Slouch, p.34
Slouch, page 34
116. Martha H. Verbrugge, Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. See also Rachel Louise Moran, Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
117. For more on the history of university students as research subjects, see Heather Munro Prescott, Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). For the growth of university physical education department, see Verbrugge, Active Bodies, and Moran, Governing Bodies.
118. Popular magazines and journals often made reference to Metropolitan Life’s posture exam. For one example, see Helen Durham and Barbara Beattie, “Are You Graceful or Awkward?,” Ladies’ Home Journal 49, no. 1 (January 1932): 24, 62. For some examples of Met Life brochures on posture, see The Importance of Posture (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 1927); Posture from the Ground Up (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 1939); Standing Up to Life: Good Posture and Foot Health (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 1954). Met Life relied heavily on nurses to conduct many of these physical exams. See Diane Hamilton, “Cost of Caring: The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s Visiting Nurse Service, 1909–1953,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 414–34; Patricia D’Antonio, Nursing with a Message: Public Health Demonstration Projects in New York City (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017).
Chapter Three: Posture Commercialization
1. Charles E. Rosenberg, “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective,” in Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 278–92. See also Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
2. Rosenberg, “What Is an Epidemic?,” 279.
3. See Elizabeth Toon, “Managing the Conduct of the Individual Life: Public Health Education and American Public Health, 1910 to 1940” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998); Nancy Tomes, “Merchants of Health: Medicine and Consumer Culture in the United States, 1900–1940,” Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (September 2001): 519–47; Nancy Tomes, Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
4. For more on Foucault’s theory about docile bodies—and more specifically the practice of docility-utility, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), especially 135ff. According to Foucault, body work began with in the eighteenth-century military, an en masse pursuit with military officers disciplining the soldier’s body, molding a piece of formless clay into a machine with high heads and erect posture. By the nineteenth century, he argues, body work came under the purview of “the disciplines,” professionals who engaged in so-called “docility-utility,” coercively manipulating bodies to become more economically efficient and to promote “internal organization.”
5. “Finds Chairs Add to the Ills of Man: Dr. Eliza M. Mosher Tells Posture League Few Persons Sit in Correct Positions,” New York Times, March 14, 1915, 9.
6. Witold Rybczynski, Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 54.
7. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2, no 1 (February 1973): 77.
8. Dudley Allen Sargent, “The Physical Test of a Man,” American Physical Education Review 26, no.1 (April 1921): 188.
9. George J. Fisher, “The American Posture League,” Journal of Health and Physical Education 6, no. 8 (October 1935): 16–17.
10. The most detailed account of the working relationship between industry and the APL can be found in B MS c 81.2, File “American APL,” Zabdiel Boylston Adams Papers, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, Boston. Adams was in charge of the “shoe committee” for the APL, and his papers contain correspondence with both the League and dozens of shoe manufacturers who sought the League’s endorsement.
11. E. H. Bradford and J. S. Stone, “The Seating of School Children,” Transactions of the American Orthopedic Association: Thirteenth Session, vol. 12 (Philadelphia: American Orthopedic Association, 1899), 170–83. The authors provide a history of physician-based research into school seating dating back to the early nineteenth century.
12. Robin Veder, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 190–93. See also M. Uribe y Troncoso, “Influence of Different Kinds of Handwriting on the Hygienic Posture and Deformities of School Children,” Public Health Papers and Reports 31, pt. 1 (1905): 182–86. For more on the history of handwriting, see Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
13. Bradford and Stone, “The Seating of School Children,” 175.
14. R. Tunstall Taylor, “Lateral Curvature of the Spine,” American Physical Education Review 9, no. 3 (September 1904): 192.
15. Rodris Roth, “Nineteenth-Century American Patent Furniture,” in Innovative Furniture in America from 1800 to the Present, ed. David A. Hanks (New York: Horizon Press, 1981), 23–46.
16. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 393.
17. And yet it is important to unmask such histories since, as disability and design historian Bess Williamson demonstrates, accessible design is inherently inclusive. Adaptive features often enhance user experience, allowing for individual variations, assisting disabled and nondisabled bodies alike. Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (New York: New York University Press, 2019). See also Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
18. Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, Fatigue Study, The Elimination of Humanity’s Greatest Unnecessary Waste (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1916), 100.
19. Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Fatigue Study, 99.
20. Daniel E. Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
21. Henry Moskowitz, “The Joint Board of Sanitary Control in the Cloak, Suit and Skirt Industry of New York City,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 44 (November 1912): 39–58.
22. Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 212–20. See also Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies.
23. George Price, “Joint Board of Sanitary Control: Ten Years of Progress,” in Ten Years of Industrial Sanitary Self Control: Tenth Annual Report of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control in the Cloak, Suit, and Skirt and Dress and Waist Industries (New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, 1921), 13.
