Probably all of us have, at one time or another in our younger years, been told to stand up straight. If you’re part of Generation X or the early Millennial cohort, you probably had to undergo an exam during middle school for scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you might have had to take a posture test upon entering college — or even to pass one before you could graduate. But where did this concern for proper posture come from? Beth Linker, a historian and sociologist of science at the University of Pennsylvania, explores this question in her new book Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.
Linker finds that the modern scientific and medical obsession with poor posture emerged in the wake of Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species, which posited that what truly differentiated humankind from apes was not intellect but bipedalism. By the turn of the twentieth century, many scientists and public health officials worried that slouching would lead to degeneration and disease. A famous 1917 study found that nearly four-fifths of Harvard’s freshman class had poor posture, which sparked the widespread adoption of posture exams in schools, workplaces, and the military, along with public and commercial efforts to correct deficient stances. Poor posture became what Linker calls “a sign and signal for everything from sexual deviancy and racial degradation to unemployability and chronic disease… Posture examinations became a way for government officials, educators, and medical scientists to evaluate not only overall health but also moral character and capabilities at the individual and population levels.”
In fact, what Linker calls the “posture panic” wasn’t based on any real connection between a person’s posture and their morality, their abilities, or their long-term health — although she argues that scientific study of the effectiveness of posture correction was inhibited by the 1990s scandal over the Ivy League’s past practice of taking nude posture photographs of entering freshmen. In this podcast, Linker discusses the history of posture panic, the widespread adoption of student posture exams that later excited public speculation about nude photos of George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham (among others), the way that the disability rights movement and the demise of in loco parentis ended the practice of university posture exams, and how we ought to regard posture science in hindsight.
Transcript
Beth Linker: When you hear somebody say, “You should stand up straight. You should sit up straight” — if the belief is it’s because it will prevent all of these kind of things from happening, I don’t think we have the science to say that that’s necessarily true.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Beth Linker. She is the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, in which she also serves as chair. Her academic areas of specialization include cultural history, the history of science and medicine, disability studies, health policy, and gender. And her books include War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America and Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America, which has just been published by Princeton University Press. Welcome, Beth!
Beth Linker: Thanks for having me.
Geoff Kabaservice: And congratulations on Slouch. It’s an extremely engaging inquiry into a subject that I’ve long been curious about. To be more specific, when I was doing research on higher education back in my graduate school days (which were kind of a while ago now), I came across what struck me as the peculiar historical fact that many colleges and universities, from the Ivy League to the Seven Sisters to many other private and public institutions across the land, had taken nude photographs of their students in the course of administering a physical exam, including a posture evaluation. And this tradition of nude posture photos persisted from the early decades of the twentieth century through, in some cases, the 1960s and even into the 1970s.
And this peculiar tradition became the stuff of national controversy a few years later when in 1995, Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine entitled “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal.” In it, he related his own experience of having been photographed in the nude as an entering Yale freshman in 1964. This was a ritual, he mentioned, which the likes of George W. Bush and Bob Woodward had also been subjected to at Yale, as had Meryl Streep at Vassar and Hillary Rodham and Diane Sawyer at Wellesley. And generations of students at such schools had made jokes about these photos. Urban rumors had circulated that some photos had been stolen and might even be for sale on the black market.
Rosenbaum asserted that although some institutions had destroyed those nude photos several years earlier, many thousands still existed, including some he personally examined in a branch of the Smithsonian Institution wherein resided the archives of William H. Sheldon, a once famous psychologist, numismatist, and eugenicist of dubious reputation. And the revelations in this article set off a furor among the relevant classes of alumni and alumnae of the schools that Rosenbaum had mentioned, which led archivists at Smith and Princeton and other schools to destroy all of the nude photos of their students that could still be found.
So, like I said, I was intrigued with this story at the time. But what I didn’t realize then, Beth, and what I only now appreciate after having read your book, is that there is a much broader story to be told about how and why those nude photos came to be taken in the first place. And I should also add, just parenthetically, that my study of history never really ventured too deeply into some of yours, particularly the history of science and medicine or cultural history. But I found a lot of really interesting things to think about in your book that seemed to me to have broad resonance.
One of the things I can recall coming across in a book long ago was by Robert Darnton, who was (I guess still is — I think he’s still alive) a cultural historian who wrote a book called The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It was mostly about the eighteenth century. And his message to his fellow cultural historians, as I’m remembering it, was that they should try to enter the culture of the past at its most opaque: the places where we don’t get the jokes, where the sensibilities and the mental symbolism of the past seem really alien and maybe even repulsive to our own.
And it seems to me that in your history of the rise and fall of the posture panic, you have certainly succeeded in evoking an aspect of the past that seems pretty bizarre to modern sensibilities, although you also point out that some of its practices and beliefs do live on in our own era. So can you, in very broad strokes, tell me something about how so-called posture science came to be and why poor posture came to be considered this dreaded pathology in early twentieth-century America?
Beth Linker: Yes, sure. Happy to do that, and thanks for that introduction. What I found was that, basically, there has been a concern for posture since Greek antiquity. You have natural philosophers talking about the uniqueness of human beings and how they are upright, and how their brains and heads are closer to the heavens, and therefore that distinguishes human beings from non-human animals and beasts. So posture concerns, or at least interest, has been there probably since recorded time.
