06/02/2026
Reclaiming the Working-Class History of Massage
Massage therapy is often imagined today as a luxury — something done in spas, wellness studios, or private clinics, marketed as indulgence or self-care. This framing is relatively new. For most of human history, massage was not a luxury at all. It was a working-class, domestic, and communal practice, developed to keep bodies functioning under conditions of hard labour, limited healthcare, and economic precarity.
Across rural Europe, manual therapies such as rubbing, kneading, oiling, and joint manipulation were part of everyday folk medicine. Farm workers, craftspeople, miners, and factory workers relied on hands-on care to manage exhaustion, injury, and chronic pain. These practices were often carried out at home, passed between family members, or provided by community figures such as midwives, elders, or bonesetters. In Britain and Ireland, bonesetters — many from working-class backgrounds — treated injuries caused by agricultural and industrial labour, often with greater success and trust among workers than formally trained physicians.
As industrialisation intensified bodily strain, informal massage and manipulation became a quiet form of survival. When sick pay did not exist and injury could mean hunger, keeping the body working was essential. Massage functioned as a form of mutual aid, not therapy in the modern professional sense, but care embedded in daily life.
This pattern appears globally. In China, Tui Na massage developed alongside acupuncture and was used by labourers, farmers, and martial artists to recover from physical work. In Thailand, traditional massage emerged in temples and villages, shared freely as part of community health rather than sold as a service. In Japan, Anma massage was historically practised by blind working-class specialists and understood as practical bodily maintenance, not indulgence.
Across Africa, massage has long been woven into everyday life — used in childcare, postpartum recovery, elder care, and labour recovery. In South Asia, oil massage has been a common practice among farmers and craftspeople, helping to protect joints, prevent injury, and restore energy. In Latin America, traditional sobadores treated work injuries and chronic pain in rural and working-class communities, often charging little or nothing.
What these traditions share is not luxury, but necessity. Massage was a way of caring for bodies that had to endure repetitive, physically demanding work. It was often gendered and domestic, passed between women or within families, and therefore devalued once medicine professionalised. As healthcare became institutionalised and commodified, these informal practices were pushed to the margins, reframed as unscientific, or absorbed into elite medical systems.
In the late twentieth century, massage was rebranded again — this time as “wellness”. Detached from its roots in labour and survival, it became associated with leisure, self-improvement, and middle-class consumption. The working-class history was largely erased.
Remembering this history matters.
Massage therapy did not originate as pampering. It emerged as collective care, shaped by people who depended on their bodies to live. Seen this way, massage belongs not to luxury culture, but to a long tradition of working-class knowledge, resilience, and mutual support.