24. Theresa Wolfson, “Health Education,” in Eleventh Annual Report of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control in the Cloak, Suit, and Skirt and Dress and Waist Industries (New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, 1922), 19–21.
25. Theresa Wolfson, “Health Education,” 21.
26. “Posture at Work: Influence of Occupation and Height of Furniture upon the Chest and Spine,” Iron Age 99, no. 15 (April 1917): 930.
27. Harold Mestre, “Seating of Women and Minors in the Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry of California,” Industrial Welfare Commission, State of California, Bulletin no. 2a (Sacramento: California Printing Office, 1919), 141.
28. Hilles, Edith, and Wilhelmina Conger. “Attempts to Standardize Seating in Industry.” In Industrial Posture and Seating, prepared by the Bureau of Women in Industry, State of New York Department of Labor, Special Bulletin 104 (April 1921): 40.
29. Hilles and Conger, “Attempts to Standardize Seating in Industry,” 42.
30. Minnesota, Ohio, Kansas, and eventually New York were among the first to require seat backs. See Hilles and Conger, “Attempts to Standardize Seating in Industry,” 36.
31. Frances Perkins, foreword to Industrial Posture and Seating, prepared by the Bureau of Women in Industry, State of New York Department of Labor, Special Bulletin 104 (April 1921): 1.
32. Hilles and Conger, “Attempts to Standardize Seating in Industry.”
33. Only three states at the time—Minnesota, Ohio, and New York—had laws that required work chairs to have back rests. See Nelle Swartz, “Industrial Posture and Seating,” in Proceedings of the National Safety Council, Tenth Annual Safety Congress (Chicago: National Safety Council, 1921), 845–51.
34. George Price, “Defective Seating, Faulty Posture Health,” in Twelfth Annual Report of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control in the Cloak, Suit, and Skirt and Dress and Waist Industries (New York: Joint Board of Sanitary Control, 1923), 35–36.
35. For more on the American Windsor chair, see Rybczynski, Now I Sit Me Down, 87–100.
36. Joel E. Goldthwait, “The Importance of Correct Furniture to Assist in the Best Body Function, as Recognized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Smith College,” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery 5, no. 2 (April 1923): 179–84. See also “Corrective Posture Chair, Plimpton Scofield Co.,” Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office 295 (February 1922): 457.
37. Goldthwait, “The Importance of Correct Furniture.”
38. Arthur B. Emmons and Joel E. Goldthwait, “A Work Chair,” Journal of Industrial Hygiene 3, no. 5 (September 1921): 154.
39. Theresa Wolfson, “Seating Survey in the Garment Industry,” Nation’s Health 5, no. 3 (March 1923): 165–68.
40. The German Bureau of Economy and Efficiency came to similar conclusions, designing work chairs similar to that designed by Goldthwait and his colleagues. For more, see Jennifer Karns Alexander, “Efficiency and Pathology: Mechanical Discipline and Efficient Worker Seating in Germany, 1929–1932,” Technology and Culture 47, no. 2 (April 2006): 286–310.
41. John Daly McCarthy, Health and Efficiency (New York: Henry Holt, 1922), 50.
42. “Gives Benches for Parks: APL Presents Seats Built upon Hygienic Lines,” New York Times, March 11, 1917, 14.
43. Henry Eastman Bennett, an efficiency engineer who began his career at the College of William and Mary, was hired by the American Seating Company in the early 1920s. Bennett offers a description of his and the company’s work in Henry Eastman Bennett, “Some Requirements of Good School Seating,” Elementary School Journal 23, no. 3 (November 1922): 203–14.
44. Arthur B. Emmons, “Organized Preventive Medicine Is Nowhere More Effectual than as Applied to Industrial Groups,” Nation’s Health 6, no. 1 (January 1924): 8–9, 74.
45. Emmons and Goldthwait, “A Work Chair.”
46. Alexander, “Efficiency and Pathology,” 309.
47. Edward Tenner, Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), especially chapter 5.
48. For more on the history of flat feet, see Beth Linker, “Feet for Fighting: Locating Disability and Social Medicine in First World War America,” Social History of Medicine 20, no. 1 (April 2007): 91–109.
49. Henry Ling Taylor, American APL, New York, to Zabdiel Boylston Adams, Boston, November 26, 1913 in Box “American APL,” File “1913–1914,” Zabdiel Boylston Adams Papers, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, Boston.
50. “Inventor’s Profile: Charles F. Brannock,” Smithsonian Institution, accessed August 13, 2020, https://invention.si.edu/sites/default/files/Kid-friendly-Inventor-Profile-Charles-Brannock.pdf.
51. The superintendent of Boston City Hospital had begun to keep records on the number of nursing workdays lost due to foot complaints. In 1892, an aggregate of forty-two days was lost. In 1893, 125 days, and so on.
