Dr. Ida P. Rolf (born in 1896 in New York state) was one of the first women to earn a doctorate in the United States. Based on her education as well as her practical work with people, she developed her own method for addressing both physical and emotional problems that arise from disharmony in the body' structure. This lead her to calling the method "Structural Integration", but in the end the shorter name "Rolfing" became more commonly used.
When Fritz Perls, the developer of Gestalt therapy, asked Dr. Rolf to train people in her method at the Esalen Institute in California, Rolfing began to grow in popularity. Early in the 1970s, she founded her own institute in Boulder, Colorado (US) where she taught until her death in 1979.
As a biochemist and physiologist, the American recognized the significance of gravity for the human body:
"Some individuals may perceive their losing fight with gravity as a sharp pain in their back, others as the unflattering contour of their body, others as constant fatigue, yet others as an unrelentingly threatening environment. Those over 40 may call it old age. And yet all these signals may be pointing to a single problem so prominent in their own structure, as well as others, that it has been ignored: they are off balance, they are at war with gravity.”