvious places. And the last piece that I'll say about where do you find folks doing exercise or health related activity that really surprised me were were cookbooks. So I think I, the book is mostly about exercise. I became really interested in dieting and I realized I couldn't talk about exercise without dieting in the 40s and 50s and 60s. They'd kind of become a package deal. And you would think just generally cookbooks is not the place to find discourse on abstemiousness, particularly Black cookbooks that we assume is about like sumptuousness and deliciousness. But again, and I didn't find an overwhelming corpus on this, but I found a few particularly one that is giving advice on responsible conscious eating in a Black cookbook, right. So I looked anywhere and everywhere I could for this, that's not a method. I don't suggest it. But this is how I found like, like I said that everydayness of exercise, conscious eating, health related behaviors. Yeah.

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:30  
Well, I'm so glad you looked for the visual culture, because I loved seeing the images that you included in the book. And I was surprised how many of them are like from the Library of Congress, and you know, like this, this stuff is out there.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  21:42  
Yeah, it is. And I had to think about what is obvious? And what is not obvious? What is my kind of intervention? Um, so you know, there are some images in the book of women like, actually like on a machine or doing, particularly in the 50s and 60s, like doing what we consider exercise, but like, you know, I had to ask myself, this woman playing tennis, that is evidence of Black exercise, right? These sharecroppers doing some active recreation during a break. That's Black exercise, right? And so for me, I had to kind of think about what is Black exercise visual culture? What does it look like? And how is it different from what this looks like, in like white fitness magazines, and things like that? But that was really important to me to kind of show that evidence, show a different kind of visual archive of Black physicality. It was also like, very fun to do. So. That's one of my favorite, favorite parts, was like looking for images.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:52  
Yeah, yeah. No, I'm glad you did. I love them. So I want to come back to this idea of intersection. So I think a lot of people sort of intuitively know or have seen in their own lives, that women have a sort of impossible situation with physical. Yes, what they are meant to look like and you know, too far this way and have to do. And so for Black women, that's then multiplied by, by this intersection. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like what what it takes to navigate these, these various aspects that that people are trying to force on to the ideal, what that might look like and how that changes during the time period that you're looking at? Reconstruction to the postwar?

Dr. Ava Purkiss  23:36  
Yeah. Thank you for that. Kelly. That's a really big question and a hard question. And I'm really glad that you asked it. So you're asking like, "How do Black women navigate this intersection of race, gender, class is also really important to that right. Region is also, can be really important to that too. And like the quick answer I have is that they do it astutely. They do it astutely. Right. And I really liked that you mentioned the word impossible because they are in a like triply impossible position both inter racially and intra racially. They navigate the intersection of race, gender and class with nuance and with great racial and social knowledge and with a sense of self efficacy, I think, not perfectly, but with just great knowledge of self and race and gender. And so I'll kind of talk more about that. So when it comes to Black health, Black women are the presumed problem and solution at the same time, right, impossible. So they are the so called, like carriers of sexual disease, right? This is also coming from Black elites. They are the producers or reproducers of unfit children. Right. This is also coming from Black elites and, and, and white folk and, but they are also teachers, they're nurses, they're homemakers, they're community activists who are charged with ensuring individual health, family health, community health and racial health. Right. So they're, they're the problem and they're the solution. And they know this, right. And although it seems like an impossible place to be, they capitalize on this positionality, right. And they make themselves the moral authority on Black fitness. Right, they make themselves the moral authority on it. And they said, "Okay, we're charged with all of these burdens. But we're also charged with the responsibility and the possibility of Black survivability, right. We are charged with the possibility of actually being able to obtain this ideal of health. Let's, let's see if we can reach it. Let's aspire towards it. Let's work toward it." Right. So this is how they do it. It's not perfect. It is problematic, Kelly, right. You have Black women who are saying, "Stop being lazy, get off of your stoop, stop gossiping, stop being sedentary, go for a walk, do something productive with your body and time." And the same women like the exact same women who say that are also building clinics, right? They are making sure that people get fresh air and exercise so that they can avoid pneumonia and tuberculosis, right. And so it's messy. But if you ask me, they do it much more astutely than we would think and that I would be able to do. Again, it's it is not perfect. You have class barriers, we have ideas about like, racial extinction, they have to navigate. They have this like gendered position where they're the problem, and they're also the solution. And they and they try to take all of that to become a kind of authority.