But something changed. What I have found in the archives, and in my studies in the history of science, is that something profoundly changed after Darwin. So Darwin posits natural selection, of course, but he also posits that human beings evolved into the people we are — and the first step toward becoming a human being was to stand up straight. Now, this flew in the face of centuries of science and centuries of skull-collecting that insisted that what was most interesting about human beings was intellect. And then there was this kind of assumption that the larger the cranium, the smarter the person was. And you had also the science of phrenology, too, at the time that Darwin is writing.
But he makes a pretty radical claim that actually what is most important — or at least precedes intellect and speech acquisition — is upright standing and bipedalism. So that starts off what I argue is an interest in posture sciences as such. You have actual, practicing scientists spending their careers thinking about human posture. So then Darwin posits this — it’s a theory — so you have these physician/anthropologists who go out across the globe and start looking for fossils again, but this time they want full human remains/fossils to discover the missing link between ape and man.
I discuss Eugène Dubois, who’s from the Netherlands. He was the first one to discover a femur and a skull cap and a jawbone that indicated, or seemed to indicate — this was in Indonesia, on the island of Java — he posited that this was proof of this Missing Link. And that because the skull cap was rather small, but the femur was straight like that of an upright standing person, that it proved Darwin’s thesis was correct. He brings this back to Europe, and by and large it’s the UK and Americans who really get excited by this find. And they start to develop their own interest in posture sciences.
Geoff Kabaservice: And there’s a curious dynamic going on here where some of these posture scientists are saying that civilization ultimately was a bad thing for humanity.
Beth Linker: Yes, right. Because natural selection… You would think that if natural selection were true, and if what a lot of these scientists saw was a lot of living human beings slouching over, you would think that it would be selected out, right? If bipedalism and upright standing was a weakness, it should have been selected out, at least according to the theory of natural selection. So the scientists — and this is a time period when there are still Lamarckian ideas floating about…
Geoff Kabaservice: Can you just describe for the non-scientists (or non-historians of science) what both phrenology and Lamarckianism are?
Beth Linker: Lamarckianism is a theory. It is a theory of evolution, but it’s about acquired characteristics. So the kind of classic example is: Why does a giraffe have a long neck? Well, the giraffe got a long neck because it needed to reach the high leaves that it feeds on. And so it’s acquired characteristics because of environmental pressures. Phrenology was the science of assessing bumps on the skull that phrenologists would then use to diagnose a person’s characteristics. And off the top of my head, I don’t remember who the person was who founded phrenology, but that’s kind of what phrenology is. It’s about taking an external characteristic — and for phrenology, it’s the skull or the head — taking an external characteristic or bodily contour and positing that there is some kind of innate biological characteristic or emotional characteristic or intelligence capability.
Between Darwin and then about the 1940s is when you get what’s called the Darwinian synthesis, which is when pretty much the entire scientific community agrees that Darwin was right. You still have Lamarckian ideas floating around, and it’s a really dynamic, interesting time period where people who study just exclusively the history of evolutionary sciences talk about it as debates about the process of evolution. These posture-first camp folks were in a camp. There were still people around saying, “No, the brain is more important” in the early twentieth century. But the posture-first camp has a lot of physicians involved in it.
And what I argue is that… So you could have this thing where you have a science saying, “Okay, posture evolves first. And hey, isn’t it curious that I see all these people around who are slouching? Huh. Is that a problem?” And what happens is that you have the medical scientist coming in and saying, “It has to be a problem.” Because the comparative anatomists who study non-human animal anatomy and human start to see that humans have unique problems, unique physiological problems. And so they start to think that we have to train humans — or retrain humans — to stand up straight, because this is the linchpin of what it means to be human, and to fail to do so would lead to de-evolution.
And this is where it merges in with social Darwinism. To fail to have a kind of posture program where we train people to stand up straight, it would lead to de-evolution. For the white scientists worried about race suicide, it would lead to race suicide. And then the medical concerns layer on top of it, and they start making the argument that posture can actually lead to disease. Irving Fisher, who was a Yale economist and also a eugenicist, was famous for arguing that he had tuberculosis or consumption — it was called consumption in his lifetime — as a child because he had a consumptive stoop, or he had bad posture. And if he had just worked on his posture more, he would not have had tuberculosis.
Geoff Kabaservice: A lot of the period you’re describing when this idea of bad posture as a pathology comes from, I would say, the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and then even into the 1920s when Irving Fisher was around and famous. And these were people who actually did think of themselves as moderns and immersed in the scientific method and dismissive of some of those old phrenological charts that do conjure up real nineteenth-century imagery.
And yet, this whole murky soup of the Progressive Era just fascinates me because it has so many contradictions. There is that eugenicist component that you mentioned on the part of some of these posture scientists, who had this fear that civilization is leading to Anglo-Saxon race suicide, civilization leads to a weakening of civilized men and women. And that seems to point toward the Nazis. And yet posture panic also manifested strongly in the African American community, as you write.
