I’m watching mad men which takes place in the early sixties and one of the women in the show goes walking/running for exercise and all the other women thinks it’s very weird to go running for the sake of it and not to get away from something/ get somewhere fast. Yet most of the housewives in the show are extremely thin. I know it’s a TV show and not 100% historically accurate but you always hear about how much fatter the population is today compared to the past. I think it was socially acceptable for men to work out, at least in the military it was, but how did women in the past stay skinny if the never exercised?
It was socially acceptable for them to work out. However, certain ways we consider working out now were not viewed in the same way. Generally speaking, women were encouraged to remain fit in order to be a better wife as a skinny wife would make the husband happier than a fat one. Yes this sort of thinking is very sexist but this was common thinking in America for a long time and we can still see traces of this thinking today. You referenced the 60s as the era in question. During this time a lot of exercising was done at home, wether it was through the television or records designed specifically for women. This craze swept America after the 1950’s and was started by Jack Lalanne with his television show, which was aimed at housewife’s and allowed then to workout from the comfort of their home. Each decade there is a different workout craze that swept the nation. Most of the time dieting was considered the best method for women to lose weight and several weight loss programs would emerge from the late 1940’s-1961. Programs such as taking off pounds sensibly (1948), overeaters anonymous (1960), and weight watchers (1961) were just a few of these programs that heavily pushed dieting on housewife’s in order to maintain what was called there honeymoon figure. While I have yet to see that TV show one of the reasons why the jogging women may have been considered inappropriate or out of the ordinary is because jogging as a popular exercise did not really take off until the late 1960’s. It was widely popularized due to a fat fear that swept the country after the release of CBS’s - The Fat American (1962), Kenneth C. Hutch’s - How Not to Kill Your Husband (1962), Peter Wyden’s - The Overweight Society (1965), and countless other news stories, documentaries, etc... Jogging was considered a solution to becoming fat and would become more widespread after 1967 when Bill Bowerman and W. E. Harris released there own jogging manual titled “Jogging.” There is alot more I can talk about but at this point it will sound like rambling cause its late. If you would like to know more about what I said or you have more questions let me know and I will gladly answer them if i can help.