“My name is Jane Fonda,” says Jane Fonda in her first ever TikTok video, posted on April 2, when she was 82 years old. She’s splayed on the carpet, wearing a scarlet bodysuit. Probably with the Gen-Z TikTok audience in mind, the screen flashes the words: “Google me.”
So I googled her.
I'll confess what I thought about Jane Fonda before I googled her name: She's an actor-slash-exerciser who is famous because she is hot. Surprise! I am ignorant. She is famous because she is extraordinary. Fonda is somehow one of the greatest actors of our time, the ruler of a legendary workout empire, and an activist whose integrity makes other celebrity do-gooders look like they’re running a lemonade stand.
Fonda's 1960 film debut was in black-and-white, and it was about a girl who didn't care about anything except getting married. Fifty-five years later, she starred in Grace and Frankie, a Netflix sitcom in which her character is still boy crazy but much, much more interesting. She's lived to see herself go from black-and-white to technicolor, from silver screen to streaming, from Turner Classic Movies to TikTok.
Eighty-two-year-old women don't hold on to prime jobs in Hollywood by accident—Fonda is relentless. Every decade she becomes more like herself. She has never been stopped by family trauma, box office bombs, multiple arrests, or even the combined efforts of the president and the U.S. government. And she certainly hasn't been stopped by the pandemic, which she is using as an opportunity to activate Americans, more than ever—from our abs to our absolute rights.
Once I went down the Google rabbit hole of Fonda's astonishing life, I couldn't stop. I decided to do one of her Jane Fonda workouts—the half-hour-or-so at-home classes that once dominated the VHS industry and have step-touched their way back into the limelight during quarantine—to think about where I went so wrong.
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Shoulder lift. Shoulder lift. Shoulder lift. And head rolling to the right.
Here’s an interesting fact: Before her two Academy Awards and seven Golden Globes, before she sold tens of millions of copies of her workout video tapes, before she had even made a single movie, Jane Fonda was on the cover of Vogue. (She holds the distinction of returning to the cover—of British Vogue—again, 60 years later.)
Her father was the mega movie star Henry Fonda. Her mother, the socialite Frances Ford Seymour, traced her lineage back to Jane Seymour, King Henry VIII’s most beloved wife. Jane Fonda is a stage name—her real name is Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda. She was born with the right connections. That's a tale as old as time. The difference is that Fonda has used her connections, every step-kick of the way, to help other people.
Now slowly roll up, one vertebra at a time.
Lying on my back, I bicycle my legs in the air like an injured insect, as Fonda looks like she’s calmly sailing into first place in an upside down Tour de France. The good thing about the Jane Fonda workout is that it's accessible. (It's inexpensive to buy; it takes up little space and uses no equipment) and it's funny (blurry, polyester-swaddled dancers shriek “whoo!” at regular intervals while thrusting their head between their thighs.) Plus, you'll have a lot to talk about with women over the age of 50, almost all of whom did the Jane Fonda workout in its original incarnation. It was designed for women who felt uncomfortable in male-dominated gyms. It was billed as a way to make women feel more free.
The difficult thing is that much of its success undeniably represents society’s obsession with women’s bodies. But a big part of the impetus for the Jane Fonda workout empire was not just Fonda’s desire for American women to tone up, or even for Fonda to increase her personal fortune. She moved from acting to exercise to fund a left-wing political organization run by her husband, which pushed for rent control and protecting the environment. Fonda cinched her waist and lifted her leg as the money rolled in. Then she used the money to bulk up democracy. Her self-care was literally a radical act.
Pulsing squats. Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce!
The crunches section of the Jane Fonda workout feels like what I imagine waking up after a C-section feels like. It feels like if I don't stop, something terrible is going to happen, not just to my body, but to world affairs. Yet Fonda, who made her original workout in her mid-40s, looks relaxed as she does a 48-count of sit-ups. She’s so strong.
In a TikTok video, 40-odd years later, she leaps out of bed, blasting the song “9 to 5,” dumps a shot of espresso into a mug with her 1970 mugshot on it, and then does squats against the wall, before jumping on a Zoom call with Greenpeace. “I did these squats in jail,” the screen reads, as she slides resolutely up and down the wall.
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The TikTok generation knows Fonda as an activist for climate change now, but it isn’t some late-in-life hobby she picked up, like golf or bingo. Her roots in justice work go back to the ’70s, when she was radicalized by witnessing the loss of life during the Vietnam War. “Activism started to help me develop a sense of self,” Fonda told Vogue last year. “Prior to my activism, I felt that I didn’t really know who I was or why I was on this earth. I felt that my life had no meaning.”
