The back’s central place in the psychodrama of our personal health is so commonplace that we don’t really question its origins. Beth Linker, a historian of science and former physical therapist, uncovers just how recent our obsession with posture is in Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America. What she finds is a moral panic, one that began in England at the turn of the 20th century with the rise of evolutionary science and its impact on human health. Posture migrated from a debate over anatomical development to a concern that popped up everywhere throughout the 20th century, a symptom tied to a whole host of anxieties around race, class, and industrialization.
How did concerns about posture become so ubiquitous? Instagram ads featuring posture-enhancing technologies like standing desks, ergonomic chairs, smartphone apps, and the FDA-registered posture-correcting bra that Taylor Swift wore while training for her Eras Tour consume my feed. And why have we attached so much meaning to posture? A child sitting upright at the family dinner table continues to symbolize respect, and colloquialisms like “upright citizen” signal virtue. Some people may purchase the viral posture bra because they feel a taller stance makes them more attractive or commanding. Others feel the bra or standing desk actually improves nagging back or neck pain. There is a blurriness here: How much of this concern with posture is a moral panic or pseudoscience? And to what extent might poor posture and its contribution to pain be a legitimate issue?
Linker’s history opens in the late 19th century, with a debate concerning the first step in human evolution. The question at hand: Did the human brain develop before humans stood upright or after? Charles Darwin was a member of the “posture-first” camp, using the principles of natural selection to argue that humans’ ability to stand upright preceded brain development. Darwin’s stance was controversial because he claimed that a small physical difference—rather than an intellectual one—was what initially separated humans from apes. While Darwin wasn’t a medical doctor, his ideas circulated among British and American paleoanthropologists who also happened to be physicians. These physician-paleoanthropologists had a stake in applying evolutionary science to clinical practice and became fixated on posture as a tangible “indicator of evolutionary fitness,” Linker writes.
Ever since Darwin identified posture as an important evolutionary trait, anxieties about the social order were projected onto it. Beginning in the post-Victorian era, the emergent professional middle class regarded the aristocratic leisure class with disdain, dubbing their slovenly stance the “debutante slouch.” The working class came under similar scrutiny in America: Factory workers, often recruited from the ranks of recent immigrants, hunched over their machines, ruining their backs in the process.