"Only a few decades removed from slavery, intentional exercise was a welcome shift from the forced physicality of bondage that controlled how Black women’s bodies moved and functioned. Exercise allowed Black women to retain a measure of freedom, however small, to control how strong their bodies could be."

Purkiss chronicles African American women's participation in the modern exercise movement and situates them within a tradition of Black physical and civic fitness. Purkiss contributes to how Black women used exercise to demonstrate fitness for citizenship during a time when physically fit bodies had new political meaning. Citizenship is being reconceived as what one does but not who one is. "This book commemorates Black women did not necessarily accomplish fitness but aspired towards it."

"African American women derived liberation from fitness culture, as they endeavored to lower mortality rates, created collective bonds, and contested damaging stereotypes through exercise." Purkiss does so much in such a small book. The sources she uses - Black print culture: textual and visual primary sources like newspapers, magazines, advice literature, public health docs, physical education reports, diaries, cookbooks etc makes me really really think about the primary source material historians use.

The chapters in Fit Citizens cover how Black women used public health campaigns by adding exercise into their health activism; how middle-class Black women used exercise to promote their ideals of beauty, slimness, and the respectable Black body after World War I; Black women's active recreation during the Great Depression explores physical exercise - shaping the implementation of Black recreation programs as free time, acquiring new meaning; and Black women's portraying themselves ideal Black Citizen through exercise and dieting practices. I love how Purkiss explicitly does not talk about sports in this work, focusing only on individual fitness.