The pedigreed Hollywood star, whose first movie was a cheerleader rom-com, started attending antiwar rallies and speaking in the press against American imperialism. She fundraised and became the target of government surveillance. She called the president a “traitor” and he said that he felt sorry for her father. “She looks pretty but, boy, she's often on the wrong track,” Nixon said.
And then Fonda was canceled. Touring North Vietnam with the intention of bearing witness to the violence that American forces were wreaking on Vietnamese civilians, Fonda was photographed sitting on a Vietnamese antiaircraft gun, laughing. In her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, Fonda wrote she begged the photographers not to release the image, and she has apologized again and again for the harm she did, calling it “a huge, huge mistake.” But the damage was done—Fonda looked to some like she was joyfully pretending to gun down American soldiers. The nickname “Hanoi Jane” has stuck with the public longer than its memory for her Oscar-winning performances.
Young women celebrities—especially blond, blue-eyed American sweethearts—tend to avoid taking stands on broiling political issues. Sometimes they're criticized for this, but often they're defended. “Think of all the pressure on her,” we say. “She’s already trying so hard to please everyone.” And, “Who can blame her for wanting to make money?” But look at Jane Fonda—she marched her way from princess of privilege to alleged anti-American traitor, and never looked back. She’s chosen to use her voice to speak up for the good of others, even when it's brought her no popularity or wealth.
“There is scarcely an evil—be it racism, sexism, capitalism, or the war in Vietnam—she has not taken on, nor a cause she has not espoused,” Life magazine wrote of her in 1971. At one point Fonda told the New Yorker she felt so much cognitive dissonance between her glamorous life as a star and her gritty activism work that she planned to stop acting, until she befriended the revolutionary black activist Ken Cockrel. “The revolution needs movie stars,” he told her.
She has fundraised for veterans, fought for Native American rights, started a center for teen reproductive health, supported LGBTQ rights, and cofounded, with Gloria Steinem, the Women’s Media Center. Her activism isn’t blindly partisan—she has been openly critical of beloved liberals like Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau. She acknowledges that she is wildly privileged, but she doesn’t get self-righteous. Just look to her comments in support of Black Lives Matter. "Because we're white, we have had privilege," she said in an interview on CNN this week. "Even the poorest of us have had privilege. We need to recognize that, and we have to understand what it is that keeps racism in place: the policies, redlining, banking policies, mortgage policies."
There’s an increasingly popular belief that the fastest way to equality is for millionaires and billionaires to redistribute their wealth—something Fonda has done, to a large extent, for decades. But she also does something more—she redistributes her power. She is unique among celebrities in that she doesn’t use good deeds to prop up her fame; she uses fame to prop up her good deeds. Even her move to TikTok isn't a grab to build a new following, but a calculated recruitment of young people to fight government inaction around our climate.
“I’m getting old, I’m going to die soon, and I have strong feelings, and I think that these things need to be said. And so I’m going to say them,” she told the New Yorker in 2018.
Now start to roll up very slowly. Inhale. Exhale.
I’m 56 years younger than Jane Fonda, I think, as I mimic her arm circles, feeling like a piano is hanging from each of my forearms. I don’t have her lineage, her superstardom, her wealth, or her resources. And I don’t have her strength. I can't even do one abs workout! The thing about climate change is that it does make you want to lie down and just give up. It feels too big, too late, too hard.
My phone buzzes. It’s the revolution’s hardest-working movie star, sending me automated texts about the climate in partnership with Greenpeace. “I need you to call Congress now to help protect workers!” it says, next to a phone number. “Here’s the script.” I’ll call Congress soon, just like all the other people who signed up for these texts after we watched her TikTok videos or saw her being dragged off Capitol Hill in handcuffs. I’ll borrow her strength. I just have to do a few more sit-ups first.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer at Glamour. Follow her on Twitter @jeanvaljenny.
A few short months ago, our world was irrevocably changed. But one constant that’s remained as we’ve navigated our new normal are the everyday heroes who continue to inspire hope. All year long we’ll be celebrating the women who are stepping up and doing good—the Glamour Game Changers. Up first: 10 women who are redefining what self-care means in 2020, whether that’s organizing to donate thousands of personal-care products to the front lines or helping to keep others, stuck at home, sane.
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