Slouch, p.22
Slouch, page 22
Professional medical photographers advised extra caution when photographing female patients in the clinic, knowing they were the most likely to press charges. Male photographers were advised to have a female chaperone in the room when taking pictures of female patients. In the end, as historian Heidi Knoblauch demonstrates, more and more clinics ended up hiring female photographers in order to further insulate themselves against potential litigation.21
Posture clinics followed suit. But as Wayne University would learn by the late 1930s, female camera operators and chaperones did not placate all co-eds. In a highly publicized case brought before the Detroit Board of Education, three female Wayne University (now Wayne State University) students claimed that the mandatory posture photographs were “outrageous” and demanded that the board open an investigation. When interviewed by the Chicago Daily Tribune, Wayne University health director Dr. Irvin W. Sander claimed that the students’ health privacy had been fully protected: there was a nurse chaperone in the photography room and the students wore masks. Depicting these complainants as outliers, Sander told the Washington Post that out of the 1,350 photos he had taken, no other women had lodged a formal complaint about being photographed.22 The president of Wayne University sided with Sander, concluding, “I can’t see a thing to criticize about it. In fact, I believe [the posture program] to be a step forward in student health.”23
The demand for nudity upset Wayne University co-eds the most. By the mid-twentieth century, many professionals in the fields of physical education and physical medicine increasingly insisted that their subjects pose nude, maintaining that anatomical landmarks be in full view, unshrouded by clothing. Insisting on nudity served as a professional distancing technique, making the clothed examiner entirely distinct from and in command of the unclothed subject. When Wellesley College first adopted camera photography, it required its students to stand fully unclothed so that examiners could affix light aluminum pointers along the women’s spines and sternum, a technique used to better demarcate spinal curvature in the resultant photograph (see figure 37). This procedure, known as the “Wellesley Method,” was touted by physical educators as an advancement in scientific precision when it came to posture measurements.24 According to the creators of the method, the Wellesley Method eliminated discrepancies between examiners, measured posture “faults and merits impartially,” and prevented the examiner from basing the entire posture grade “on a single pronounced defect.” The authors of the original study distinguished their work from that of older methods (such as Mosher’s schematography), claiming that posture grades up to that point had been “subjective” and “unintentionally biased.”25
FIGURE 37. A physical education instructor at the University of Minnesota demonstrates the “Wellesley Method” of posture photography in 1934. The tell-tale sign of the Wellesley method is the use of aluminum pointers running up and down the examined subject’s spine. This image was published in the Minneapolis Tribune, which explains why the student is wearing a leotard rather than posing naked, as was demanded according to the rules of best practice.
The projection of scientific objectivity was particularly important for posture scientists on university campuses where college athletic departments grew exponentially after World War II, threatening the very existence of physical education. Additionally, some of the major tenets of posture science were coming under scrutiny not only from the wider medical community (especially in the wake of the pharmacological revolution), but also from factions within physical education and orthopedic medicine. Kenneth D. Miller, professor of physical education at Florida State, concluded a 1951 survey of posture research contending that there was a “bewildering lack of unanimity” among experts in the field, with no agreement about what constituted good posture or an agreed-upon method to measure it. He also noted growing doubt within the field about the ability of physical training to actually bring about meaningful change in body posture.26
Miller’s study built on several studies conducted by physiologically oriented physicians and orthopedists. The most extensive study, headed up by University of Pennsylvania cardiologist Louis B. Laplace and orthopedist Jesse T. Nicholson, found that posture correction did not uniformly bring about physiological benefits. Focusing on cardiac and pulmonary functioning, the authors found that “the results of correcting faulty posture differ widely between individuals irrespective of the grade of the defect.” In testing circulatory efficiency, they discovered that a corrected posture moderately improved blood flow in 50 percent of their subjects, but that in over 15 percent a “certain degree of postural slump” was far more advantageous than an erect posture.27
Dr. James Frederick Rogers, chief of the Division of Health and Physical Education in the U.S. Office of Education, also railed against the gospel of good posture. “Posture grading,” he insisted, “has been done essentially for aesthetic reasons.” “It is manifestly unfair to seriously compare children as regards posture,” he continued. “It would be just as unfair as to classify them as beautiful, plain, homely and ugly. We cannot standardize the human body.”28 Rogers insisted that the human spine was elastic, constructed to bend in all directions, and therefore should not be trained to maintain one singular erect position. He also disputed any correlation or causality between posture, physical health, and mental acuity. “To say that posture has any effect upon immunity,” he quipped, “is just a little absurd.” He further pointed to the fact that examiners would inevitably find “very delicate and stupid and immoral subjects at the A end of posture distribution and very vigorous, bright, and honorable children at the D side.”29 A physiologist by training, he believed that good food and rest were more important to health than posture training. His research led him, similar to Laplace and Nicholson, to question the assumption that erect posture improved respiration. In one study, he found that individuals who had let their arms hang loose by their sides demonstrated better lung functioning than those who adopted a stiff, erect posture.30
The growing criticism of the posture sciences during the mid-century years had the effect of making certain university educators more committed than ever to demonstrating the scientific worth of their programs. In schools such as Wellesley, where students could earn PhDs in physical education, dissertations devoted to posture exams abounded. In a 1943 survey of the field, two university physiologists claimed that the sheer volume of work devoted to the scientific establishment of posture programs in the U.S. “would require a monograph of large proportions.”31 Following this trend, many universities modernized their posture laboratories and clinics, replacing the old technologies of schematography and modesty drapery with camera technology and enforced nudity.