Beth Linker: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: And there was also what seemed to have been a strong feminist component to the movement. So how do you make sense of some of these contradictions?
Beth Linker: Yes. Well, the argument was that it seemed to be that civilization was the problem. As soon as you are living in a world where there’s industrialization, where people are using mechanized transport to move around instead of walking — you have trains, eventually automobiles, eventually planes — civilization and technology makes humans more sedentary.
And sedentariness doesn’t necessarily mean leisure. It can mean, if you think about the industrialized workplace and Fordism and Taylorism, that a worker was stationed in one spot doing the same thing over and over and over all day. So a worker could be sitting in a chair for the entire day or standing in one place the entire day. But it was about this sense that a kind of storied past when we used to be hunter-gatherers had been lost, and therefore that was physically threatening.
So if civilization is the problem that makes human beings less capable of their full humanness, of being upright, you can imagine how these more marginalized groups feel. So women’s groups, who don’t yet have the vote depending on what year you’re talking about, early suffrage movement, don’t have full rights to citizenship. They of course want to say that they have a posture problem as well.
And similarly, the middle-class Black Americans, educated Black Americans, want to say they have a posture problem themselves, because to say that they don’t have a posture problem would mean that they never even got to the point of modern civilization. And those kind of groups can’t afford to have that label. So what you see is that for middle-class Black Americans, they’re very concerned about migration from the South of lower-class, poor, working-poor Black Americans, that they’re going to drag the race down.
And in this time period, I think it’s really interesting and important to note that women themselves call themselves a race. Different people, Italian Americans, were thought of as a different race. Irish Americans were thought of as a different race. So race was used in a different way than we use it today. And there was a very vibrant and contested idea about what it means to “strengthen the race” or “build the race.” It’s always dependent on who is talking about the race and what they mean about the race.
Sometimes it could mean nationhood. Sometimes it could mean America — a nation at that point which was in flux with immigrants from southeast Europe; from Asia; migration from the South — and the posture work could also be seen as Americanization and also national uplift. Because this was also a time when nation-states started to collect data on their citizens’ health, vital statistics. And so if you get vital statistics that look like you are weak, that’s not going to look very good on the global stage.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. Although it must also be pointed out, in defense of posture science from charges of eugenicism, that there was this belief that everybody could come to a better posture. In that sense, it was somewhat universalist, right?
Beth Linker: Yes. And that’s why there’s… This is a fascinating story for me, because there are all kinds of contradictions. Because some of the first women who were the leaders… So in 1914, Jessie Bancroft, a physical educator director for the New York City Public Schools, founded the American Posture League. Her colleague out at Stanford, Clelia Mosher, develops a device to measure and to standardize and to grade posture of human beings. And these women considered themselves physiological feminists.
Specifically, Clelia Mosher did a lot of studies to try to determine that male and female anatomy were essentially the same. So men and women breathe the same, their respiration was the same; it was believed that it was anatomically different at the time. Clelia even went so far as radically to say that men and women had equal muscular ability and strength. And so there is a kind of radicalism to it. And if someone like myself who studies the history of science and anatomy quite a bit… If you’re going to set up a physical standard, you usually have a physical standard for women, a physical standard for men, a physical standard for Black people, a physical standard… You have slightly different norms and standards. But this one was a universal one. And I think it’s because for those physiological feminists, it was a way to gain a kind of political power for them.
Geoff Kabaservice: And Clelia Mosher also believed that maintaining an upright posture would mitigate the disabling effects of menstruation for women as well.
Beth Linker: Yes, that is correct.
Geoff Kabaservice: So how did you get interested in this subject of the posture panic as a historian?
Beth Linker: I, like probably many listeners, was told to stand or sit up straight. I went through scoliosis exams, the horror of that, in middle school, when you’re very awkward and just hitting puberty. I had a mother who went to nursing school, and probably I saw her many times saying, “Oh, I should sit up straight or stand up straight” — kind of always self-correcting and articulating that she had failed somehow, just even if it was in that moment. And then I went on to physical therapy school, and I started to think about that command, and it made less sense to me as a physical therapist.
Then I went on to get my Ph.D. in history, and that’s when that command seemed even more curious. And so when I was working on my first book, which is on how rehabilitation became a medical but also social and political institution in World War I America, I was sitting in the National Archives, I opened this box, and it was just full of unprocessed papers of foot tracings, human foot tracings. And I started to follow that lead a little bit, and I found out that there were flat foot camps in World War I where physicians and physical therapists and trainers were trying to get soldiers to correct their flat feet — and also to correct their posture.
So there were also posture exams at this time. In the Selective Service Act, in the draft, there were a lot of physical measures that were taken. And the thing that was just curious about this to me was that they really did define flat feet, and any kind of postural abnormalities, as disabilities. Whereas when I put on my clinical hat, I was like, “I don’t see it. I would never diagnose this person as having a disability or an inability to physically do the job that was necessary.” So it just became a real curiosity for me.
Geoff Kabaservice: Out of curiosity, is there any kind of problem with having “flat feet” that would prevent a man from effectively performing the duties of a combat soldier in the infantry?
