The Bad Politics of Bad Posture

Strangers try to fix my posture. According to them, my shoulders slump, and my neck protrudes on a diagonal, as though I’m constantly reading a book or peering down at a phone screen. My critics come in different shapes and sizes. A chirping young woman at a Brooklyn party asked, “Why can’t you stand up straight?” Once, at a friend’s wedding, the bride’s elderly grandfather pushed my head into alignment with my spine, like Sisyphus rolling a boulder uphill. I am a 33-year-old adult, but in these moments I become a little boy in need of correction.

None of these people believe that they are insulting me. What they want to do is help. If I stood upright, they tell me, I would project a sense of assuredness and capability. My back must ache—it doesn’t? It will soon. Have I tried a standing desk, Pilates, deep-tissue massage? They would never suggest orthodontia to a man with crooked incisors. Posture, though, occupies another realm: It leads us to not only make assumptions about people, their backgrounds, and their psychologies, but also to police their bodies, in a way that reveals more about the critics than the criticized.

As Beth Linker, professor of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, makes clear in her robust, often astonishing new book, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America, erect carriages are markers of American conformity. Midcentury universities ran posture pageants that named students “posture queens” and (less frequently) “posture kings.” At Columbia Teachers’ College, students with perfect posture were appointed “posture police,” whose job it was to stalk the halls and hand out badges to classmates who let their stances relax.

Spines vary naturally from person to person—yet posture has always been judged using rigid metrics. Linker shows how ableism threaded the country’s social fabric and wove into its growing industries, among them garment and furniture manufacturing and more recently pharmaceuticals. Her book’s remarkable sweep binds a piece of over-discussed and under-substantiated medicine to both broad currents and specific phenomena of the past century, from racism and feminist reform to Buster Brown shoes and the lumbar-supporting chair. A strict ideal of good posture has become essentially universal, but this is hardly a sign of scientific progress: It’s an indicator of how societal pressures drove huge swaths of people to embrace a falsehood.

The scientific research on posture and its implications for general health has always been murky. Early twentieth-century orthopedist Joel E. Goldthwait claimed that poor posture could lead “to tuberculosis, nervous disease, acute mental disorder, as well as hyper-glandular disturbances … and many intestinal disorders.” A common conception today that hunching relates to lower back pain is similarly contentious, and has been all but discredited by recent studies.

The assumptions underlying the posture craze anticipated those of future health fads. At the root of posture science was a desire to learn more about the development of early Homo sapiens, after Charles Darwin suggested in The Descent of Man (1871) that prehumans became bipedal before their brains began to grow. Thanks to a bigoted belief that contemporary nomadic peoples, often cast in the Eurocentric archetype of “noble savages,” bore more evolutionary similarities to early humans, they were touted as both missing links in the chain of evolution—ripe for study by Westerners—and time capsules whose upstanding postures weren’t bowed by the weight of modernity.

Countless twenty-first-century wellness treatments have refurbished the same logic with more politically correct trimmings, appealing to an enduring misapprehension that early humans lacked health problems. Barefoot running is an obvious instance of this fixation on the imagined primitive, and so is the standing desk—based on the notion that sitting is unnatural and that people from pre-civilization were iron men who walked and stood constantly, which somehow made them pain-free. Relatedly, the Paleo diet attempts to recreate the nutrition of Stone Age humans because, as Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health notes in an overview of the weight-loss regimen, “Paleo proponents state that our genetics and anatomy have changed very little since the Stone Age, [so] we should eat foods available during that time to promote good health.” The article mentions an important and bizarrely overlooked point: “The life expectancy of our predecessors was only a fraction of that of people today.”

Encouraging bountiful health was always an afterthought of our nation’s posture panic. Concern with posture doubled as a thin pretext for helping American businesses grow and flourish. Take the corset trade, which floundered in the early twentieth century due to changing fashions and feminist opposition. Recasting corsets as supportive medical braces maintained a consumer base—manufacturers eventually managed to market the traditionally feminine article as abdominal supports for World War II soldiers. Orthopedic shoes and ergonomic seating similarly offered lucrative entrepreneurial opportunities. At their most successful, posture-conscious items could transcend their medical roots and become established in the vocabulary of consumer society—for instance, the Norfolk jacket, which was initially designed to ensure good posture hygiene in boys and by the 1930s had developed into the ubiquitous sports coat.

Opportunists used posture and its veneer of medical importance to distinguish their products in a crowded marketplace. Storied Boston department store Filene’s urged children to come in twice a year for check-ups on their foot growth, while the salespeople at the aforementioned Buster Brown were advertised as “scientifically trained”—in addition to checking the fit of the shoes on child clients, they gave each kid a posture exam.

