Americans are generally apprehensive about what they perceive as big government—especially when it comes to measures that target their bodies. Soda taxes, trans fat bans, and calorie counts on menus have all proven deeply controversial. Such interventions, Rachel Louise Moran argues, are merely the latest in a long, albeit often quiet, history of policy motivated by economic, military, and familial concerns. In Governing Bodies, Moran traces the tension between the intimate terrain of the individual citizen's body and the public ways in which the federal government has sought to shape the American physique over the course of the twentieth century.

Distinguishing her subject from more explicit and aggressive government intrusion into the areas of sexuality and reproduction, Moran offers the concept of the "advisory state"—the use of government research, publicity, and advocacy aimed at achieving citizen support and voluntary participation to realize social goals. Instituted through outside agencies and glossy pamphlets as well as legislation, the advisory state is government out of sight yet intimately present in the lives of citizens. The activities of such groups as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Children's Bureau, the President's Council on Physical Fitness, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) implement federal body projects in subtle ways that serve to mask governmental interference in personal decisions about diet and exercise. From advice-giving to height-weight standards to mandatory nutrition education, these tactics not only empower and conceal the advisory state but also maintain the illusion of public and private boundaries, even as they become blurred in practice.

Weaving together histories of the body, public policy, and social welfare, Moran analyzes a series of discrete episodes to chronicle the federal government's efforts to shape the physique of its citizenry. Governing Bodies sheds light on our present anxieties over the proper boundaries of state power.

"Moran not only makes a critical and creative contribution to her field; she also illustrates the great potential of the historical monograph. Both capacious and incisive, Moran has dug deep and wide in the archives to document her overarching claim that 'most government projects designed to shape American bodies were part of . . . the advisory state'...Given how much Moran has accomplished, scholars are now well equipped to delve even further into the complex and profoundly important role of the advisory state."—American Historical Review

"Moran’s work is important reading for scholars of the subtle American state. Within a field that has grown increasingly attentive to the workings of the state despite its efforts to conceal its tracks, Moran’s attention to the importance of gender in facilitating the invisibility of the state’s activities is particularly compelling. Gender, along with race and class, provides similar explanatory power in showing, however, that for many Americans the state’s efforts to shape the body were experienced coercively. Moran’s work offers the important reminder that the distinction between the state’s nature as advisory or coercive is one that is often experienced along axes of difference and power."—Western Historical Quarterly

"Governing Bodies is an important and valuable addition to the landscape of histories about fitness and the body. Moran’s work is a valuable examination of 'why the federal government cares about weight and muscles and the mechanisms through which it regulates them' and it is essential reading for the field."—Journal of Social History

"Deeply researched and engagingly written, Governing Bodies offers a nuanced and provocative account of the role of the U.S. government in managing the physical fitness of its citizens. Rachel Louise Moran provides a new perspective on American political history and state development."—Marisa Chappell, Oregon State University

"Governing Bodies offers an authoritative and compelling account of the century-long effort to ensure that America's citizenry was physically fit. Tracing the story from the evolution of the calorimeter to warnings that Americans were a 'Nation of Weaklings' during the Cold War to WIC in the 1970s, Moran pays careful attention to the intersection of state, society, and political culture that framed this set of public policies. For much of the twentieth century, Americans were enticed, rather than coerced, into shaping up."—Brian Balogh, University of Virginia

Governing Bodies

American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique

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