Mary Bagot Stack

Mary Bagot Stack founded the Women's League of Health & Beauty in 1930, the first and most significant mass keep-fit system of the 1930s in the UK. This has continued as an exercise system into the 21st century.

After an education at Alexandra School and Alexandra College, Dublin, she enrolled in 1907 as a trainee teacher at Mrs Josef Conn's Institute of Physical Training in London. She had met Mrs Conn in Paris and was inspired by her specialisation in exercises to promote health. By 1910 she had moved to Manchester and set up her own fitness centre with private classes, large classes for women factory workers and also treated private patients.

In the 1920s she again began to hold classes, initially for children in her own home, and by 1926 was training teachers in her own system at the Bagot Stack Health School in Holland Park, London. This initially involved 12 sequences of exercise designed to train the body in accordance with the seven principles of the Bagot Stack System. There were classes for women and children in dance as well as exercises. Her inspiration for developing her own exercise system came from a short time in India, where she observed the differences in movement between women wearing constricting Europeans clothes and those with looser Indian clothing. She had also studied yoga. She developed a series of exercises based around her belief that movement was essential in life. This also fitted with ideas developing across Europe at the time of the benefits to women of exercise and changes in clothes fashions. As well as involving vigorous group exercises, the classes were designed to be sociable, which benefited the many recently bereaved women.

Her big innovation was to move from small, private classes to a mass-market movement. In 1930 this grew into a commercial enterprise, the Women's League of Health and Beauty, using the YMCA's Regent Street premises. Public displays in London garnered publicity, and more centres started in 1932 in Bromley, Southend, Slough, Bournemouth, Croydon, Birmingham, Glasgow followed by Ayr, Paisley and Edinburgh and finally franchised centres all over the UK. The Women's League of Health and Beauty classes included elements from dance, callisthenics, and remedial, slimming, and rhythmical exercise to music. The League published its own magazine, Mother and Daughter, from 1933 to 1935 with content on pacifism and feminist political discussion as well as general self-improvement. Her book Building the Body Beautiful - The Bagot Stack stretch-and-swing system was published in 1931.

The organisation grew rapidly so that by 1934 there were 47,000 members but this had grown to 166,000 in 1937. Her daughter Prunella, along with others, continued promoting this exercise system so that the (now called) Fitness League movement continues as a national fitness programme in the UK.

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