**A New York­er, Finan­cial Times, and Ama­zon Best Book of 2022**

For Amer­i­can women today, work­ing out is as accept­ed as it is expect­ed, fuel­ing a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar fit­ness indus­try. But it wasn’t always this way. For much of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, sweat­ing was con­sid­ered unla­dy­like and girls grew up believ­ing phys­i­cal exer­tion would cause their uterus to lit­er­al­ly fall out. It was only in the six­ties that, thanks to a few for­ward-think­ing fit­ness trail­blaz­ers, women began to move en masse.

In Let’s Get Phys­i­cal, jour­nal­ist Danielle Fried­man reveals the fas­ci­nat­ing — and sur­pris­ing­ly Jew­ish — hid­den his­to­ry of con­tem­po­rary women’s fit­ness cul­ture, chron­i­cling in vivid, cin­e­mat­ic prose how exer­cise evolved from a beau­ty tool pitched almost exclu­sive­ly as a way to ​“reduce” into one that mil­lions have har­nessed as a path to men­tal, emo­tion­al, and phys­i­cal well-being.

Ulti­mate­ly, it tells the sto­ry of how women dis­cov­ered the joy of phys­i­cal strength and com­pe­tence — and how, by mov­ing togeth­er to trans­form fit­ness from a priv­i­lege into a right, we can empow­er all women.