Beth Linker: Well, it’s interesting because I think it was… I have wanted to trace this through — when did it drop out? I’m pretty sure it was still on the books in Vietnam War that if you had severe enough flat feet, you could dodge the draft. I guess the rule of thumb as a physical therapist is… First of all, I only saw people who were in pain in the clinic. Somebody not in pain doesn’t walk into a physical therapy clinic.
But say a person came into the clinic and had, I don’t know, a broken wrist, and I needed to treat the broken wrist, and I noticed they had flat feet. I really wouldn’t do much about it. If they’re not complaining of pain or a problem, it isn’t a problem. So I guess you would have to ask how severe would the flat feet need to be. But it’s not, on the face of it, a problem that needs to be treated.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think we are both members of Generation X, and I also remember that test for the abnormal curvature of the spine in junior high school. I also seem to remember that Judy Blume, who was one of the most famous young adult novelists of the day, wrote a potboiler about a young woman whose plans to become a model were derailed by having scoliosis. Am I remembering that right?
Beth Linker: Deenie, yes. Her scoliosis was found out when she went to the modeling agency. Her mother wanted her to be a model. And then she had to wear… The most nightmarish part of that book was the Milwaukee brace, which was true to current-day practice in the early ‘70s. The Milwaukee brace was worn 23 hours a day. It went from the neck down to your pelvis — metal, cumbersome.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, it was sort of a figure of fun in John Hughes movies, too.
Beth Linker: Yeah.
Geoff Kabaservice: So this is not entirely ancient history.
Beth Linker: Not entirely.
Geoff Kabaservice: What made you want to go to college to become a physical therapist?
Beth Linker: Interesting question. I came from a family of nurses. My grandmother, my maternal grandmother, was a nurse. She went late in life. The man she married had two wives before that who had both died. And he died — because he was quite a bit older — when my mother and her two brothers were quite young. Nursing was a profession for women, an obvious profession. She went to nursing training. She opened her own nursing home, which was little more than a Victorian home in our small Midwest town in Ohio. And so my mother became a nurse and took over the nursing home with my father. I grew up around healthcare, but I didn’t want to be a nurse. In the ‘80s, physical therapy was a good health career to go into. It was challenging to get into physical therapy school at that time, and I think I wanted the challenge.
Geoff Kabaservice: So here you are, having overcome the challenge of getting into physical therapy school. You’re a licensed professional, making a good salary. Why do you then decide you want a Ph.D. in history?
Beth Linker: Well, I’m in the physical therapy clinic in the 90s, and it’s managed care, and I’m realizing I can’t really do what I was taught to do because you’re constantly in this battle with health insurance companies. And also physical therapy is highly regulated by the medical profession, so then you have to take orders also from physicians who might not really know very much about physical therapy at all or know much about the musculoskeletal system. And so I think I just kept asking questions like, “How did we get here as a society? And how did I get here?” I wasn’t asking the questions that would lead one to go to medical school. Those aren’t questions to lead one to go to medical school. Those are historical questions: “How did we get here?”
So for my first degree, I got a master’s in bioethics. I was at Michigan State at the time with my then-spouse, and I decided that that was the easiest way to go, because I had hardly any history training. Physical therapy school at the time was four years, and it was crammed. You had twelve months of schooling. You really didn’t have time for electives.
And a funny story is in my sophomore year of physical therapy school… I went to Ithaca College. My parents, who came from a more blue-collar background, thought it was exorbitant how much Ithaca College cost. The only reason I was allowed to go there was because I got in early decision, and it was guaranteed that I would come out as a physical therapist with a profession, with a career. I took one history elective, and I called them up and said, “I want to go into history.” And they said, “Okay, then you’re going to come back to Ohio to a state school that’s more affordable, and we’re not going to pay for this private school education to just be a history major. And by the way, what are you going to do with that?”
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m always happy when I talk to somebody who has eventually managed to follow their dream and have it come true. But are there advantages, do you think, in not following the straightforward trajectory of most people in the academic history profession of going undergrad to grad school to Ph.D.?
Beth Linker: Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. And I feel like I just have so much more of a perspective, first of all, on my historical material, and so I can come at it from a unique perspective. No one would’ve thought to do, I don’t think, a history of physical therapy as I did for my first book, or even rehabilitation. And then there’s a feel for things that one has if you’ve had life experience or professional experience. That’s not to say that you have to have experienced something in order to write a history about it, because I don’t think that that’s true. I think a danger sometimes I see in our various fields and sub-disciplines is that that’s assumed, that you have to have experienced something in order to write about it. I don’t think that that’s true, but I do think it does give me some extra insight, having been in the clinic.
So yes, I always tell my undergrads who go on to grad school, or anybody applying to our particular graduate program, to get out and work a little bit before they go do it.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I do think that added perspective, and maybe having real practical experience in another field, really does come through in your book — although sometimes I’m a little hard-pressed to define exactly how, but I just sense it. So going back to the book… Again, I’m struck by part of what you’re talking about is the origin story of posture science, in some ways, in the Progressive Era. And one of the qualities that it has always seemed to me stands out about the Progressive Era is the way in which the different movements that made up the Progressive Movement of that time were middle class. And in some ways they were motivated by anxiety of falling back into the sump of the working class, and in some ways they were motivated by resentments of those above. And I think that the posture science movement takes in some of that, which also includes a criticism, for example, of the debutante slouch. I think that would come as a bit of a mystery to most people what that is. Can you define that?
