American Posture Panic

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too.

In April of 1914, Jessie Bancroft, then the Assistant Director of Physical Training of Public Schools in New York City, announced the incorporation of the American Posture League, for which she would serve as president. According to The New York Times write- up of the announcement, the league, whose board included, "leading educators, orthopedic surgeons, physical trainers, and specialists in child care," aimed to, "induce people to sit up and stand up straight."  For Bancroft and others at the time, who were applying the findings of evolutionary sciences onto the medical field, good posture was something vital to health, but not something that can be left to human instinct. As Bancroft noted, the human spine was, "a quadrupedal spine set on its end," and thus, humans, starting in childhood, needed to be trained in good posture. A 1917 study of the freshman class at Harvard University seemed to prove that Bancroft and the APL were right to be concerned. In this study, Dr. D. T. Brown and his team took posture tracings of each of the 746 students in the class, all male, and then graded their posture on an ABCD scale. The Harvard Crimson reported of the students, "A little more than four fifths are using their body in a markedly relaxed position. Three fifths have no knowledge of how to use their bodies properly, or how to stand up straight, and nearly two out of every 10 have feet, which would prevent them from serving in their country in a time of war." On the eve of the US entry into World War I, the military readiness of college men was of particular concern. And indeed, upon the declaration of war, draft boards were rejecting around 8% of volunteers due to problems with their feet or posture. With members of the APL, the US military established flat foot camps, where draftees underwent the same kind of posture training that Bancroft led in the New York City schools. The ongoing alarm about apparently widespread poor posture and the perception that diseases like tuberculosis could stem from bad posture, led to a mass surveillance project in American schools. While the 1917 Harvard study relied on tracing projected bodies, colleges who could afford to do so, began to move toward camera photography, as was becoming increasingly common in clinical settings. Dorothy Sears Ainsworth, the longtime Director of Physical Education at Smith College, who was known as "Physical Education's First Lady of the World," mandated that all Smith students pose for biannual posture photographs. These photographs, like those at many other colleges, were taken while the students were nude, in order to best show the position of the body. Ainsworth didn't stop at photographs. She also developed a posture training system called "Fundamentals of Movement," that the students referred to as "fundies," which focused on, "the more simple and primitive forms of movement, ie walking, running and folk dancing, but always with an emphasis on erect carriage." Smith students had reason to take the posture training seriously, since Ainsworth had convinced administrators at the college that students must earn at least a B minus in posture to graduate. As founder and president of the International Association of Physical Education and Sport for Girls and Women, Ainsworth's influence reached far beyond Smith. At some colleges good posture could earn a student more than just passing grades. Barnard University for instance, held annual Posture Queen pageants, from 1925 to 1962. At the first contest, the judging panel included not just members of the Physical Education Department, but also representatives from APL. There were posture programs at historically Black colleges, like Hampton University and Howard University as well, and for some middle class African Americans, posture training could be part of asserting the dignity of race. The goal of Maryrose Reeves Allen, the Director of Women's Physical Education at Howard, was for Howard women to be instantly recognizable by the beauty of their carriage. By the early 1970s, most colleges had discontinued their annual nude posture photographs programs, after pushback from students. Many of the photos were shredded or burned, and those that remained were forgotten. That all changed however, in January, 1995, when journalist Ron Rosenbaum published a piece in The New York Times Magazine titled, "The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal." In the article, Rosenbaum, who himself had posed for a nude posture photo at Yale in the mid 60s, revealed that not only had students at such schools as Vassar, Princeton, Yale, and Smith, students such as George Bush, Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, and Hillary Clinton, had photos taken of them from the 1940s through the 1960s; but also that many of those pictures still exist in the national anthropological archives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the reaction of the public, and especially those alumni whose photographs might be part of the collection, was swift and vocal, and many of the colleges, or at least their offices of legal counsel and departments of Alumni Relations and Development, demanded that the photos now be destroyed. The American Posture League folded in 1943, and colleges ceased taking posture photos by the early 1970s. The American obsession with achieving better posture hasn't disappeared. In just the past few months, Vogue Magazine has declared, "It's not too late to fix your posture." The Financial Times has outlined "Six Ways to Improve Your Posture." Golf Digest has promised, "You can learn how to correct your posture in only 60 seconds," and the Washington Post has explained to readers, "How to Promote Good Posture and Avoid Becoming Hunched Over." Joining me now to discuss this obsession with posture is Dr. Beth Linker, the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of, "Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America."