For the most part, white male students went along with the edict to shed their clothes. A 1948 Harvard graduate and veteran of the Second World War, Irving W. Knight adopted a fairly indifferent attitude toward the exam. “Nudity was a normal part of the college experience,” Knight reflected, recounting how at Harvard (and many other universities), men were expected to swim in races in the nude since it was believed to be more hygienic. From his years serving in the armed forces, Knight was accustomed to stripping naked for repeated physical exams. In many ways, the military normalized both male nudity and posture exams. Recalling his time as a World War II veteran, D. W. Schulenberg writes: “We were just in from Japan, mostly draftees, with two years in the service [and] a frontal [posture] picture was taken as part of the discharge procedure.”32 Knight himself said that “none of us gave [the posture exam] a second thought. We had been living lives without privacy for several years in the armed services.”33
Yet in taking white men as the norm, examiners gave relatively little thought to how more marginalized populations—women, minorities, or those with disabilities—might experience the exam differently than those who, by virtue of being part of the majority, enjoyed far greater autonomy and security in their daily lives. In a 1953 letter to her fiancé stationed overseas in the Korean War, Smith college senior Bonnie Sharpe wrote, “We had senior posture pictures the other day and the ordeal was positively traumatic!” “They’re always taken in the nude,” Bonnie continues, “and the idea of ‘dropping the sheet’ and posing is abhorrent.”34
Sharpe was not alone in her personal protest. In 1948, several Smith freshmen told the Hartford Courant that the exam was “ ‘grim!’ ” “First,” the students explained, “they make you wrap yourself up in a sheet, or maybe it’s a shower curtain, and you feel just like a Roman senator, and then they make you unwrap and they take your picture in your birthday suit.”35
Graduates from Pembroke College voiced similar feelings of degradation. Teresa Mellone (’39) described it as “such an embarrassing experience.” Ann M. C. Anderson (’59) depicted it as “nerve-wracking.” Finally, Elissa L. B. Arons (’66) recounted more of a collective unease about being “stripped to the waist,” saying, “We all had concerns that it was really—there was something uncomfortable about this whole thing.”36 In an attempt to explain why more women did not refuse to stand for these photos, Ulle Viiroja Holt (’66) blamed it on the fact that college women did not have the words to express feelings of violation or sexual harassment. Holt also pointed out that there was no academic process for women to safely protest and report abuses. “We were powerless,” said Holt. “We didn’t even have the language to talk to each other except, ‘Ew.’ ”37
University examiners scrutinized not only posture, but also the shape, size, and weight of students. Gloria Elizabeth Del Papa (Pembroke, ’46), an Italian American student who described herself as “overweight,” recalls the “great influence” the director of physical education, Bessie Rudd, had on her. “I can remember Miss Rudd throwing this thing [the silhouette photograph] … on the desk and saying, ‘You realize that this would make two of any other girl at Pembroke College.’ She was disgusted. She felt I was terrible [sic] overweight. Well, I was big, but I really wasn’t an obese monstrosity.”38 Speaking in an interview more than forty years after the fact, Del Papa said she felt generally unharmed by Rudd’s harsh words because she was preoccupied with her chosen extracurricular activities. Yet the way she was treated by Rudd and the institution after her posture photo was taken indicates that her extracurricular time may have suffered in order to make room for mandated weight loss efforts. Rudd “put me on diets constantly and sent me to the school psychiatrist—we used to have a school psychiatrist/psychologist—to see why I was overeating and all that. Because I never lost any weight. I just kept my merry way. So, there was a concerted effort to really make me lose weight.”
Minority students experienced a double bind, for they felt that they could not risk articulating any displeasure with the exam, even though some of them abhorred it. Expressing the need to fit into Pembroke in the late 1960s when there were only six Black students on campus, African American student Bernicestine McLeod Bailey (Pembroke, ’68) says about her posture photo: “I went along because I didn’t know what else to do.” “I guess I thought of it,” she continues, “as a crazy white thing.” The number of indignities that Black women experienced on predominantly Anglo-Saxon white campuses such as Pembroke likely made posing for nude posture photos just one more item in a long list of transgressions. Facing everything from outwardly racist white roommates to fraternity-sponsored minstrel shows, the Black students at Pembroke in the late 1960s largely remained silent, describing themselves as timid and shy, working hard to pretend that race was not a factor in their daily lives.39 Women such as Del Papa and Bailey likely felt powerless to refuse or question posture examinations, for as non-white women their voices were already marginalized and their bodies pathologized for not adhering to Eurocentric beauty standards.
