The Rise and Fall of American Posture

Abstract

THE DECLINE OF ONCE-FERVENT STANDARDS is always an interesting historical phenomenon. Stand up straight; Get your elbows off the table; If you're not careful, you'll grow up like once echoed through American homes. While the advice still lingers in obscure corners, there is no question that the American population has relaxed its collective backbone. Robert Bork used posture decline as the symbol for a larger decay of national standards in his recent book, Slouching towards Gomorrah.1 In their heyday, posture concerns were partly symbolic, so it is not inappropriate to interpret their relaxation in the same light, without reducing the slackening of standards to a Borkian jeremiad. From another, less political vantage point, some contemporary doctors are wondering whether contemporary Americans have not pushed the neglect of posture too far, reducing their capacity to deal with injuries and painful back problems in an increasingly lengthy adulthood. Unquestionably, modern posture history provides another important chapter concerning the roles of discipline in nineteenth-century life and the growing informality of the twentieth century. While the origins of explicit posture standards have been fruitfully traced, their evolution has not gained historians' attention, yet it is at least as significant. Shifts in posture norms involved alterations in what parents and teachers expected of children, as well as in the ways strangers were evaluated. The changes reveal much about the rise of new leisure habits and changes in material culture, especially furniture. They even suggest alterations in larger social relationships, serving as part of the decline of middle-class identification through etiquette standards and raising interesting questions about the centrality of military imagery. The basic issue is a classic case of historical change, applied to intimate perceptions of the body: why did what was once regarded as proper become too stiff and uninviting? Yet the posture story also offers revealing complexities. Posture standards did not ease with the advent of new leisure patterns and the intensification of consumerism around 1900. When shifts in clothing and furniture began to reduce structural supports of rigid posture, a vigorous counterattack emerged that