Hi Beth. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Beth Linker  10:08  
Thank you for inviting me, Kelly. 

Kelly  10:10  
Yes. So I want to start by asking how you came to write a book on slouching and posture panic.

Dr. Beth Linker  10:17  
Yeah, there are several entry points. I sometimes like to say that, before I even became a professional historian, I was working on the book. And I think that comes from personally, I think we all have our posture stories. And so it's one of those things that what draws me to History of Medicine and topics such as this is when there's a universal experience. So my own posture story would probably be I was in the era of scoliosis tests, and reading Judy Blume's "Deenie," which I'm still waiting for the movie of that to come out. And, you know, I'd love to put my two cents into that movie if it comes out. So, yeah, but there was a, you know, it was like this very kind of constant worry, I would say low grade worry about whether or not you are going to have scoliosis or not, and then worry about the exam, because they were kind of publicly done in a gym, and you had to expose yourself right when you were going through puberty. And then I, my first career was in physical therapy. And so I learned a lot about human anatomy and physiology, and would do posture exams, but more in the clinic, it usually those those exams would come about not as a preventative tool of analysis. They'd come about for treatment. So someone would be coming in with pain of some sort. And so then I would do the examination. So when I was working on my first book, which was my dissertation, and that is on World War I rehabilitation, how rehabilitation was established during the first World War, and I looked into the history of physical therapy, since there really wasn't any work out there on history of physical therapy, I noticed lots of flat feet tests and posture tests going on with the passage of the Selective Service Act. And that that kind of piqued my interest. That's when I knew early on that I wanted to write a book titled "Slouch." So it's all of those different entry points. And then I can't, you know, the New York Times nude posture photo scandal was also in the background of my mind. And to be honest, I can't remember if I read it in 1995. I think I knew about it, I think I do have a memory that I knew about it when I was a physical therapist. And I thought that's really odd. But I wasn't scandalized. Right. And I just always found that piece curious. And so I often would go back to that piece and read it and think about it.

Kelly  13:18  
So I want to ask about archives. But before I do, I have to ask, as you were writing this, did you find yourself constantly like sitting up straighter adjusting your position, because as I was reading it, and I, I have a tendency, when I read to be sort of like, my feet are up, I'm all slouched over, you know, and I kept going like, this is not good posture. thing exists? Like, did you find yourself just sort of constantly calling to mind your own posture, your own way of sitting and standing? 

Dr. Beth Linker  13:47  
Yeah, I actually didn't. But that's because I think, you know, the question is kind of a, I think it's important, and a lot of people want to know, right? If I'm gonna write a book on posture, like, what do I do? I do yoga, I actually got certified to be a yoga teacher during the pandemic,  you know to do something, that's all they're talking about posture all the time. And, you know, I have chronic back pain myself, I see physical therapists for that. So I attend to my posture, but I don't put much credence into that there is one particular posture norm, that one needs to be sitting in a particular way in order to read. For me, it's more about changing it up. Like if you want to lie on your couch and slouch around and read. Great. Well, should you do it for three hours? Maybe not, you know, so it's, it's I think posture is actually like a fantasy in a way. It's this this word we, we talk about and I have to improve my posture. But what does that even mean? Well, you know what's interesting, you know, it would be interesting if somebody could do more of an anthropological study on this to just find out what people mean, when they say I need, I'm worried about my posture. 

Kelly  15:10  
So you focus in on the story within the United States, mostly. So can you talk some about what what sorts of archives you consulted as you were doing this? And there's a fairly long period of time that you're looking at in the story.

