Danielle Friedman > Quotes

“While researching this book, I interviewed aerobics instructors across the country who began teaching as young women and are now in their seventies and older, and most described the workout as a revelation. Jean Buchanan, now in her late eighties, started taking Jacki Sorensen’s Aerobic Dancing when she was forty-four. Growing up, she had been taught, like many women of her generation, that vigorous exercise would make a woman’s uterus “drop.” After she lost her son to cancer, however, she signed up for Jacki’s classes in her then-hometown of Austin, Texas, to cope with her grief, as well as to lose the weight she had gained from stress. Through aerobics, “I became a different person,” she told me. “A stronger, more confident person.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“We made our way into the living room studio and found our places at the barre, and she switched on a bossa nova CD.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“The class, they told her, just wasn’t fun. It was too hard. It was demoralizing. “I hated seeing all the things I couldn’t do in the mirror,” one woman told her. “I’ll never be on Broadway,” another said. “I just want to look good for my high school reunion this fall.” She heard the same refrain over and over: The women didn’t want to be professional dancers, they just wanted to look like them.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Lydia and her disciples would train nearly all of the women (and one man) who’d go on to open today’s biggest barre franchises, from Core Fusion and Physique 57 to Pure Barre and The Bar Method.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Class ended and the women walked back into the kitchen, chatty and energized. I was proud I had kept up with them, though my legs felt a little wobbly. (The relaxed vibe was deceiving—I would be sore everywhere for the next two days.) Everyone changed into street clothes around the kitchen table, paid Esther in cash, and said their goodbyes. When the last student left, Esther turned to me. “These women have been with me for a long time,” she said. “This is my life.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“In the beginning, the studio remained an exclusively female space. “I felt that women should be able to go someplace and not have to care what they looked like, to be comfortable,” Lydia told me. “And I thought, Fuck you, men, you’ve got all your clubs around New York City. Now we’ve got ours.” But her attitude softened over the decades. She hired a male instructor and began to teach a handful of male students—including the writer Tom Wolfe.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Until the early 1970s, common wisdom held it was dangerous for women to run more than a couple of miles at a time—a justification”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“While Mary Quant was revolutionizing how women dressed, the young coiffeur Vidal Sassoon was reinventing how women wore their hair.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Military families would become instrumental in spreading aerobics across the country and then around the world.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“My mother’s repetitive question, Why can’t you be more like your sister?, was a thorn in my heart.” Bonnie preferred spending time with her father, who was an outdoorsman, but he worked in newspaper advertising and was rarely home. When he was, he liked to call his eldest daughter his “bonnie lass”—a nickname that stuck.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Women were told to “act like women” and “look like women,” in part to fight the “paranoia that American women had become overly masculine during the war,” writes historian Elizabeth Matelski in her book Reducing Bodies: Mass Culture and the Female Figure in Postwar America. They married earlier than their mothers had a generation ago, and they had more children in rapid succession.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“The world “needed somebody like Lotte to bridge the gap between exercise and dance,” Esther told me during an interview. The time was right for something new.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“This belief lured waves of women who had never exercised before through the doors of studios and community centers to try aerobic dancing—which involved at least thirty minutes of vigorous movement to music—for the first time. Dancing felt safe, particularly for women uninterested in smashing any gender barriers. Dancing was conventionally feminine; dance classes were a popular activity for little girls. Few men felt threatened by a room full of mostly middle-class moms shimmying to Tina Turner.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“For the winning photo, Bonnie got down on the ground, shot a toned leg high into the air, and smiled.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“. Mary Quant’s designs were playful, they were androgynous, and most relevant to the history of women’s fitness, they were skimpy. She introduced the world to the miniskirt. Mary Quant didn’t set out to help launch the sexual revolution—or the fitness industry. She didn’t explicitly aspire to change the way women viewed their bodies. But as more women bared their skin privately and publicly, more became motivated to refine every contour.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“At some point the music switched from Latin to French. When we moved on to legwork, Esther told me, “You know, you could be good if you kept coming back.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“(Judi’s vocal cord ordeal would also lead to a fitness first: She and her instructors would begin teaching with microphones. In the period before wireless mikes were invented, this was a clunky practice—instructors found themselves tripping over cords during class. It wasn’t until the nineties, when wireless headset mikes became available thanks to technology developed by NASA, that the practice began to feel effortless.)”