Co-Eds Take Revenge
For many co-eds, the practice of posture photography amplified feelings of sexual anxiety in an era already rife with concerns about sexual deviancy and the place of the nude female body, particularly in the growing industry of popular pictorial magazines. Since the early twentieth century, popular magazines and advertisers utilized seminude images of women to sell products such as soap, corsets, and perfumes. Print media used the slang term “cheesecake” to describe the practice of covering the female body enough—but not too much—to make the mass-produced images of seminude women at once alluring and respectable. By the mid-twentieth century, magazines such as Life, Esquire, National Geographic, Ebony, and eventually Playboy and its African American counterpart Duke, pushed the notion of acceptability, exposing more and more flesh in the hopes of boosting circulation and ultimately creating what became known as “borderline material,” erotic imagery that, according to historian Joanne Meyerowitz, “stretched the gap between respectable cheesecake and illicit pornography.” The rise of the pinup girl, Meyerowitz argues, “moved images of women’s bodies from the margins of obscenity to the center of mainstream popular culture.”40
Leading up to the 1946 U.S. Supreme Court case of Hannegan v. Esquire, wherein the U.S. Post Office wished to revoke the second-class mailing privilege of Esquire magazine due to the perceived obscenity of Alberto Vargas’s pinup girls, women provided testimony in both opposition and support. Certain child welfare activists and social workers testified in favor of the magazine and its use of cheesecake, seeing the semi-clad woman as a progressive step toward shedding the repressive Victorian past. These women found the Vargas girls a fitting tribute to female beauty, which, they believed, would help the cause of women’s liberation. Only the truly abnormal onlooker would derive sexual pleasure from such images, they concluded. By contrast, the feminist activist Anna Kelton Wiley argued that such images degraded women and threatened the fight for equality by minimizing women, seeing them as little more than mere sexual objects.41
Similar disputes erupted when Ebony began to mass produce seminude images of Black women during the 1940s, but the arguments took place against the backdrop of entrenched racism and the centuries-long history of Black enslaved women being sexually exploited, having no right to privacy of their bodies. Some Black women, taking a stance similar to that of Howard University’s Maryrose Reeves Allen, believed that cheesecake helped to promote the idea of Black beauty, a form of resistance against the notion that only white women could be considered attractive. Others, however, worried that these images perpetuated racialized stereotypes of the animalistic, hypersexualized Black woman, and wished to place the blame on the immorality of white popular culture.42
Posture photography went far beyond the limits of cheesecake, or even borderline material. Even Playboy and Duke, both of which challenged the limits of borderline material by including images of bare female breasts in the immediate postwar years, still covered the female genitals.43 It is thus little surprise that college-age women who were forced to pose entirely naked for these photographs felt exposed and violated.
Nude posture photos may have been acceptable, at least for a time, if it were not for the inadequacy of university safeguards, measures that would have protected the photographs, negatives, and identities of the students standing in the frame. Posture photos were stolen, either in reality or according to rumor, and this made college co-eds worry about their own social status if their photos were to fall into the possession of a male student. Exactly what, after all, was the difference between a Playboy or Duke centerfold and a university nude posture photo, with a co-ed’s name attached to it, freely circulating among college fraternity houses? To university co-eds, there was a world of difference.
Reading against the grain, one can see co-eds taking up subtle and covert forms of resistance in the published and archival records. In creative ways, co-eds chipped away at the veneer of objective professionalism that physical educators and physicians liked to project. They did so by refusing to accept that the photos were, to use the words of Dr. Sander from Wayne University, “as impersonal as a clinical examination.”44 They insisted on the sexual nature of the photos, not in the way that male students did, but in a way that would bring the entire pursuit into question.
Take, for example, a cartoon in a 1950 issue of the Vassar Chronicle, which depicts—through parody—the nude posture photograph as a prop in heterosexual courting (see figure 38). In the image, the female Vassar student pulls away from Arnold’s attempt at physical intimacy, a model of masculine aggressiveness being countered by feminine restraint. Her demure gaze, upright posture, crossed ankles, tidy pin-curled hair, and starched blouse all indicate that she is, as marriage and dating guides recommended, in control of this physical encounter. Her response—“But Arnold, I hardly feel I know you well enough to exchange posture pictures”—while humorous, also points to the premium placed on female modesty. Co-eds needed simultaneously to flaunt and protect their breasts and genitals from male onlookers. For the unmarried woman looking to attract a potential spouse, form-fitting sweaters and skirts signaled a proper degree of flirtatiousness. But if the co-ed moved in the direction of exposing too much skin, of baring her breasts and genitals entirely, then she risked sullying her reputation and social standing. The line between harlot and appropriately attractive was very thin, making the concealment of certain fleshy parts of the female body a high-stakes matter. In this context, a misplaced posture photo, whether in reality or rumor, could tip the reputational balance for a woman who ultimately had no control over the situation.
