At my very old-fashioned and now long-gone English girls’ school (with the motto: “pure and upright”), the most coveted award was a “position badge.” This coloured pin, worn at all times, was awarded only to those few pupils whose upright posture and general poise set an example throughout the school (surprisingly, this was in the 1980s, not the 1920s).
Now, after reading Beth Linker’s book, FlexibleI know exactly where that focus on behavior came from: “For much of the 20th century,” he writes, “Americans were told they were living through an epidemic of poor posture that, if left unchecked, would lead to widespread disease, 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 that gave rise to a 20th-century posture correction industry focused on public health campaigns and interventions for children and students.
The science of posture has almost entirely disappeared from view, though Linker notes that some aspects of it have been repurposed into a 21st-century “wellness” discipline. The Covid-19 pandemic, and all the changes associated with it, also prompted us to think more about how we sit: companies spent a fortune ensuring posture-friendly desk setups for homebound office workers during lockdowns.
This warning from employers is not new, as Linker reminds us: “Since the adoption of workers’ compensation laws in the early 20th century, chronic back pain has increased in prevalence and represents an increasing portion of disability claims in the industry.”
This account revives the vast and frankly wild lost history of posture panic. Because — spoiler alert — slouching does not lead to disease or death. Linker frames the 20th-century American obsession with good posture as an epidemic, though, as he acknowledges, “the historical actors featured in this book do not use that precise word.”
A true epidemic, he explains, is an event, not a trend. But what the posture scientists were doing, he argues, was “making visible a problem that was epidemic in scale.”
The panic over poor human posture has its roots in the advance of evolutionary theory in the late 19th century. Bipedalism was thought to have become a problem when upright humans began working at desks and in factories. Modern life was thought to encourage us to slouch.
That, in turn, made us susceptible to all sorts of debilitating diseases, most notably tuberculosis. It was also socially undesirable. The numerous and often shocking intersections of postural panic with racism, classism, eugenics, and ableism appear frequently in the book.
Linker highlights the fact that physically disabled people were at the bottom of the postural panic hierarchy. In the early 20th century, Jessie Bancroft, founder of the American Posture League (APL) and a key figure in Linker’s account, tested some 250,000 children in New York schools and found that 60 percent of them could not pass her basic postural test.
“In any case,” Linker writes, “disability dictated their hierarchy of positions more than race, class, or gender; ‘the most marked characteristics of idiots and the mentally handicapped,’ [Bancroft] He wrote, “are his collapsed posture and his imperfect bearing…’”
In some passages, Linker makes claims about the intentions of early posture activists that are not supported. The APL awarded badges to schoolchildren and students with “A-grade” 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 market it for the betterment of ‘civilized’ peoples, who were thought to be the only ones who suffered from poor posture.” Was the APL hoping to market Native American culture? We are given no further information.
Linker masterfully conveys how deeply rooted the science of posture was in the past, and how quickly it was forgotten. For decades, up until the 1960s, new students at many American universities were required to submit to photographs, often nude, to check their posture. It was, she says, “a routine and widely accepted tradition for much of the 20th century.” By the 1970s and 1980s, these photo repositories had become a liability for institutions, and many were quietly destroyed.
What struck me most about Linker’s account was the fact that several of the most famous and influential pioneers in the field of posture were women, who opportunistically claimed status and space by operating in this field outside of medicine.
Most memorable is the unstoppable Bancroft. I would read a full 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 during her teenage years.
After becoming 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 postural exercises but also table manners, handwashing, and English) as nothing less than “democracy in the making.”
Slouching: Postural panic in modern America By Beth Linker Princeton University Press £25/$29.95, 392 pages
Isabel Berwick is the presenter of the FT programme ‘Working on it’ podcaster and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’
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