Dr. Beth Linker  15:25  
Yes, so the story does start in the late 19th century. And it's the epilogue goes up until today to present day. I used a lot of different archives. And because it took me so long to write the book, at the beginning, there weren't many digitized archives, and then suddenly, there were more. But one beautiful archive that I went to early on in the book, when I was researching the book was the Clelia Mosher archive and at Stanford, beautiful archive. And Clelia Mosher is such an interesting historical figure. Most people know her better, as doing a sex study of, you know, a kind of a study of she interviewed, I think, friends and companions, about about their sex lives as much as somebody in the early 20th century could do. But she, you know, she developed posture technologies, and she did it from a position of a feminist, a physiological feminist. So she was doing she didn't do posture photography, she she, she developed a device with a with an engineer at Stanford, called the schematograph. And it was a tracing an outline a silhouette of the of the women's posture who went to the school. And she already knew at that point, that it should not be camera photography, because it would be dangerous and could be potentially too much reputational damage done if photographs got out of female co-eds. She believed that good posture could help with painful menstruation. And the other reason she was interested in this is because at this time, it was still believed that men and women had different physiological and respiratory capacity. And she wanted to prove that women had the same kind of respiratory capacity as men. She even did some studies showing that men and women women have similar muscular abilities. So I see her as someone who was really trying to establish a physiological standard that was that cut across gender. So that was one archive. Smith archives ended up being really wonderful. They had, they still had a couple of the posture photos, but de- identified, and they had all of the papers and holdings of one woman who, a phys ed teacher there, Dorothy, Dr. Dorothy Ainsworth, so I got to dig into her papers. But they also had when Smith College destroyed the posture photos, in the 1970s, late 70s, early 80s, they had a whole trail of the conversations and correspondence that went back and forth about why they needed to destroy them. And then I was able to interview, she's an archivist now at Temple University here in Philadelphia, she was working at Smith College at the time, when, 1995, when the when the nude Ivy League scandal magazine article came out in the New York Times Magazine, which led to the destruction, widespread destruction of archival materials. She was the archivist at Smith College. And so then she kept, I was able to interview her about what it was like. And in addition to that, I went to Howard University, and Hampton, I found it was, you know, I wanted to make sure that this wasn't just a story of white middle class. And so it was a little more difficult because as we know, archives, require time, money, resources, so I knew from newspapers and I knew from Black newspapers, I knew from magazines, and I just knew from like living in this history that absolutely, you know, the educated, you know, schools, Black schools would be doing, engaging in this as well. So, yeah, that's that's a little bit about the sources.

Kelly  20:08  
So you talked some about what you call the posture epidemic or poor posture epidemic. Could you talk a little bit about what you mean by that when you use the term epidemic, how we think about this, how that sort of informs how you think about the story?

Dr. Beth Linker  20:23  
Yeah, that that framing came to me later on after, after probably five to seven years of research. It, as I think anybody could imagine to say, "Oh, I'm going to do a project on human posture," you could be doing a whole book from in the western world from ancient Greece till now. You could be doing it worldwide, and there would be material for you. So it was it was a bit daunting, first taking on this project. And I would say one of the most challenging things was how to frame it. And so I knew that I wanted to focus on the health ramifications, or the presumed health ramifications of posture. I wanted it to be a culture history, but I also wanted it to speak to my interests and specialty in history of disability, and cultural history. And so, it this the epidemic frame happened before COVID. And I just kept coming back to this study called the Harvard Slouch Study, in 1916-17, where they reported that 80% of Harvard students have bad posture, poor posture. And then I kept coming across report after report after report that was a basically 70 to 80%, no matter where physical educators, physicians, or physical therapists conducted the study, it was always about the same percentage. And I think, sitting with that long enough, it kind of dawned on me, like, "You know what? They're talking about an epidemic." They might they didn't use the term. But they were measuring it, they were talking about it on a population level, if a majority and then using percentages, like 80% of, you know, Americans, Harvard student, whether it's Harvard students, Yale students, or military, that's, that's epidemic, kind of reasoning and logic. So I think it was, you know, I did a piece on Clelia, Mosher and tracing paper. It's it's a it's an unedited volume on technologies of paper. And I think it's there that I really went I had to sit with that and think about it, and how her technology was circulated, and how using her technology, and then eventually camera technology, the same results came about. That's I think, when I came upon the epidemic framing.

