At my very old-fashioned, now very defunct, English girls’ school (motto: “pure and upright”), the most coveted prize was a “position badge”. This coloured pin, worn at all times, was awarded only to those few pupils whose upright posture and overall poise set an example across the school. (Amazingly, this was the 1980s, not the 1920s.)
Now, having read Beth Linker’s Slouch, I know exactly where that focus on deportment came from: “For much of the twentieth century,” she writes, “Americans were told that they were living through a poor posture epidemic that, if left unchecked, would lead to widespread illness, disability, and even death.”
This book is about the US but, as a historian of medicine and disability and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Linker has uncovered a decades-long international panic, spawning a 20th-century posture correction industry focused on public health campaigns and interventions on children and students.
Posture science has almost totally disappeared from view, although Linker notes that some aspects of it have had a 21st-century “wellness” rebrand. The Covid-19 pandemic, and all its associated changes, also led us to think more about how we sit: companies spent a fortune on ensuring posture-friendly desk set-ups for office workers stuck at home during lockdowns.
This employer caution is not new, as Linker reminds us: “Since the adoption of worker’s compensation laws back in the early twentieth century, chronic back pain grew in prevalence, accounting for an ever-greater portion of disability claims in industry.”
This account revives the vast, and frankly wild, lost history of the posture panic. Because, spoiler alert, slouching doesn’t lead to disease and death. Linker frames 20th-century America’s obsession with good posture as an epidemic, even though, as she acknowledges, “the historical actors featured in this book do not use that precise word”.
A true epidemic, she explains, is an event, not a trend. But what the posture scientists were doing, she contends, was making “visible a problem that was epidemic in scale”.
The panic about poor human posture was rooted in the advance of evolutionary theory in the late 19th century. It was thought that bipedalism became a problem when upright humans started to work at desks and in factories. Modern life, it was thought, encouraged us to slouch.
That in turn made us susceptible to all sorts of debilitating diseases, notably tuberculosis. It was also socially undesirable. The many, often shocking, intersections of the posture panic with racism, classism, eugenics and ableism all feature heavily in the book.
Linker spotlights the fact that people with a physical disability were at the very bottom of the hierarchy in the posture panic. In the early 20th century, Jessie Bancroft, founder of the American Posture League (APL) and a key character in Linker’s account, tested some 250,000 children in New York schools and concluded that 60 per cent of them could not pass her baseline posture test.
“If anything,” Linker writes, “disability dictated her posture hierarchy more than race, class or gender did; ‘the most marked characteristics of idiots and mental defectives,’ she [Bancroft] wrote, ‘are their collapsed posture and imperfect carriage . . . ’”
In some places, Linker makes assertions about the early posture campaigners’ intent that aren’t backed up. The APL awarded badges to schoolchildren and students with “grade A” posture. One, from 1917, depicts a Native American man. Linker says in the caption: “This artifact speaks to the ways in which the APL glorified ‘primitivism’ and hoped to commercialize it for the betterment of ‘civilized’ peoples, who were thought to alone suffer from poor posture.” Was the APL hoping to commercialise Native American culture? We are given no further information.
Linker expertly conveys just how embedded posture science once was — and how quickly it was forgotten. For decades, until the 1960s, new students at many US universities were required to present themselves to be photographed, usually naked, to check their posture. It was, she says, “a routinized, largely accepted tradition for much of the twentieth century”. By the 1970s and 1980s, these caches of photographs had become a problem for institutions, and many were quietly destroyed.
What surprised me most in Linker’s account was the fact that several of the most famous and influential posture pioneers were women. They opportunistically claimed status and space by operating in this area at the medical margins.
Most memorable is the unstoppable Bancroft. I would read a whole biography of this unusual — and now #problematic — woman. A physical educator by training, she had grown up in the remote Midwest as a “self-proclaimed invalid” and had been exposed to posture exercises as an adolescent.
After she became assistant director of physical education for New York’s public schools in 1904, Bancroft described her department’s work with immigrant children — teaching not only posture exercises but table manners, handwashing and English — as no less than “democracy in the making”.
Slouch: Posture Panic In Modern America by Beth Linker Princeton University Press £25/$29.95, 392 pages
Isabel Berwick is host of the FT’s ‘Working It’ podcast and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here