Mary Bagot Stack

Mary Bagot Stack (12 June 1883 – 26 January 1935), known as Mollie 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. Education 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. Development of the Bagot Stack Exercise System 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 hatha yoga on her travels in India. 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 clothing fashions. As well as involving vigorous group exercises, the classes were designed to be sociable, which benefited the many recently bereaved women.