Beth Linker: The debutante slouch was, at least in the early twentieth century, was a woman who would wear Paris fashions. She was the New Woman who was not corseted. She was not quite a flapper, because she’s more high class than that, but she always had a nice lilt or a little tilt to her hips, to her shoulders.
This goes back to… Most etiquette manuals from the Enlightenment onward would not ever advise a high-upper-class person to have strict upright posture. It was always advised to have a bit of a lean, because to be bolt upright was seen as low class. So these debutante slouches are the moneyed leisure class. If you think about the characters of The Great Gatsby, they probably all have a little bit of a lean as they’re smoking their cigarettes.
Geoff Kabaservice: Or in more modern times, William F. Buckley slouching in his chair as he drawls away with his Long Island lockjaw accent.
Beth Linker: Yes. It was déclassé to be bolt upright, you know, with perfect posture. So yes, they were trying to punch up. The middle class had a lot of anxieties. This is the beginning of professionalization as we know it in the country, and this professional class was very anxious about establishing themselves, legitimating their work, establishing their worth. And the word “science” at the time… They were helped by the fact that in the Progressive Era, science was seen as the cure for nearly everything.
So this is the time when you get “scientific charity”: no more church handouts, no more relying on those kind of things. We’re going to apply social science to the problem, and we’re going to call it scientific charity. And these were the people that were most concerned about the Americanization process, about the immigrant — so, as you said, concerned about the working class. And it’s kind of the middle child syndrome, right? The middle class has the middle child syndrome.
A way, some of their anxieties were also shared by the upper classes. And I have a bit of a funny story about that. My late friend Amo Houghton was from one of the richest families in upstate New York, but when he was a boy, he spent his middle school years during the 1920s at what was called the Arizona Desert School. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it was a Western ranch school for boys about ten miles north of Tucson. And it was one of several schools that had been founded in that era in response to this fear that rich man’s sons were becoming soft and lazy, much as their daughters were becoming dissipated and overly fond of luxury. And the hope was that you would take these pampered, effete young men, and they would learn both from the example of the Old West pioneers but also of the strong, noble Indian, the Native American…
Beth Linker: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: …and they would emerge upright, brave, self-reliant, strong — the leaders that they ought to be, not these dissipated gentleman sons.
Beth Linker: What you’re talking about is the masculinity crisis of this time period, which did affect the upper class. One of the first studies that I talk about was the “Harvard Slouch study” of 1917. So you take these tools that the American Posture League start to standardize, which eventually become camera technology, which you referred to in your introduction… But in the 1917 Harvard Slouch Study, you have an orthopedist taking posture silhouettes of all Harvard freshmen, boys and men, and he discovers that 80% of them have poor posture.
And so it’s very much a concern about the bookish class: these kind of men who aren’t really manly enough. They haven’t seen war — because this was right on the cusp of the U.S. entering World War I, so these men had never served in war. They had lived rather protected, and then they were at one of the nation’s greatest universities, sitting around all day doing book learning. So very much a masculinity crisis. And the TRs of the world are trying to get men out there to hunt and do military work.
But these posture scientists were actually in a kind of battle — pun intended, I guess — with the military education proponents. There were military schools and a lot of people sent their boys to military schools. And these posture advocates would argue two things. First, that the military posture was too exaggerated, that to really throw your shoulders back in a military-style would cause problems. Second, they argued that this was the United States, we were not Old World Europe. We shouldn’t all be marching in military drill, because that was too reminiscent of authoritarian states of the Old World. So they insisted that this posture work, and these kinds of posture calisthenics, was more suitable to U.S. citizenry and the importance of individual liberty and freedom and not simply following orders of the government.
Geoff Kabaservice: I can understand why there would be that kind of opposition, even before World War I and our entrance into fighting against Germany, to that kind of German-style calisthenics in the Turnverein societies and so forth. What I don’t quite understand is this idea that poor posture made people more prone to acquiring diseases such as tuberculosis.
Beth Linker: I think it’s important to understand what’s happening in the medical sciences at the time. So a really brief one-minute lecture on history of medicine is that in the 1880s we have the discovery of the tubercle bacillus by Robert Koch, and Louis Pasteur as well for his work on pasteurization. Both of those two theories lead to what we now call the germ theory of disease. So medical sciences in the early twentieth century are quite good at knowing the cause of diseases and the transmission of disease. So consumption is no longer what was thought to be a hereditary disease. Medical scientists now understand it as contracted through contagion. However, they don’t have a really good treatment. Not until the 1940s do we have antibiotics. And so the treatment for tuberculosis is basically, “Go away and take a rest cure.” And for the poor, the working poor, they don’t have the leisure or the means to take time off of work. And with tenement housing, the tuberculosis becomes more rampant.
So this is an era of what they call, even at the time, “the new public health movement,” which is more geared towards surveillance of individual behavior, surveillance to figure out if there’s a healthy carrier, doing blood work, doing sputum samples, things like this. And so it really becomes about preventative health.