Kelly  23:09  
So you mentioned the presumed health problems that might come with poor posture. And this isn't just the kinds of things we might think of today, like back pain or something, but things like predisposition to tuberculosis. So could you talk some about what it was when they're talking about, you know, the this problem, the Harvard Slouch Study, like what problems they see with their being poor posture, and everyone 80% of people having that?

Dr. Beth Linker  23:38  
Yes, this was an era in medical history where it was that period, after germs had been discovered in the 1880s, and before you get the antibiotics pharmacological revolution of the 1940s. And it's interesting to study that period, because the cutting edge scientists of the time, knew what caused certain diseases, knew that it was, you know, germ or virus or contagious, but had very little by way of a direct cure. So you get the rise of preventative medicine. There's a really a lot of emphasis emphasis on preventative medicine in the early 20th century. You also get the rise of the new public health, what's called in the literature and they call themselves the new public health because with germ theory, they started focusing in on individuals and individual behavior and trying to educate and then surveil and manage individuals and their behavior. So, the theory that poor posture could lead to emphysema, could lead to tuberculosis, could lead to constipation, could lead to, you know, a whole host of diseases was based out of a kind of holistic thinking that I don't think is that foreign to today. I think a lot of these posture crusaders, well, they would say, to enhance breathing, we can have all the fresh air. So this was like the the era, the progressive era of fresh air movement, where you're trying to get people in the city out to the farms. And the posture crusaders would say, that's all well and good, but in order to really truly get the benefit of fresh air, you need to have a good posture, so that you can adequately use your lungs. So that's kind of where that comes from. And the other thing to mention is eugenics, I think that's the I've been talking for a while that would be the elephant in the room, I guess. And I see these posture crusaders as more on the side of soft eugenics. They weren't really talking about controlling reproduction, or sterilization. But they were talking about race betterment, through posture fitness and posture training. And it was obviously white posture crusaders, but there were immigrants who were educated in medicine, so Jewish immigrants who were educated in medicine, who would target lower class, Jewish immigrants. There were middle class Black posture crusaders who would then target lower class. And then I should say, since I brought in class, so it was really a middle class movement. They were also punching up the middle class professionals were pretty upset with the debutante slouches in the fashions and these these you know, ridiculous shoes that come from the Paris fashion houses and they thought that that was reckless leisure and that it would negatively influence middle to lower class people in America and that it would degradate national health.

Kelly  27:24  
And then perhaps not surprisingly to anyone who's studied any part of American history, but commercial enterprise gets in on this and says you know, "We can we can sell people things that will improve posture." Could you talk a little bit about that the the ways that you know people see you know, perhaps well meaning but see a way to make money on the back of this panic.

Dr. Beth Linker  27:47  
Yes, the corset industry is probably the biggest one because they were really in jeopardy the early 20th century the flat the Jazz Age and flappers you know, they they in some did, some, some industries did go under, but certain clever industries figured out that they could use this poor posture epidemic to boost sales. So they don't they start to that you still get the word corset, but increasingly, you get the word girdle and belt. They, even though that construction of them are corset-like, I mean, this is the era too of empire, right where the US is going in and extracting rubber from Latin America, so you're able to make these kind of posture correct supporters out of new materials as well. So yeah, so you start getting girdles and belts, they are very similar to medical devices. So I look at like medical devices, post surgical medical devices and braces, and then these corsets and they kind of merge to become, depending on where the company advertises, it's the same thing. It's the same product, so they can advertise it in Vogue. And it's a corset to, you know, make sure you don't have a dowager hump or, you know, to make sure that your clothes sit nicely on you, or they can advertise it in a medical journal for more medicalized problems of, well, at that time, they would say like aging and stoutness, and so forth. So it's kind of a it's kind of a very clever way to get into both places and because they are because the industry calls them scientific corsetry, it then becomes okay to be in both medical journals and in trade and commercial magazines. So that happens with corsets, it happens also with shoes. So the same kind of merging that we see with undergarments we see with shoes of the you know godforsaken orthopedic shoe becomes merges with more of a fashion and they try to do and like I, I'm benefit from this this mood, this particular movement, you know, like, I want my shoes to be sensible yet, you know comfortable, yet somewhat fashionable. And so this is kind of the birth of that. And also, what's interesting about that is they figure out a kind of standardized shoe last, that's the way you build a shoe to around a last that is androgynous as well. So if we think about like Keds shoes, the first sporting shoes, those are androgynous. So these these these posture enhancing devices, really find a marketplace. And that's how I argue that the posture epidemic, quote, unquote, spreads, because it becomes built into the various products that we live with.

