“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eye of the goal.”
– Henry Ford
Woohoo!! “Master Your Core” is complete! It’s been 1 ½ years since my patient, Deirdre Bair, a world-renowned biographer, planted the seed for my book, to share what had only been privy to fellow health care professionals and medical researchers. Dierdre had read my scientific manuscripts and was particularly impressed with my impassioned quest for advancing women’s health and injury prevention research, and was adamant that I make my knowledge and experience accessible to all. Although Dierdre did not live to see it published, I am deeply thankful for her guidance through the process and sense her pride in the finished product. She sent me this just days before her passing as a potential intro for my book:
“Whenever we think about how the lives of women have changed throughout history, we usually begin by seeing them through the gaze of the other, and in this case the “other” is always the eyes of men. Men decided what roles women would play in society and culture. Men made the rules for how women should behave, and this led naturally to how they should look. Men chose the activities open to women, and that dictated the styles of what women wore. Men decided what they could read, tried to tell them what they could think; and all of this ultimately determined every aspect of women’s lives, especially their physical health. By the middle of the 19th century, even furniture reflected what women should be: this was the era of the fainting couch, when the proper behavior was for “a lady” to lie upon it and be pale, frail, and weak.
Just looking at clothing through the ages shows how restricted and constrained were women’s lives. To take some random examples, think of the massive numbers of crinolines in the last years of the 19th century that were piled on top of hoops of wood or metal to hold up massive skirts—but only on the rich of course. Poor women had two functions during these times: they either worked in the many thriving hoop skirt factories (indeed, one little Connecticut town still has a historical marker boasting proudly today that it had fifteen in 1885), or they were the house servants who helped the rich get into these contraptions. That is, after they first tightened those punishing corsets that sometime broke ribs and misplaced internal organs. The hoops themselves were equally dangerous; the metal or wood sometimes broke loose and stabbed the wearer, often resulting in injury or death. And newspapers of the time often carried stories of unfortunate women who were drowned after boating accidents because so much material would suck them under and not let them float. No matter that, for most could not swim anyway as they were never allowed closer to the water than occasionally dipping their toes into it.
The last half of the 19th century provides many examples for contemporary outrage, but the indignities foisted upon women began much earlier than that. Just to name a few: Heels as high as three feet were popular in European courts from Medieval times onward, while women in China had their feet broken first, then bound in rags that often became smelly if not septic. In the first instance, women could not walk after they stumbled, fell, and broke their bones; in the second their bones were deliberately broken as a sign that women of wealth and status could let others do their walking for them. The first Queen Elizabeth was famous for her dead-white face powder, a look that was copied afterward for several centuries and in several countries. Nobody cared about why women who used these powders were so often sick from the arsenic or lead such makeup often contained, or why their eyesight was often ruined by the belladonna and other drugs they used to make them shine. Everything was for beauty, so health did not matter.
Equally awful were the powdered hair wigs that women in various European courts took to ridiculous heights. Higher and higher these monstrosities rose, sometimes requiring one or two servants to walk on either side of the wearer holding specially designed poles so the woman could walk upright. Eventually they smelled bad, attracted all sorts of critters and creatures, infected scalps, and led to assorted ailments or diseases. Nevertheless, women kept on wearing them.
We can jump ahead to the 20th century and still find clothing constraints that hindered physical movement. When suffragettes were demanding the right to vote and women were leaving home to go to work (but only in supporting jobs as factory workers or secretaries, or with slightly more autonomy as nurses and teachers), clothing impaired their movements and kept them firmly in their places. Hobble skirts kept them from striding freely on their marches; skirts and blouses may have given working-class women a bit more variety but not much freedom for they still had to wear constricting corsets or girdles beneath them.
Clothing was a clear reflection of how the societies they lived contributed to keeping women in their place, and the German expression said succinctly where that place was: kinder, kirke, kuche; children, church and kitchen. That left little time for the development of healthy minds and did not do much for healthy bodies either. Still, societies were changing by the middle of the 19th century, and a slow murmur of phrases about how sound minds could only be found in strong healthy bodies began to coalesce into the muted roar that many women heard.