A new focus on prophylactic care, in conjunction with the expansion of public health initiatives, held a purpose beyond raising the bottom line: Reformers attempted to incorporate and embrace posture hygiene as a vector for uplifting Black people and women in a world that looked at them as inferior. Influential newspaper The Baltimore Afro-American published a health column in 1937 that decried what it called the “stoop-shouldered” bearing of young Black people; one decade later, the publication’s purview had expanded to style pieces with headlines like, “Newest Fall Fashions Demand Good Posture.”

Certain Black doctors took up the cause as integral to bodily well-being, while prominent voices in the community linked posture to the cultivation of a cultural consciousness. In the 1930s, Charles H. Williams, the first Black physical educator at the Hampton Institute—an HBCU now called Hampton University—melded posture training and dance instruction while drawing on both African tradition and slavery-era choreography. Maryrose Reeves Allen, professor at Howard University from 1925 to 1967, knit discussions of Black history and the legacies of enslavement, Jim Crow, and the ongoing reality of segregation into courses on such topics as “Body Aesthetics” and “Body Sculpture Through Movement.” To generations of Black college students, Reeves presented ideas of beauty that existed outside of the norms of racist white America. Yet she propagated narrow understandings of good posture, and her desire to create standardized scales of facial elegance, physique, and range of expression among women was hardly a liberating proposition.

And even if standing up straight didn’t really offer social advancement for the oppressed, the wider effects of posture consciousness created jobs. The boom in shoe manufacturing, as upper-class women began to buy “sensible” footwear for certain occasions while saving high heels for others, meant that less well-heeled women were able to get work: In the early twentieth century, the boot and shoe industry was rivaled only by textile manufacturing as an employer of women, who were increasingly hired as buyers and store managers too. Progress was in reach, as long as someone more powerful could profit from it. Being a “posture queen” was never a ticket out of subjugation. But filling a niche in the sprawling business ecosystem that thrived around the myth of good posture could allow white women, at least, to make some headway when other paths were blocked.

Slouch begins and ends with seeing the powerful stark naked. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum revealed in 1995, in an essay for The New York Times Magazine, that he had found a substantial collection of photographs of nude undergraduates stored in an archive of papers at the Smithsonian. These pictures, open to public viewership, included photos of George H.W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Diane Sawyer, and other celebrities who attended prestigious colleges in an era when all freshmen were photographed in the buff—a ritual universities instituted amid early twentieth-century posture mania. Protest movements in the 1960s and early ’70s put an end to this practice, and many universities, responding to the outcry of alumni who feared for their privacy, destroyed posture photographs throughout the subsequent decades. But in the Smithsonian, some of these pictures still gathered dust as the century of posture panic rushed to its close, a cache of little emperors with no clothes.

In one important way, such images did prove scientifically useful, as Gretchen Dieck, Ph.D. student at Yale’s School of Public Health, showed in 1976. She wanted to use posture photographs from Smith College as part of a study that intended, Linker writes, “to determine whether young women who had detectable spinal deviations in their late teens and early twenties had an increased likelihood of back pain and other musculoskeletal disabilities later in life.” The answer was no: Dieck discovered that 70 percent of the young women she observed had “postural aberrations,” but that these “bodily asymmetries” did not predict other health problems and that even scoliosis, which provoked terror among children and parents for decades, played a merely minor part in the development of spinal pain later in life. The health liability of having bad posture was negligible, a reversal of decades of conventional wisdom.

Dieck completed her dissertation in the nick of time. Facing the indignation of potential donors, some of whom only learned that their posture photographs had been preserved when they got wind of Dieck’s research, the university incinerated the photos. And years later the Smithsonian, under widespread pressure thanks to Rosenbaum’s exposé, did the same.

Similar tales occurred at universities across the country. Colleges could not undo the damage that posture photography had wreaked on young psyches, even if they stopped it from harming future undergraduates. And many other such caches survived this purge: Rosenbaum found 122 boxes containing posture photographs of those who were subjected to the same humiliating custom—but these subjects had their naked figures captured for posterity because they were inmates in, for example, New York and Oregon state prisons. “In other words,” Linker summarizes, “photographs of historically more vulnerable populations remain in the archive, while the images of white elites have been actively erased.”

The history of posture science, and of evolutionary science at large, is full of instances in which disadvantaged, disabled, and nonwhite people have been used as research specimens. Yet the value of good posture has become a commonplace, and an entire economy has arisen from its salubrious promise. How to rid ourselves of such a brittle formulation that has spent 150 years becoming more and more ingrained in our culture? We would need to dispense with the very concept that a correct human anatomy exists. In our capitalist status quo, this would mean floating a potentially more marketable proposition: We could celebrate a diversity of people, rather than upholding the elusive, abusive paradigm of corporeal perfection.