‘We Did What We Were Told’: The ‘Compulsory Visibility’ and De-Empowerment of US College Women in Nude ‘Posture Pictures,’ 1880-1940

Abstract

It was a notorious, dreaded, rite of passage for new students at the Northeastern USA’s elite, all-female colleges. As part of a mandatory “posture” class focused on personal and physical refinement, female students were regularly weighed, rigorously measured, and photographed fully nude 50 times more often than their male counterparts. The information and the images were reported to the college’s state government and to the national Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Students were photographed repeatedly if their posture needed improvement. Almost everyone’s did. These images helped the ERO create a set of aspirant pre-World War II “norms” by which students (and society as a whole) were measured and scrutinized: that of the New England, WASP/Protestant-descended gentry. It also helped identify students with physical disabilities, who were deemed incompatible with the eugenics movement’s goal of “good breeding”, while encouraging young women (eugenics’ primarily mute actors) to have children to drown out the genes of “[t]he morally worst, the most deformed” (Lavater 99). Posture pictures also physically regulated female students so their access to higher education might not make them overly “masculinized”, independent, and resistant to their plights as mothers, socialites, and supporters of their husbands’ careers. The “compulsory visibility”, in Michel Foucault’s terms, of these women also expressed “disciplinary power” by affirming their innate subject-hood. Thus, this photographic practice assisted in the training of generations of college women to accept, rather than challenge, existing patriarchal power structures and gender-based behavioral expectations.

Keywords

• eugenics
• class
• posture
• photography
• Eugenics Record Office