Bonnie Prudden Quotes

She had one of Bonnie Prudden’s Keep Fit / Be Happy records lying around somewhere. But while she was new to the nascent fitness industry, her program, she would later learn, was building on a centuries-old tradition of exercising to music and reinventing it for the modern woman.

But in the years after Cooper convinced more Americans to make exercise a regular part of their lives, women discovered that dancing—when done regularly, vigorously, aerobically—made them feel happy. It made them feel strong. Americans of a certain age had grown up believing that for exercise to count, it had to feel like work—regardless of how many times Bonnie Prudden told them keeping fit can be fun! Dancing? That was something you did at a party. Dancing was pleasure and play.

Jazzercise, meanwhile, continued to grow throughout the eighties, and Judi’s star continued to rise. After Jazzercisers danced for a TV audience of millions at the Los Angeles Olympics, they were invited to perform at the 1986 rededication of the Statue of Liberty, a $6 million extravaganza held at Giants Stadium. That same year, President Ronald Reagan honored Judi as one of the country’s “top woman entrepreneurs,” and she would go on to receive an inaugural lifetime achievement award from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports alongside honorees including Bonnie Prudden, Jack LaLanne, and Dr. Ken Cooper.

Despite Bonnie Prudden’s efforts with Capezio to revamp leotards for the masses in the fifties, they hadn’t changed that much since their introduction by French acrobat Jules Léotard in the nineteenth century. Léotard’s initial claim to fame was inventing the flying trapeze—he’s the “daring young man” of the famous song. He wore the stretchy suit to “fly through the air with the greatest of ease,” and in time, dancers embraced it, too. By the 1930s, leotards dyed pink or black were dancers’ rehearsal wear of choice.

Publishing houses invited Bonnie to write books detailing her regimens, and she churned out one guide after another: Is Your Child Really Fit? in 1956 and Bonnie Prudden’s Fitness Book in 1959. She made an exercise record, Keep Fit / Be Happy with Bonnie Prudden, for families to follow in their living rooms. “Fitness should begin in the cradle,” she would tell mothers, encouraging them to put away the playpens and let their kids run around to develop their muscles.

Our story begins in the fifties, when the first real women’s fitness celebrity, Bonnie Prudden, pitched exercise as a novel solution for housewives who felt trapped in their homes and struggled to find purpose outside their roles as wives and mothers.

In the late fifties, she began a pilot program at the Westchester women’s prison Westfield State Farm. In a New York Times feature on the program, journalist Gay Talese writes of the participants: “They could have been dancers getting in shape for a Watutsi block party. Instead, they were convicted killers, prostitutes, and narcotics addicts exercising to keep fit (and lose weight).” Bonnie had been invited by the prison’s superintendent, Talese writes. “Fearful that girls with too much energy might become unruly,” the superintendent “regarded Miss Prudden’s program as a preventative for riots.