Until then, there had been no need for most of society to think of ways to incorporate structured physical movement into their daily lives because the usual work day was one of hard physical work raising food and building shelter. One’s own two feet provided transportation when most people did not have horses and carriages, and even later when they could not afford to ride trains or trolleys, daily walking was exercise enough. Times changed, and suddenly there was talk of diet (fads high among the calls for the nourishing and natural) and physical exercise for its own sake.
Women were encouraged to move their bodies, but even that was subject to howls of outrage followed by restriction and fad. Little girls were allowed to toss balls gently back and forth, or to roll hoops as they ran slowly beside them, but when puberty arrived, they were told to put movement aside and take to the fainting couches. The invention of the bicycle provoked acres of print as writers (mostly men) argued that it was an obscene contraption, designed to show too much of a woman’s leg and therefore arouse their own libido as well as too many impure thoughts in men. Men had previously taken care of the problem of women on horses by requiring them to ride side-saddle but the poor old bicycle did not provide such an option.
Fortunately, there were a few women among a greater number of men who recognized the health benefits of exercise for women. In the process, so many theories were spouted, so many programs were created, and so many women did them faithfully and found benefits among them. Others were harmful and quickly discarded on history’s dustbin, but those that were beneficial are used all or in part to this day. Reading about them all can be vastly entertaining, but here I want to concentrate on the one that helped me become the vital and dynamic woman in her eighties that I am today.
I am the poster girl for this book, and oh how I wish I had had it before 2018, when a slip of the left foot led to a hard fall on a tile floor that fractured the tibia and fibula in my ankle. I feel sure that if I had had the exercises to strengthen my core, the fall would not have been so severe as to require surgery that installed two metal plates and at least fourteen screws and rods, followed by a month in a rehabilitation hospital and another non-weight bearing month at home, and then a year-long process of learning to walk again. Unfortunately, while learning to walk without pain in the left ankle, I compensated so much that I injured the muscles in the right hip. Fortunately, Billie was the therapist my surgeon insisted I consult, and the program I followed was hers of core empowerment.
I have been following this for over a year, and I know I will be doing it for the rest of my life. How lucky I was to have it at such a crucial time when I was in the middle of writing my last book. I am a writer, and writing is often a lonely profession that requires long hours of concentrated sitting. Several hours would go by before the pain of being slumped over a hot computer would jerk me out of my reverie and let me know that I had to get up and move. Having this book on my work table would lead me to thumb through to find the perfect movement that would straighten out the kinks and relax my mind as well as my muscles. When I did my own personal routine at the end of the work day, I found mental and emotional release as well as physical restoral. I wish I had had it years ago so that I could have trained my daughter to follow it from her childhood. Now she and her own daughter have copies and are happy practitioners.
This program is simple and direct, and it makes great sense, particularly for the fractious and fragmented time we live in now. Women have chosen to create complicated lives for themselves and society has (finally!) come to the point where they can do so. At a time when a woman can be everything from a neurosurgeon to a pole climber for the telephone company, it is more important than ever that her body can keep up with her mind. And this is the book that can help her achieve that vision.
Deirdre Bair
Deirdre Bair received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Simone de Beauvoir biography was chosen by The New York Times as a Best Book of the Year. Her biographies of Anais Nin, Saul Steinberg, and Al Capone were all New York Times Notable Books. Her most recent publication is Parisian Memoir: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me, named by Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.
Since her passing, “Master Your Core” evolved to be inclusive of men and women so all can benefit from empowerment, while highlighting the important gender considerations in health and injury prevention. In her last conversation with me, Dierdre proposed we hoist a glass to celebrate the completion of the book. Let us all salute Dierdre and her remarkable life, the magnificent snowy owl of wisdom and illumination who encouraged me to soar for the sky!
Stay tuned for future blogs regarding Breathing, Awareness, Stability and Empowerment of your body-mind-spirit!
