Donald Trump allegedly believes that exercise is bad because the body has a finite store of energy: exactly the logic used to warn 19th century women off education
Donald Trump allegedly believes that exercise is bad because the body has a finite store of energy: exactly the logic used to warn 19th century women off education
Donald Trump allegedly believes that exercise is bad because the body has a finite store of energy: exactly the logic used to warn 19th century women off education
A piece in this month's New Yorker magazine has drawn attention to Donald Trump's alleged views on exercise: "... he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy."
While this may be a joke or a weak excuse for being one of the least active Presidents in living memory (if we don't count golf), as a theory about the human body it actually has a fairly long pedigree. In the late nineteenth century ideas about industry, fatigue, thermodynamics and evolution came crashing together, producing some over-cautious advice for athletes, and some terrible advice for women.
The source of these fears came not from biology or medicine but from physics: the optimism of the first law of thermodynamics – energy cannot be destroyed or created, only transformed – was rapidly overtaken in the late 1860s by the second law – entropy increases. All the energy of the universe would eventually become unusable, leading to the 'heat death' of the universe, a state of absolute cold and dark. These weren't obscure scientific theories; they were popularised by popular science writing and lectures, and even in fiction: HG Wells' The Time Machine includes a frozen universe in the far future.
In industrialised nations, where massive social change and huge wealth had been created by mechanisation, the efficient use of energy was a pressing economic issue. This meant designing efficient machines and transport systems, but also extended to the 'organic components' of the factory system: human bodies. Applied to people, the laws of thermodynamics were a warning - you have a fixed store of energy, so what you use to do one thing, you cannot use to do another.
Using the metaphor of the coal-fired engine, Victorians realised that fuel was important – more coal (food) meant more energy available for work. Concerns about energy and fatigue therefore inspired a great deal of reform, including limits on legal working hours, reforms of (and scandals about) diets in workhouses, prisons and schools. Lots of this reform was 'evidence based' – often looking to German science, as in the late nineteenth century a group of young reformers began to suggest that biology would be a more rational and objective discipline if it was transformed through the equations and measurements of physics. Everything should be measured and calculated, and the definition of the calorie enabled us to measure the input and output of the human machine, with an eye to regulating it.
Although the Victorians understood that it was possible to add more fuel to the human machine to allow more work, they were still concerned that it was possible to place so much demand on one body system that another would suffer. They worried – as every generation seems to – that the modern world was so busy, so complicated, and so fast-paced, that people's mental energy would be depleted and they wouldn't have enough energy left for normal life: this was supposed to be the source of many hysterical and nervous diseases, and a threat to the assumed 'superiority' of Western societies.
For women, the situation was even more serious. Nineteenth century biological theories still made reproduction and the reproductive organs absolutely central to women's lives – to quote the influential German doctor and social reformer Rudolf Virchow: "Woman is a pair of ovaries with a human being attached, whereas man is a human being furnished with a pair of testes."
There was a risk that any energy expenditure by a woman, especially through puberty and early adulthood, would detract from her 'true purpose' of having babies. This included sport, but because all the body's energy – mental and mechanical – came from the same source, it also included education.
As late as 1904 the President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (Sir Lambert H Ormsby) argued that:
I do not think that ladies entering university is to the advantage of their physique afterwards. I think the more they develop their brains the less they impress strength and robustness upon their offspring. That is my opinion, for what it is worth. I think they often cease to breed altogether.
By the early twentieth century physiological research into metabolism and exercise had begun to show that human machines could increase their energetic capacity through training (often referred to as increasing 'wind'). Young men whose fitness had been depleted by studying too hard or being distracted by the novelties of the modern world were advised to begin training slowly and build up to full strength. But for women the fear that exercise and education would permanently damage their breeding capacity never seemed to completely go away. As women began to take up higher education – particularly entering the male-dominated professions of medicine, law, eventually politics – it was evident that they did tend to have fewer children.
This was a particular concern for eugenicists: the fact that the more education a woman had the fewer children she had seemed to prove their worst fears about a future where the 'unfit' (e.g. the poor and immigrants) would 'outbreed' the fit (e.g. white educated middle class people). Indeed, it remains a fear for the far right, including among Trump's supporters. Unlike Trump, they do not use 150-year-old scientific theories to justify it – instead the issue is maternity leave, career structures, social expectations and economics, not the 'finite battery' of the womb. The result is the same, though, women's education and employment (and relatedly, access to reproductive healthcare, abortion, and so on) are represented as a bad for society, and somehow 'against the laws of nature'.
The science has changed, from physics to biology, from thermodynamics to evo-psych and population genetics, but the fear is the same: changing social roles for women. Luckily, for the reluctant battery-conserving sportsman, like Trump, some golf clubs still offer a male-only sanctuary, just as they did for the Victorians.