52. Robert W. Lovett, “The Occurrence and Prevention of Flat-Foot among City Hospital Nurses,” Medical and Surgical Reports of the Boston City Hospital 7, no. 1 (1896): 94.
53. Despite all his research, Lovett could not pin down what caused foot disability. He concluded that “the only reliable information obtained in these cases was given by the imprints seen through glass. A foot with a well distributed pressure area seemed rather less likely to give trouble than one resting on two islands.… A flat foot may be perfectly serviceable, as may also a severely pronated one, while an apparently well-balanced foot may become painful.” Robert W. Lovett, “Occurrence of Painful Affections of the Feet among Trained Nurses,” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery s2-1, no. 1 (August 1903): 60. For a history of how flat feet became a disability, see Linker, “Feet for Fighting.”
54. Lovett, “Occurrence of Painful Affections of the Feet,” 54.
55. William H. Mulligan Jr., “Mechanization and Work in the American Shoe Industry: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1852–1883,” Journal of Economic History 41, no. 1 (March 1981): 59–63.
56. Frank P. Aborn, Aborn and Co., Lynn, MA, to Zabdiel Boylston Adams, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, March 18, 1914, File “American APL,” Zabdiel Boylston Adams Papers, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, Boston.
57. Aborn to Boylston Adams, March 18, 1914.
58. For an excellent discussion of the dialectic between decadence and primitivism, see Elisa F. Glick, “Harlem’s Queer Dandy: African-American Modernism and the Artifice of Blackness,” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 414–42.
59. Joe Marr, “Growing Interest in Foot Remedies,” Boot and Shoe Recorder (January 22, 1916): 64.
60. “The Orthopedic Department,” Boot and Shoe Recorder (January 22, 1916): 75–76.
61. See, for example, a series of articles authored by orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Herman W. Marshall, the first of which was “What Do You Know about Feet?,” Boot and Shoe Recorder (April 15, 1922): 108–10.
62. Nancy Rexford, Women’s Shoes in America, 1795–1930 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000).
63. “Something New and Vital in Shoes,” Display Advertisement, New York Times, March 30, 1919, 41.
64. “At Last—a ‘Human’ Shoe!,” Display Advertisement, American Physical Education Review 25, no. 1 (January 1920): 127.
65. Glick, “Harlem’s Queer Dandy.”
66. Henry B. Scates, Boston, to Zabdiel Boylston Adams, Boston, March 16, 1914, Box “American APL,” File “1913 and 1914,” Zabdiel Boylston Adams Papers, Harvard University, Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.
67. For an example of Buster Brown and its promise of posture exams in the African American press, see “Buster Brown,” Display Advertisement 10, New York Amsterdam News, September 16, 1950, 3. For an account of labor conditions at the Brown Shoe Company, see “Brown Shoe Company, Inc. History,” International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 68 (London: St. James Press, 2005), http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/brown-shoe-company-inc-history/. For the Brown Shoe Company’s employment and exploitation of little people, see Jerry Maren, who played one of the “munchkins” in The Wizard of Oz film and worked for the Brown Shoe Company. See Stephen Cox, The Munchkins of Oz, 3rd ed. (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2002), 107. For more on how shoe stores at this time appealed to science and children, especially through the fluoroscope (X-ray technology applied in shoe fitting), see Jacalyn Duffin and Charles R. R. Hayter, “Baring the Sole: The Rise and Fall of the Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope,” Isis 91, no. 2 (June 2000): 260–82.
68. Edith Abbott, “Women in Industry: The Manufacture of Boots and Shoes,” American Journal of Sociology 15, no. 3 (November 1909): 335–60.
69. “Retail Shoe Women’s Symposium,” Boot and Shoe Recorder (May 13, 1922): 78–80, quote on 79. For percent increase in women workers, see “Retail Shoe Women’s Symposium,” 80.
70. Antioch College, The Effects of Modern Shoes upon Proper Body Mechanics, 1924–1931 (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch College, 1931). According to this report, Antioch Shoes became a mainstay in several hospitals where superintendents of nursing reported improved efficiency and less foot trouble among student nurses. The cost of the shoes ranged from $7.25 to $10.50. Antioch was concerned with making an “economical” shoe, but not a “cheap” one that would break down and need frequent replacement. The study estimated that student nurses needed to replace their Antioch Shoes approximately twice per year.
71. See “Forget Your Feet Because Antioch Didn’t,” Display Advertisement, Saturday Review, October 24, 1942, 47. See also Antioch College’s pamphlet “Walk in Beauty” (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch College, 1941).
72. L. E. La Fetra, “The Relation of Clothing to Posture,” Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the American School Hygiene Association, vol. 6 (New York: American School Hygiene Association, 1917), 117–21.
73. Michael Hau, The Cult of Hygiene and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
