For decades, the idea of standing has carried considerable political and social baggage. Slouching was considered a sign of decadence.
In the early 20th century, posture exams became mainstays in the military, workplaces, and schools, thanks in part to the American Posture League, a group of doctors, educators, and officials of health formed in 1914. In 1917, a study found that about 80 percent of Harvard freshmen had poor posture. Manufacturers came together with posture-enhancing chairs, products and gadgets.
But current science doesn’t support conventional wisdom about good posture, says Beth Linker in her new book, “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.” Dr. Linker, a historian and sociologist of science at the University of Pennsylvania, recently gave an interview to the New York Times; The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Delighted to meet you.
Your posture seems pretty good. And that doesn’t matter, that’s the whole point of my book. This is fake news.
Is our obsession with good posture fake news? I’m out of the woods!
Concern about posture, as a matter of etiquette, has been around since the Age of Enlightenment, if not before, but poor posture only became a scientific and medical obsession after the publication of “On the Origin of Species » by Darwin in 1859. He asserted that humans evolved by natural selection and that the first thing to develop was bipedalism; in other words, standing preceded brain development.
This idea was controversial because convention taught that a superior intellect distinguished humans from nonhuman animals, and it now appeared that only a simple physical difference, located at the spine and feet, separated humanity from apes. .
In other words, poor posture was primitive.
In fact, quite the opposite. Poor posture was thought to primarily affect “civilized” individuals, that is, people who no longer engaged in physical labor but instead enjoyed the fruits of mechanized transportation, industrialization, and leisure.
With the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century, some scientists began to fear that the carelessness of “civilized” peoples could lead to degeneration, a setback in human progress. Posture correction became an integral part of “race improvement” projects, particularly for white Anglo-Saxon men, but also for middle-class women and blacks attempting to gain political rights and equity. Bad posture has become stigmatized and defined as a disability. As I show in my book, people with postural “defects” were routinely discriminated against in the workplace, in educational institutions, and in U.S. immigration offices. Disabled people did not benefit from any legal protection at the time.
It was also a time when doctors and public health officials began to focus more on disease prevention to control the spread of infectious contagions like tuberculosis. Good posture was considered an effective way to avoid life-threatening injuries…
