Composing a Further Life

make it more accessible to more of the people that need it. That’s really what it comes to.”
    Jane was struck by my bringing up the
Workout
. “I think I would have avoided mentioning it,” she said, “because I’ve been so described as saying to women, ‘You have be slim and glamorous and look like me.’ I felt guilty about it, frankly, until I really thought about it more, and then it was kind of like, wait a damn minute, if I’m honest I have to go back to my experience as someone who thought she was extremely unattractive and unacceptable and suffered from an eating disorder. I had stopped the behavior, the acting out of my addiction, but the
Workout
for me was a way of taking control of my body. Liberation starts for a lot of us in our muscles. It took me, I would say, four years to get to the wait a minute stage. The purpose was to allow women who had no time and had young children to be able to own their bodies in their own homes. And I got letters like, ‘I never wanted to go out,’ ‘I never could stand up to my boss, and now I can.’ So I’m reluctant to claim the
Workout
as a legacy, but now that you have reminded me, yes, I think that is a legacy.”
    As Jane went on to consider the legacy question, she described how writing her memoir,
My Life So Far
, after twenty years or more of being “under the radar,” had led great numbers of people to tell her how she had affected their lives. “Writing my book was a very liberating experience, and I went out on the road extensively when it came out. I spent almost a year traversing this country. I feel like all the different changes I’ve gone through as I’ve composed my life are fodder; they’re the fertilizer for me to grow lessons from that will be helpful to other people. I learned in writing the memoir and traveling around to promote it that I can use my own experiences to make people who are reading them think about their own situation.
    “I was struck by all these generations of women I met on three levels. There would be ‘My favorite movie,
9 to 5
, oh, my God, it changed my life.’ That kind of thing. Sometimes it was
Cat Ballou
, sometimes it was
Barefoot in the Park
, but different movies had intersected the lives of so many women. Then there were the women like, ‘I marched with you in San Diego, do you remember?’ ‘I went to Chapel Hill when you spoke there in 1971.’ And then there was the
Workout
, the women who said, ‘I got through my pregnancy with your
Pregnancy, Birth, and Recovery
book,’ or ‘I recovered from mastectomy doing your …,’ and in a way it was the
Workout
stuff that was the most personal, you know, the way the music of Bonnie Raitt or James Taylor is like the wallpaper of your life for chunks of time that are embedded in you. That was kind of the way the
Workout
was.”
    “We came from a generation where women were not encouraged to be athletic,” I said, “and along came midlife and bodies needed moving, so I think that’s a very important legacy. It might not be everyone using the same videos, but the creation of a different body consciousness, which we were talking about earlier. I think you also helped make people realize they can have an effect by demonstrating, by activism. So much has been done to discourage citizen activism since that time in very subtle ways. Now, if you get fifty thousand people out demonstrating, it hardly makes the news, whereas it did in those days. I think that’s still a legacy. It’s there for people to think about. Maybe
legacy
is not the right word, but when I think about trying to get older adults more politically engaged, one of the things I think about is all the people who remember the sixties and seventies and left that behind, and I wonder whether that’s something that can be reawakened.”
    Jane has a foundation that was endowed as a gift to her by Ted Turner, and she uses it to bring together her two birth children, one stepdaughter, and one informally adopted daughter who has become a member of the family, each deciding on the use of a share of the income. Jane’s share goes to the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention and to a program she created called the Jane Fonda Center for adolescent reproductive health at the Emory School of Medicine.
    “What I discovered,” she told me, “was that the adults who were working with kids don’t understand and don’t like them. And so there was a need for the training of