And so I think it’s not too hard to understand how, in this era, they talk about tuberculosis in terms of seed and soil. So you can be exposed to the tubercle bacillus, the seed, but it has to take root in the soil of a body — and if it’s a slouching body, somehow respiration is not as good in that slouching body, or digestion isn’t as good, it’s going to be more liable to take root. And so that’s pretty much the theory behind how posture could cause one to become more diseased, in a nutshell. Does that make sense?
Geoff Kabaservice: It does make sense. You also point out that conservatives like, let’s say, Herbert Hoover are more predisposed to like this idea of preventive health because it puts individual self-determination over any kind of attempt to remedy socially caused problems. You don’t have to take on the social determinants of health, whether they be housing or better healthcare. You can say, “Stand strong. Fend off the tuberculosis bacillus.”
Beth Linker: Yes, it is about individual determination. It’s heavy on public health education, which doesn’t cost that much: print out some pamphlets, make sure they get into the schools, posters that show “Stand up straight.” And then when that person ends up with tuberculosis or also back pain — that is something else I talk about in my book — then it’s fairly convenient to blame it on the individual. It kind of skirts around even thinking about other problems — such as, as you said, Does this person have enough to eat? What is their education? Do they have shelter? — which are usually far more important when it comes to determining someone’s future health than whether or not somebody is slouching or not.
Geoff Kabaservice: So how did we get to the beginnings of the widespread engagement of colleges and universities with the taking of nude posture photos?
Beth Linker: Universities are the places where a lot of research does happen, and you have a captive audience of students. It’s great talking to somebody who’s an expert in the history of education… This was the era of in loco parentis, when if your child went to a university, the university was essentially the parent of that child. The child did not have any rights to privacy, did not have much autonomy whatsoever. And the university was the very definition of paternalism, because they were in charge of the health and welfare of these students.
So they began to do physical exams on every student who came in. You could imagine there were some good reasons for that because, again, infectious diseases were quite common. For women who were going on to education, they really felt pressure to have these physical exams, because we still had people in that day like Edward Clarke and others who kept arguing that women should not take on higher education because if they use too much brainpower their wombs will decay and they won’t be able to reproduce. So women’s colleges were always under pressure to show that women did not get sicker by going on to higher education, that they stayed the same or got healthier.
So in this kind of general milieu, where the physical exam is very important in college campuses, the posture exam fits in there quite easily. It’s fairly simple, and you get a kind of bird’s-eye — it’s not really a bird’s-eye, but it’s a full-body view of the entire person. And they start to say, “Oh, if this person has a slight slouch or a slight deviation, we can improve that. And we should improve that so that we can keep them healthier so that they don’t get diseased and acquire diseases.” It’s also a disciplining tool, and we can just say that it’s about creating discipline in the university. And for women, it’s also a beautification. It’s about how do you carry yourself, and also gain the attraction of the opposite sex, and also: “How am I going to educate my children, the future citizens of the nation, in the best way to acquire posture? “
So the posture scientists move towards camera photography. They will show these photographs to the student him- or herself. And they grade them A, B, C, D. They will show D-posture people an A-posture person photo and say, “Look, this is what you’re supposed to be doing.” And then this is also the time of the professionalization of physical education — you actually get Ph.D. programs in physical education — and so this is a great learning tool for all those would-be doctors in physical education to do these kind of exams and to learn about anatomy and anatomical markers.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I believe you said that some colleges required students to pass a posture exam to graduate.
Beth Linker: Yes. Not only would there be a posture exam, this was also a time when physical education was mandatory in most schools and colleges, and you had to pass your physical education classes. In most colleges that I looked at, you had to have a passing grade on your posture exam. And if you had a D-grade posture, what that meant is that you had more physical education classes in your future than the A-grade posture person.
Geoff Kabaservice: When and why did there come to be unease about the practice of these nude posture photos?
Beth Linker: Legally, in 1974 you get FERPA [the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act], which protects student privacy, and an 18-year-old becomes an adult. So the universities no longer have control over students. That’s kind of getting ahead of the story, but that’s a very quick and easy reason why it would no longer be tolerable.
Students themselves no longer found it tolerable, and especially co-eds. Either it’s urban legend or real — I happen to think that there are probably real cases of this happening, though it’s impossible to know how many times it happened — but co-eds’ photos often went missing, and it was assumed that male students were stealing these photos. There are Yalies on record, Yale men who would brag about stealing Vassar women’s photos. They would take them back to their secret society and they would rank these photos and say, “Hot, not so hot,” like kind of early Mark Zuckerberg Facebook days, and then sell these photos or try to arrange dates and so on and so forth. And then as you get desegregation in schooling, first of all, as you get more schools admitting co-eds, so that you have co-educational education, I think a lot of schools find it really impossible to kind of keep a lock on either the photos themselves or the stories that are spread about the photos. So that is another reason that the schools stopped doing this.
