Slouch

Posture Panic in Modern America

By: Beth Linker

Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow

This audiobook narrated by Laurel Lefkow recounts the strange and surprising history of the so-called epidemic of bad posture in modern America—from eugenics and posture pageants to today’s promoters of “paleo posture”

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century’s worth of nude “posture” photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America’s largely forgotten posture panic—a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences. Tracing the rise and fall of this socially manufactured epidemic, Slouch also tells how this period continues to feed today’s widespread anxieties about posture.

In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement and fears of disability gave slouching a new scientific relevance. Bad posture came to be seen as an individual health threat, an affront to conventional race hierarchies, and a sign of American decline. What followed were massive efforts to measure, track, and prevent slouching and, later, back pain—campaigns that reached schools, workplaces, and beyond, from the creation of the American Posture League to posture pageants. The popularity of posture-enhancing products, such as girdles and lumbar supports, exploded, as did new fitness programs focused on postural muscles, such as Pilates and modern yoga. By 1970, student protests largely brought an end to school posture exams and photos, but many efforts to fight bad posture continued, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

A compelling history that mixes seriousness and humor, Slouch is a unique and provocative account of the unexpected origins of our largely unquestioned ideas about bad posture.

©2024 Beth Linker (P)2024 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“Slouch is a gripping read that made me sit up a little straighter in my chair—and taught me how that very impulse, while no longer imposed by campus medical inspectors or stiff ‘posture fashion,’ has come to be so ingrained in the American psyche. Our attitudes about health, beauty, ability, race, and more are vividly, and often surprisingly, revealed through how we have surveilled the shape of our spines. Beth Linker’s rigorous and accessible history illuminates our culture, politics, and society.”—Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession

“From a preeminent historian of disability, Slouch lights up the corners where ableism still lurks. Inventive, persuasive, and important, Beth Linker’s wide-ranging book follows the curves of American posture science through the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. This book is ardently needed—to support more liberatory notions of beauty, belonging, power, consent, and what it means to be human.”—Laura Stark, author of Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research

“Who would have thought that slouching could be so riveting? Acclaimed historian Beth Linker has written an enthralling account of posture, prejudice, panic, and disability. Essential reading for anyone curious about bodies.”—Joanna Bourke, author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers