- Strong, Beautiful, and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935–1960 by Charlotte MacDonald
Between 1937 and 1943, Britain and some of the “white dominions” passed legislation encouraging citizens to engage in healthy and active lifestyles. Often termed “national fitness,” the imperial, national, and local efforts were a complicated mix of sport, health, and careful, if sometimes polarizing government intervention. Charlotte Macdonald’s book offers an in-depth analysis of the national fitness schemes with chapters on their successes and failures in Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Macdonald sets an ambitious agenda for her research in covering such wide and diverse geographic territory, and in analyzing the fitness schemes not only as a part of sport history but also body history and the history of imperialism. Central to her argument is that the various national fitness programs, with strong imperial ties, can reveal what it meant to produce a modern body at mid-century as well as “the difficult political questions of government in sport and fitness” (12). This focus allows her to interweave discussions on a wide range of topics (beauty ideals, international sporting competitions, government propaganda, education, and professional jealousies) into wider histories of the changing relationship to sport and leisure in some of the British world.
The book is divided into five chapters with the first four geographically focused on Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, respectively. The final chapter, which also serves as the book’s conclusion, [End Page 291] looks at the culture of “sporting citizenship” and provides the most in-depth analysis of the body and modernity. In each of the first four chapters there is a detailed overview of the governments’ attempts to institutionalize health and fitness. The arguments presented are sensitive to the peculiarities of national context and introduce many of the individuals who were charged with taking up the gauntlet of encouraging national health. This structure is especially good in allowing Macdonald to focus on the specificities of each country’s legislation and how it evolved and was implemented. Macdonald argues that “healthy body culture” was new to the 1930s, but the place of the modern body in these national contexts and the connections to established ideas of physical culture and fitness remain less developed. The chapter on Australia is the strongest in addressing the place of national fitness in the shaping of the modern body. Macdonald also shows the difficulty governments had in encouraging good health and fitness without crossing the line into more authoritarian demands, especially in the wake of Nazism.
Overall, what emerges from these chapters are remarkably different histories of the nature, shape, and success of national fitness schemes. For example, while the Second World War effectively ended the British movement, in New Zealand it flourished in the immediate postwar years, and Australia’s survived into the 1970s. And, although the book is focused largely on adult fitness, Macdonald persuasively argues that the Australian success was, in part, indebted to the focus on physical education and efforts directed toward youth, especially in the postwar years. The geographically focused chapters also reveal some of the international connections between the countries as they competed against each other, and as professionals moved from place to place and country to country for educational or professional reasons. As such, the book demonstrates some of the shared ideologies regarding sport and leisure in some of the British world.
Canada’s attempts at national fitness were comparatively brief, with legislation in effect from 1943 to 1954. Despite the rather short-lived Canadian national program, Macdonald cautions against seeing the efforts as modest or limited. Instead, she argues for looking at a broader context that influenced the national program before and after the legislation. In this regard, Macdonald focuses largely on the efforts of Jan Eisenhardt and British Columbia’s Pro-Rec scheme, which was a free and publicly funded sport and recreation program that began in the 1930s. Macdonald argues that Cold War–era concerns over...