And then the other reason is… I talk about the disability rights movement. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act basically makes it illegal to discriminate against somebody with a disability, especially in the educational setting. Prior to the ‘70s, you would not have seen a person with a moderate to severe disability on a university campus, because universities could refuse to accept such a person to be a student. If you think about these posture exams, they really were… The possibility of having bad posture was not really that extreme, because they already are not accepting a whole swath of people who would have had moderate-to-severe polio, who would have been wheelchair users, who would have used canes, who would have used any assistive devices.
And so as part of the achievement of the disability rights movement, people like Ed Roberts (who was a post-polio wheelchair user) and Judy Heumann (also a post-polio wheelchair user) is they are coming onto college campuses and they’re saying, “No, I don’t need to pass a physical education requirement to get my high school degree.” And then they go on to college campuses and say, “Yes, you do need to accommodate me.” Ed Roberts out in Berkeley, when he came to campus, they had him stay in a hospital, and that was his student housing. And so that was the Independent Living Movement and so forth. So it no longer even made sense anymore to do posture photography if you have this diverse student body, literally and figuratively.
Geoff Kabaservice: Can you tell us a little bit more about who Ed Roberts is/was?
Beth Linker: He was an early disability rights advocate. He had polio. He was a wheelchair user, and he was also respirator-dependent. He and his mother took the California public school system to court for the fact that they didn’t want to graduate Ed from high school because he could not pass the driving test and he couldn’t pass his physical education requirement. So after they were successful with that lawsuit, he was accepted to UC Berkeley in the early ‘60s. And then he ends up going to Berkeley and helping to found the Independent Living Movement, trying to get ramps on colleges. So that was part of the disability rights movement.
Geoff Kabaservice: You and your spouse have been teaching at Penn this past year, in what I’m sure has been an interesting year. There’s a lot of national political focus on college campuses in a way that there hasn’t been for quite a long time. I have plenty of opinions on this that we don’t need to get into. But one thing I was thinking about while reading through your account of the campus posture photos episode is that it has some resonance with the present era. And one of the ways in which that came up was your description of how in 1950, Cornell University co-eds (which is what women students were called at that time) might have been the ones who stole and destroyed those posture photos rather than the usual fraternity bro suspects.
Beth Linker: Yep.
Geoff Kabaservice: And it then emerged that the leading defender of the taking of these nude posture photos was Robert Kiphuth, who was Yale’s swimming coach. I think you quoted him at the beginning of one of the chapters. And Kiphuth was a legendary swimming coach. He was there for forty years. I want to say his overall record in swim meets was something like 520 wins to 12 losses. I mean, he was the winningest coach of all time. He also was technically on the faculty as a professor of physical education, but in reality was sort of seen by the faculty themselves as an administrator.
His legendary status bought him some space, but there were resentments even in the early 1950s that this was in some sense administration thrusting its own perspectives into the faculty and its areas of their privileges and prerogatives. Even at the time, you could hear some faculty pushing back on this whole apparatus. You did quote that professor at Florida State, Kenneth Miller, in 1951 pointing out that posture science isn’t really a science. There isn’t unanimity among experts on the field. There’s no agreement on what constitutes good posture or how to measure it.
Beth Linker: Mm-hmm.
Geoff Kabaservice: And another person who sort of stands out as a modern there is James Frederick Rogers at the U.S. Department of Health in the US Office of Education: “We cannot standardize the human body.” So there’s certainly an element of this thinking that it’s dangerous to give administrators free rein when it comes to such things. And I also feel… I’m not disagreeing with anything you said, but for example you mentioned that one of the court cases relating to in loco parentis came in the nineteenth century at the University of Illinois when a student disputed the university’s mandatory chapel attendance. And the court said, “Nope, sorry. Students have no rights. The university says you’ve got to go to chapel, you go.” But most universities did away with mandatory college chapel attendance in the early decades of the twentieth century, because it was always a process of some negotiation between the university leadership and the students and the faculty over what the university should be doing. And I feel that there was some element of that too going on with regard to the posture photos.
The story of the 1960s generally, in the good telling of it, is that yes, there’s student protest, and sometimes that results in changes. But more generally there’s a story of sometimes faculty and even enlightened university leadership reevaluating the past inheritances that they have. And some of the things need to be preserved, and they redouble their defense of ideals like academic freedom. Some need to be adapted to modern circumstances. And some need to be jettisoned.
For example, I don’t know how much this is something you stress in your disability studies classes, but the ideal of meritocracy is a friend toward bringing people who had been considered disabled but are extremely able in academic areas into a university setting. It becomes immoral to deny them the opportunities that they could benefit from. And so there’s a lot of interesting dynamics going on here, but one of the things that clearly emerges from this account of the campus nude posture photos is that students ultimately didn’t trust their administrations to safeguard these photos forever.
Beth Linker: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the universities probably didn’t deserve to be trusted in that case.
Beth Linker: No, they did not. Because when I looked at the stories of how they were destroyed and when they were destroyed, way before Rosenbaum, a lot of them had already been destroyed. Either a janitor finds them in the closet of the Payne Whitney gym at Yale… And then even at Smith, I track a Ph.D. researcher who was an alum of Smith, but went on to get her master’s in public health at Yale, and she goes to use the Smith photographs for a longitudinal study on how good of a predictor bad posture is for future back pain. She finds them in the basement of the college administration building. This is before Smith really had proper archives that are processed and organized and kept safe.