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:23  
Can you talk some about you know, they're, they're held to a really high standard in terms of, you know, physically what you should be doing, but given very few resources to do it. So yeah, you talk some about like, YMCAs that like, yeah, Black white or YWCA? The Black one doesn't have the equipment, or maybe they're allowed to get like, hand me down equipment or, you know, so yeah, talks about that, and how that makes it so much more challenging to reach those ideals.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  27:53  
Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you for mentioning the Y, which appears a lot throughout the book. So it's really difficult because on one hand, Black people really want, they want to exercise, like they believe in this, they want the resources to do it, they want the time and energy to do it. They see the value in it. And they want to do it like more resourced communities are doing it. They want the machines. They want the state of the art facilities, right, they want paved roads that they can walk on. And they also Kelly want to have the physical energy to do it. Right. But they realize that this is not something that they have, that's something that is easy to get. And so they just try to work with what they can. They do petition, because you have to petition white YWCAs for better resources. So they do kind of do the activist work. They do kind of like community drives to be able to put some machinery together to make a playground for for children and young people and adults to work out at. They're also really big advocates of walking, huge advocates of walking. And they're very explicit about this not being something that you need a lot of resources to do. It is great cardiovascular exercise, it has amazing, you know, effects on your kidney function, they get really into the organs that benefit from aerobic exercise through walking. And so they become really big advocates of that because they say you know you don't, which is very similar to some of the discourse that we hear contemporarily right. You can always walk if you don't have a gym membership, you can always walk. So that's those are some of the ways that they try to navigate just the lack of resources.

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:02  
Yeah. And then the lack of resources follows through then to a lack of training. Right. So the you talk about some of the, the training opportunities to become a physical education teacher, or you know, those sorts of things, that, despite the fact that they are expected to be fit, Black, people are not welcome to do some of this training. Can you, can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Ava Purkiss  30:24  
Yeah, I mean, again, there's, there's, I'm so glad you introduced the word impossible, this is such an impossible situation to navigate, right? The the kind of sick conundrum of, "You are not fit, and we're not going to give you the resources to make sure that you could get there." That's how racism works. You are this thing, essentially, biologically, right. And if there even is a chance for you not being this thing, we're going to shut that down too. We're going to make this impossible. And this is why like, bottom up history, social history, African American history, ethnic studies, it's so important, because it shows how folks respond to that impossibility. And like I said, it's often done in a really astute way. So just like you said, you have young Black women who really, really want to be physical education teachers at the highest level. And they're applying to go to these institutes and these physical culture schools, and they are explicitly being denied because they're Black, explicitly. And so they're like, "Well, what are we supposed to do? Right, what are we supposed to do?" And then, you know, they, I think a lot of them end up just going to historically Black institutions where there aren't really great physical education programs. They make the best of what they have. If you think about Tuskegee, even at the beginning, Tuskegee was really trying to privilege like, classes in like physiology and bodily hygiene. And as soon as they got the opportunity to have a kind of standard physical education program, they did in the late 19th century. So they find ways around it, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's a really, really impossible situation, which is why it's so fascinating. It is, it is so fascinating how folks navigate that impossibility.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:33  
So you just mentioned Tuskegee, and I had done something on Tuskegee, a while back and never even occurred to me that Booker T. was I mean, I assumed he had a wife, but I never really thought about his wife and you bring her into the story. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about her.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  32:49  
Oh, Olivia Davidson. I love Olivia Davidson. Okay, so Olivia Davidson was instrumental. I'm yelling, I'm sorry. She was instrumental in getting Tuskegee started, right. She was his literal and figurative partner in getting it established. Olivia Davidson was an educator. She was his second wife, until she passed away. And she she's featured in the book because not just because she is amazing, and phenomenal and brilliant. But she is really sick. Historians think that she died of tuberculosis. She suffered with weakness, physical pain, she's trying to get Tuskegee started. And when you're trying to found an institution, you're thinking about what your philosophy is what you know. And, and to her, she's thinking about Black girls as the future of the race. And she gives this speech to a group of teachers in Alabama and she says, "Black girls are the future of the race. They are, their bodies are already precious. They just need to take care of their bodies. And this is this is where we come in, we can show them how to care for their bodies, they're already worthy. They already are corporally valuable, not because of what they do, just essentially, biologically by virtue of them being Black girls. And so we need to make an investment in their bodies and their health because they're the future of the race." And she doesn't necessarily advocate exercise in that speech because I think it's in 1888. This is really before the kind of modern exercise physical culture movement, but it's she's one of the progenitors, I think, of thinking about Black women and girls as a kind of authority on the body, on fitness, on health. On maybe what some will come up like a Black feminist thinker about the body. And she is rarely chronicled. She rarely shows up. And she's wonderful and brilliant and other things that I can't say on air. So that's, that's, that's Olivia Davidson. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:42  
Yeah. I'm really glad you put her in the book because I was quite pleased to learn about her.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  35:23  
She's my favorite. She's my favorite. Yeah.