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“While many women still seek out the workout to “lift, tone, burn” their way to a “ballerina body,” many stick with it because, as I discovered, it can make you feel good: The first time I returned to barre after giving birth to my son, I left the studio feeling hopeful, proud of myself, and lighter on my feet than I had in months.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford University psychologist and longtime cardio dance instructor, in her book The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage. “For most people, the impulse to synchronize our bodies to a beat is so strong, it takes effort to suppress it.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Most notably, a former University of California–Berkeley pom-pom girl named Jacki Sorensen had introduced America to the term aerobic dancing in 1969—the same year Judi created Jazzercise—and launched a booming fitness business that offered classes from coast to coast. Other aerobics entrepreneurs built on what Judi, Jacki, and earlier fitness pioneers had started. Judi and Jacki Sorensen were “pilot fish at the nose end of a large school of women,” writes Daniel Kunitz in Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors, and throughout the seventies, aerobic dance spread “on tendrils sent out by these women.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Although reducing salons were not health clubs per se, they helped entrench the habit of visiting a location outside the home for the improvement of one’s body,” writes historian Shelly McKenzie. “Figure salons appealed to women who wanted to shape their bodies but found exercise distasteful.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“(It bears mentioning that cheerleading actually began as an exclusively male pursuit. Schools would select the most popular male students to rally up crowds with megaphones during games. It was only during World War II, when so many college men were drafted, that women began to replace them—a controversial move that some protested, fretting that for a girl to use her voice in such a way was unfeminine. When the men came back, they no longer wanted to participate in an activity that had been taken over by women.)”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Quant’s new miniskirts were simple and colorful. They signaled, as Nicolson put it, “an energetic innocence that belied [their] rebelliousness.” They were also affordable, and they sold out almost as soon as they appeared on her clothing racks—joined, in time, by micro-minis and micro-micro-minis.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Back at home in New York, I pulled up a recording of Bonnie’s hit Keep Fit / Be Happy album on YouTube and felt an invisible cord of connection to the newlywed who, more than eighty years ago, lived up the street. And as I bent and stretched to the dulcet tones of her conditioning cues and the cheerful instrumental soundtrack, I felt the stresses and anxieties particular to my own twenty-first-century life, liberated as it may be, begin to lessen. I felt my shoulders relax. And I realized: Bonnie’s work, from the start, was always about finding—and then offering—a refuge from pain. At its best, the fitness movement she launched would do just that.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Eventually, aerobics became a catchall term for these dance-based cardiovascular workouts.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“She hesitantly trained five of her most experienced and enthusiastic students to become instructors. It turned out Jazzercise as a fitness program could stand on its own.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“The seventies were becoming a decade defined by dance. The era saw the rise of discos, which offered a respite from the nation’s social and political turmoil and whose lifeblood was the pulsing, euphoric music that kept clubgoers on the dance floor until the wee hours. (That, and cocaine.)”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“But I also gained deeper insight into the reality that because of systemic inequality and discrimination, exercise is not a right but a privilege in this country. The fitness industry has a history of exclusion, catering to middle- and upper-class white people with disposable income. The costs associated with working out make it inaccessible to millions. Exercise also requires time and a safe space to move around in—luxuries millions more don’t have. Just as the rich often get richer, the fit often get fitter, while the poor get sicker. And then there’s the problematic fact that exercising has, for several decades, been linked to virtue, creating stigmas against people who can’t or don’t want to or even don’t look like they work out.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes,” University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins famously quipped, and in the 1950s, he spoke for the mainstream.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World

“Publishing houses invited Bonnie to write books detailing her regimens, and she churned out one guide after another: Is Your Child Really Fit? in 1956 and Bonnie Prudden’s Fitness Book in 1959. She made an exercise record, Keep Fit / Be Happy with Bonnie Prudden, for families to follow in their living rooms. “Fitness should begin in the cradle,” she would tell mothers, encouraging them to put away the playpens and let their kids run around to develop their muscles.”
― Danielle Friedman, Let's Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World