Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique by Rachel Louise Moran (review)

Governing Bodies examines moments when the body, and more specifically physique, became both an instrument and object of federal public policy in United States. Moran argues that the "advisory state" drew on tools such as quantification, advertising, and voluntary programming to encourage behavior related to the physique that could not be explicitly legislated in the American political context. Expanding on the existing historiography of diet and fitness and relying on feminist scholarship on the body as well as histories of the "hidden" or voluntary state, Moran's work is a valuable addition that highlights how the advisory state "has played a critical role in facilitating federal investment in the weights and bodies of American citizens" (156). Spanning the twentieth-century, each chapter in Governing Bodies focuses on a moment when the advisory state sought to shape the physique of American citizens often relying on quantitative measurements to "reveal information about a citizen's worthiness in the eyes of the state" (156).

The first chapter places the roots of the advisory state's continued interest in body projects in the development of nutritional science and concern over military unfitness during the Progressive Era and World War I. Using Wilbur Atwater's research on caloric requirements as a foundation, Moran examines how scientific nutrition arose as an emphasis for women's Progressive reform work and public health reformers arguments that approaching nutrition from a scientific standpoint could contribute to the work of Americanizing immigrants or easing the problems of the working poor. Focusing on the work of the Children's Bureau, Moran argues that the organization's vast networks of public health reformers sought to reshape "the public discourse around child health and physique" through height-weight measurements, maternal education, and conferences and other events (18). Further this chapter establishes concern over military preparedness and American male strength as both motivation for the deployment of nutritional science outside of the laboratory in clinical settings and as a recurring justification for advisory state programs.

The role of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in shaping and altering the "bodies and circumstances of young, low-income American bodies, rehabilitating them and transforming them into breadwinning men" is the subject of Moran's second chapter (38). The CCC, Moran argues, placed muscular bodies at the center of its message and also sought to develop muscular bodies using hands-on methods, such as calisthenics, in its camps. Linking improved physical form to "better individual and national prospects," the CCC, Moran shows, was key to rehabilitating and transforming men from weak boys into breadwinning men (39). If the CCC helped to transform "Boys to Men," Moran argues that the wartime state in the 1940s worked to transform "Men into Soldiers." The Selective Service's more aggressive approach to intervening in the masculine body was made possible, in part, by the wartime context but also because of the previous thirty years of precedent built by the advisory state. Moran frames the Selective Service's aggressive approach to physique building as an outlier made possible by the expanded wartime state and argues that approaches to shaping the American body shifted back to advisory approaches after the war.

Selling fitness in the postwar era is the subject of the fourth chapter and Moran outlines the state's brief flirtation with aggressive or interventionist programs, and its ultimate reversion to an advisory state approach. Examining the President's Council which focused on fitness for children, and later all adults, Moran argues that the council sought to "bring attention to adult men—and for the first time on this large a scale—adult women's fitness" (85). Moran's examination of the advisory state program for adult women argues that by the early 1960s the council identified young women as paid workers. In contrast to the Council's program under Eisenhower which relied on expectations about family unity and resisting communist influence, Kennedy's program...