Kelly Therese Pollock  35:26  
So at the end of the book, in the epilogue, you come around to bringing in some of the more modern pieces that are really fascinating. And we see how a lot of these ideas have not gone away. A lot of these impossible standards have not gone away. And you talk some about Michelle Obama, and I had found myself throughout reading the book, thinking about Michelle Obama, and this, some people are like, "She's not fit enough." And other people are like, "She's like this strong, muscular, like a man." And like, yeah, there's no winning. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Michelle Obama, and how we can see some of these these themes that are happening in the time period you're writing about sort of still still happening going forward?

Dr. Ava Purkiss  36:12  
Yes, Kelly, and I, I hope we can be I know, this is an interview. And it's supposed to be me talking. But I hope we can be in conversation about this, because I haven't fully wrapped my mind around Michelle Obama. So I'm going to be thinking, and I hope we can go back and forth on it, because we were both there. Right? So I just have a little piece on Michelle Obama. And there are a couple of reasons why she's only a little piece in the epilogue of the book. One is the sense that like, maybe folks weren't interested in Michelle Obama anymore, that we were past that point. She's not in the White House anymore. We're maybe in a different moment where people might be more interested in like Serena Williams as like a contemporary figure to think about. Oh, she just retired, so maybe that's passe, too. So I was like, well, maybe folks aren't interested. But you just asked me about her. And I'm like, maybe I should have meditated on her more. And the second reason is because I'm, I'm a historian who actually needs time to pass to understand what's happening. Right. And also, Michelle Obama is an interesting figure to me. And this is I want to talk through it with you, right? When I looked at Michelle Obama, I thought, "This is probably the fittest in every way, physical, eternal, moral woman that has ever occupied the White House." Did you feel that way? About like when you visually saw her that she looked fit to you? Yeah, I mean, her

