Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Goff, Brendan

Area of Concentration

History

Abstract

This thesis uses evidence from magazines, television, and academic journals to suggest a historical evolution in the social and cultural function of physical fitness in the white American middle class. The central argument of this study is that the antimodernist rhetoric of Progressive Era bicycling culture preempted the historical emergence of the “entrepreneur-of-the-self,” “neoliberal self,” or the “personality-based self” in the twentieth century. In tandem with this argument, I examine how the consumption-based cultivation of health and bodily appearance work as markers of economic, racial, and moral fitness. I begin by detailing how the media and federal government responded to a moral panic over the poor fitness of young people in the 1950s and ‘60s. I then argue that, beginning in the 1970s, the cultivation of physical fitness and health became increasingly important to educated professionals as a way of embodying individualistic values. Drawing from sociology, I explore the relationship between morality, health, fun, and competition in physical recreation, contending that the government and media produce a normative conception of health as entirely contingent on individuals’ consumer choices and lifestyle. I assert that the contemporary fitness landscape is rooted in the rationalist and racialized worldview of the Progressive Era white middle class. I use a case study of nineteenth-century bicycling to explore how advertisers, media figures, physicians, social scientists, and religious leaders promoted physical recreation as a way to improve the economic, racial, and moral fitness of white professionals. However, I ultimately claim that some proponents of bicycling stepped beyond an understanding of physical recreation as a means and began to see bodily cultivation as an end in-itself. In their conception of the bicycle as a tool for the construction of an authentic body and self, they foreshadowed the rise of “cool capitalism” and the logic of consumerist self-definition and empowerment.

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