I think a lot of students had hoped that the universities disposed of or burned these photos as soon as the student went on to graduate, but they did not do that. And I think you’re right. You know this better than I, but in the history of university education in America, the administration just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger as the twentieth century goes on. And the faculty are probably decreasing relative to the number of deans of students and administrators and so on and so forth.
About these posture photos, I think it would depend on which administrator you’re talking about. I think physical educators really wanted to keep this going. Athletic directors are pretty much friends with physical educators, and so they’re always in this fight about, “Yes, there’s brain learning, which is important, but we need to keep the student body healthy.” And physical educators — they’re gym teachers, and I think they’re always battling a perception of: Are they a legitimate profession? So I have a feeling that they were probably holding on to this for as long as they could.
Geoff Kabaservice: Rosenbaum, at the conclusion of his article, writes: “It is hard to deny the possibility, the likelihood that well-meaning people and institutions will get taken in — are being taken in — by those who peddle scientific conjecture as certainty. … Skepticism is still valuable in the face of scientific claims of certainty, particularly in the slippery realms of human behavior. The rise and fall of ‘sciences’ like Marxist history, Freudian psychology and Keynesian economics suggests that at least some of the beliefs and axioms treated as science today… will turn out to have little more validity than nude stick-pin somatotyping.” Do you find yourself more agreeing with that or disagreeing?
Beth Linker: I take issue with Rosenbaum’s definition of science. I mean, that’s a lot. I’d have to really dissect that, because he’s saying a lot there, and what do I agree with and what do I disagree with? I think when I read Rosenbaum’s piece now, he finds these photos and he says, “It’s just this bizarre pseudoscience.” And I don’t see the posture sciences as a bizarre pseudoscience. And it’s because, as a historian and then particularly a science historian, you always have to go back in time with the greatest humility and try to understand what the people on the ground thought they knew was true.
And that’s not to say… Because of what I do, I don’t have an ideal where there is a scientific theory that is devoid of some sort of culture, politics, or social concerns. I think there is good science, I think there is bad science. But at what time and in what place? That’s very important.
I don’t think it’s a pseudoscience. And indeed, what I find striking is that this linkage that was first articulated in the early 20th century — namely that poor posture will lead to disease or will lead to back pain — still stands today.
If you look around most media, if you look around even… I’ve done this search many times. NIH Human Resources probably has something like, “Stand up straight, sit up straight. It’s better for you.” Harvard Health, Mayo Clinic — you find that it’s omnipresent, this kind of health claim that actually there isn’t enough scientific evidence to prove that it is true. So instead of dismissing posture scientists in the past, in the way that I think Rosenbaum did, and just saying, “This is a ridiculous part of history” and kind of treat it as “Don’t we know so much better now?”…
Geoff Kabaservice: I mean, I am slouching right now, but I’m also slouching in my expensive ergonomic office chair, right? So ergonomics are still a very important part of what we think of as important, and it may be a legacy from this posture science.
Beth Linker: Yeah, it went out into the commercial marketplace. There’s a lot of money to be made. I think a lot of fitness industries and ergonomics shoes, undergarments…. Taylor Swift wore a posture bra for her Eras Tour, and now they’re like peddling that as the posture bra that every woman should have. There’s money to be made.
Geoff Kabaservice: But I also think a lot of people do believe very strongly that when they go to their Pilates class, they’re not in the thrall of some long-ago physical culture guru (which is who Pilates actually was). They’re doing something that is strengthening their core and is good for them. And if I’m not mistaken, you are a yoga instructor, and yoga is very posture-centric in many ways.
Beth Linker: Yes. I think that’s if people have a greater sense of well-being, go for it. I’m just saying that I think the claim that to… When you hear somebody say, “You should stand up straight. You should sit up straight” — if the belief is it’s because it will prevent all of these kind of things from happening, I don’t think we have the science to say that that’s necessarily true. And I think, indeed, it ends up being this kind of mantra that’s a remnant of the past that is incredibly stigmatizing. And I think it’s medicine masquerading as morality, unexamined morals, and distinctions between different kinds of people. It almost gets to the point of phrenology for the entire body. If you can’t sit up straight or stand up straight, that means you’re lazy. That means you’re not smart. That means you are lacking in all of these characteristics. And there are people with… We have different anatomies. The spine is very dynamic. There are people who can’t stand up straight for no fault of their own.
So I just find it curious that it still actually moves people. I would say that the most curious thing to me is that when I tell people I’m writing a book called Slouch, invariably they’re like, “Oh, I need to stand up straight and do this,” as if I’m standing there in judgment of them — and I’m not. But that itself is something very subtle, simple, yet loaded with a lot of meaning and a lot of assumptions that I, with my book, hope to examine a little bit and stop to think about why we have that reflex to do that.
Geoff Kabaservice: And your book definitely does make one think even about the simple act of sitting or standing straight. And it points to a whole world of historical — a whole new dimension of historical thinking that I had never really thought about before. So thank you so much for talking with me today, Beth Linker, and congratulations on your new book Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.
Beth Linker: Thanks so much for having me. It’s been fun.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.