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:58  
Yeah. And she's always wearing like sleeveless tops. And she's got those amazing arm muscles. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  38:04  
Just and also but also feminine, graceful, fit, healthy. "Let's Move" made perfect sense to me. I just want to make sure this makes sense to you too, just someone else who was there. Okay, perfect. So that's what my eyes saw. But then I saw these caricatures of her, these images of her, the way in which, like discourse around her body was trying to detract from her health, fitness and femininity. And then you had those kind of more on the right who basically just said, "She is overweight, right? She is unfit in every way possible. Why is she doing 'Let's Move?' This doesn't make sense for her." So there was this moment of contradiction, where what I was hearing, and reading was betraying what I was seeing. And I couldn't understand, right. And maybe I was just really, I was deep into my dissertation. And I couldn't really make sense of it. But I was like, "This is what history has told us you are supposed to aspire to. She's done and she's checked every box. And she's still unfit, right. She has impossible fitness." And so the way that I tried to reconcile that again, in a way that isn't as robust or thoroughgoing because I need more time away from it was to think about Michelle Obama, in this realm of what I call aspirational fitness. Right? She is doing all the things. She's providing corporal and physical evidence of her strength and physical capability, her knowledge about the body, about nutrition, and choosing a platform that makes sense, for the time and for her interests and her capability, right? She's doing it. And she is still hopelessly perpetually, unfit, overweight, unhealthy too manly, right? But she still perseveres, she still does it, she still asserts herself as a fit citizen, literally. She says, this at a speech over the White House garden. Right? So I'm just thinking about aspiration as this kind of contradictory space, where the milieu says, "You are not these things, you can't do these things. You can never be these things." And you still try to do them anyway. So I just tried to think about that as a space of aspiration and aspirational fitness. But, you know, talk to me again in 10 years now, and I might have a more sophisticated answer. I just wanted to make sure you were seeing what I was seeing. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:00  
Yeah. absolutely. I think it's probably not just coincidence that she's a mother of Black daughters, and is thinking through representation for them. Like, obviously, she's thinking, I assume, everybody in the country, you know, all of that, but in particular, being what she would like her daughters to see. And she seems to have had a, you know, very strong mother herself, who had yet imparted a lot of that kind of courage to her. But 

Dr. Ava Purkiss  41:30  
Yeah, she calls herself was it "mom in chief?" Yeah, but yes, remember that? Yeah. Mom in chief, which is also a very interesting moment and a different podcast. Yeah, but she's thinking about, she's thinking about a lot. And I think she's thinking about the history of Black, female corporality a lot in the decisions that she makes. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:54  
Well, I would like to encourage everyone to read your book. So how can they get a copy?

Dr. Ava Purkiss  41:58  
They can purchase it from the UNC Press website. It's called, "Fit Citizens." It's on Amazon, you can just Google it. You can see if it's in your library. Yeah, that's how you can get a copy. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:05  
And everyone listening knows I love UNC Press. Always. They're the best.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  42:20  
They're the best. They are the best. Oh, this is so wonderful. Kelly, this is so lovely.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:26  
Yeah. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?

Dr. Ava Purkiss  42:29  
I have a question for you. Did you find this history surprising? You know, a, when you when you research something for so long, you lose the element of surprise. Yeah. And I, this book just came out in April, I haven't really been able to, like, be in conversation with people about the book, because it's summer, and we're kind of isolated. Yeah. But is it surprising to you? Like I've just, I'm just really, really curious. Yeah, were you surprised? 

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:03  
Yeah, I think I mean, surprise, might not be the right word for it exactly. But more made me think about something I just hadn't thought about. So you know, if I, if I'm thinking about the history of fitness, I, you know, probably like, a lot of people sort of my mind defaults to white fitness, and, you know, white men, and you know, and then as we get more toward the 70s, and 80s, white women and so if I had stopped and thought about it, I'm sure I would have been like, of course, Black people and Black women are part of this too. But not seeing that very often represented, yeah, means that I have not spent much time thinking about it. And so your book got me into that mindset of thinking about that. And so, you know, I don't know that surprise is exactly the word but eye opening, I think would be how, I would describe it. Yeah. 

Dr. Ava Purkiss  43:58  
Yeah. Thank you for that. I think. I mean, I think I think I would like people to be surprised. I do want it to be eye opening. I think the assumption is that Black folks are fighting against these standards and ideals. Like that is their position is to work against them, change them. And I'm thinking about what it means to have a documented history where not only are they not fighting against it, but they're actually co creators, like they're helping to create them and what does that what does that mean? So, yeah. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:37  
Well,Ava, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Dr. Ava Purkiss  44:41  
I did too. Thank you so much, Kelly.

Teddy  45:06  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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