Ruth is a historian who hosted a bunch of BBC documentaries about regular day to day life a few decades ago. They’re great, strong recommend. I assume BBC generally does strong fact checking for things like that. The episode was about how exercise became a thing that people do.

However, I could be misremembering so I went digging. The internet suggests weight lifting was strongly discouraged for women. Here’s a pubmed paper:

> Medical experts of that era believed that intense exercise and competition could cause women to become masculine, threaten their ability to bear children, and create other reproductive health complications. Consequently, sport for women was reserved for upper-class women until the mid-twentieth century.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28886817/