Source
Donald Trump allegedly believes that exercise is bad because the body has a finite store of energy: exactly the logic used to warn 19th century women off education
Donald Trump allegedly believes that exercise is bad because the body has a finite store of energy: exactly the logic used to warn 19th century women off education
A piece in this month's New Yorker magazine has drawn attention to Donald Trump's alleged views on exercise: "... he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy."
While this may be a joke or a weak excuse for being one of the least active Presidents in living memory (if we don't count golf), as a theory about the human body it actually has a fairly long pedigree. In the late nineteenth century ideas about industry, fatigue, thermodynamics and evolution came crashing together, producing some over-cautious advice for athletes, and some terrible advice for women.
The source of these fears came not from biology or medicine but from physics: the optimism of the first law of thermodynamics – energy cannot be destroyed or created, only transformed – was rapidly overtaken in the late 1860s by the second law – entropy increases. All the energy of the universe would eventually become unusable, leading to the 'heat death' of the universe, a state of absolute cold and dark. These weren't obscure scientific theories; they were popularised by popular science writing and lectures, and even in fiction: HG Wells' The Time Machine includes a frozen universe in the far future.
In industrialised nations, where massive social change and huge wealth had been created by mechanisation, the efficient use of energy was a pressing economic issue. This meant designing efficient machines and transport systems, but also extended to the 'organic components' of the factory system: human bodies. Applied to people, the laws of thermodynamics were a warning - you have a fixed store of energy, so what you use to do one thing, you cannot use to do another.
Using the metaphor of the coal-fired engine, Victorians realised that fuel was important – more coal (food) meant more energy available for work. Concerns about energy and fatigue therefore inspired a great deal of reform, including limits on legal working hours, reforms of (and scandals about) diets in workhouses, prisons and schools. Lots of this reform was 'evidence based' – often looking to German science, as in the late nineteenth century a group of young reformers began to suggest that biology would be a more rational and objective discipline if it was transformed through the equations and measurements of physics. Everything should be measured and calculated, and the definition of the calorie enabled us to measure the input and output of the human machine, with an eye to regulating it.
Although the Victorians understood that it was possible to add more fuel to the human machine to allow more work, they were still concerned that it was possible to place so much demand on one body system that another would suffer. They worried – as every generation seems to – that the modern world was so busy, so complicated, and so fast-paced, that people's mental energy would be depleted and they wouldn't have enough energy left for normal life: this was supposed to be the source of many hysterical and nervous diseases, and a threat to the assumed 'superiority' of Western societies.
For women, the situation was even more serious. Nineteenth century biological theories still made reproduction and the reproductive organs absolutely central to women's lives – to quote the influential German doctor and social reformer Rudolf Virchow: "Woman is a pair of ovaries with a human being attached, whereas man is a human being furnished with a pair of testes."
There was a risk that any energy expenditure by a woman, especially through puberty and early adulthood, would detract from her 'true purpose' of having babies. This included sport, but because all the body's energy – mental and mechanical – came from the same source, it also included education.
As late as 1904 the President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (Sir Lambert H Ormsby) argued that:
I do not think that ladies entering university is to the advantage of their physique afterwards. I think the more they develop their brains the less they impress strength and robustness upon their offspring. That is my opinion, for what it is worth. I think they often cease to breed altogether.
By the early twentieth century physiological research into metabolism and exercise had begun to show that human machines could increase their energetic capacity through training (often referred to as increasing 'wind'). Young men whose fitness had been depleted by studying too hard or being distracted by the novelties of the modern world were advised to begin training slowly and build up to full strength. But for women the fear that exercise and education would permanently damage their breeding capacity never seemed to completely go away. As women began to take up higher education – particularly entering the male-dominated professions of medicine, law, eventually politics – it was evident that they did tend to have fewer children.
This was a particular concern for eugenicists: the fact that the more education a woman had the fewer children she had seemed to prove their worst fears about a future where the 'unfit' (e.g. the poor and immigrants) would 'outbreed' the fit (e.g. white educated middle class people). Indeed, it remains a fear for the far right, including among Trump's supporters. Unlike Trump, they do not use 150-year-old scientific theories to justify it – instead the issue is maternity leave, career structures, social expectations and economics, not the 'finite battery' of the womb. The result is the same, though, women's education and employment (and relatedly, access to reproductive healthcare, abortion, and so on) are represented as a bad for society, and somehow 'against the laws of nature'.
The science has changed, from physics to biology, from thermodynamics to evo-psych and population genetics, but the fear is the same: changing social roles for women. Luckily, for the reluctant battery-conserving sportsman, like Trump, some golf clubs still offer a male-only sanctuary, just as they did for the Victorians.
Source