Kelly  31:11  
So like you, I was part of the scoliosis testing time, but was certainly not part of this photography, nude photo, posture photos time. So let's talk a little bit about that. This is unimaginable today. I work at a university. I cannot imagine if I told my students they had to line up and take nude photos, but this was accepted and done in a lot of places. So can you talk about how and why this starts, how it continues? And then you know, we can talk some then about as we get to cultural revolution time, you know, starts to die out.

Dr. Beth Linker  31:50  
So it starts, so there are many different technologies to measure posture. I mentioned already Clelia Mosher created a schematograph that was more like a camera obscura. And for those who don't know what that is an overhead projector, and then for anybody younger, I don't know how to explain it. So we talked about that. There was even more basic technologies in measuring posture. Jessie Bancroft, who was the founder of the American Posture League, used to use wooden dowels, window poles to measure posture. But camera photography really became the gold standard. And that's part partly because it did in the clinic in the medical clinic itself, camera photography was seen as more objective. And that then became the technology of choice for schools, and the military, and certain industrial settings. It came about because it's to take to measure posture, in profile, so as a silhouette, full body, it's it becomes seen as a really rough and ready way to get a full on quick but holistic assessment of another person. So immigration officers use it. And they you know, brag about how they can assess the health of hundreds of immigrants in an hour. And then universities use it, because again, it's like a quick snapshot. They use it to then develop training courses, posture training courses for their students. And then they also measure the student across time to see if there's improvement and then also shame students who don't improve, or they would like even take photos of A posture. So it was usually A,B,C, and D. They would take examples of A posture and put it next to a person who has D posture and show that person with D posture like how, quote unquote bad they look. So there was a ton of shaming. And it was encouraged to have peers shame one another about their posture. And then they were they were they were really effective data sets. I mean, if you're allowed to, you know, this is how research university research is built. And you can if you have a data set like that of photographs of all entering students, you can do lots of studies that way. And the other thing with the camera photograph is that you have a, like you have a negative or something. You have something concrete to store in a file. And so for all of those reasons camera photography became the mainstay and posture assessments also so in elementary schools where they didn't have enough money to buy camera, you know, technology they would still do posture evaluations. So they were pretty widespread in educational settings. And then also military, they were, there was pretty standard practice. And it was used in very similar ways. 

Kelly  35:14  
And so then, as you outline, there's not like one thing that stops this happening everywhere. It kind of around similar times dies out for lots of different reasons. Could you talk a little bit about that, and sort of that that time in American history and the kinds of problems or challenges that they're running into as they're trying to do these photographs?

Dr. Beth Linker  35:39  
Yeah, so I trace it, the beginnings of the demise are the late 1950s, post war university setting, GI bill. You have universities expanding very quickly. You have a greater diversity of student body. And in in that era, it became customary, especially at co educational institutions for men to go on panty raids in the spring. And they would bang pots and pans, go out onto the quads and be chanting, "We want your panties, you know, hey, hey, let's go all the way." They you know, usually required police coming in to control it. And so women, female co-eds, obviously felt threatened. And then usually around a week or two later, there would be a report saying that the male college students stole female co-eds' posture photos. And I show in my book that was like a constant fear for female co-eds, whether they were at an all women's school. So if it was Vassar, they worried about Yale men coming to steal the photos. If it was Smith, they were worried about Amherst students coming to steal their photos. And so it was, some of it was real. Some of it might have been urban legend. I have one case where reading closely and in between the lines, I think the Cornell women stole the photos and then blamed the male students for stealing them. And that effectively brought the end for Cornell quite early of having annual posture photographs. It didn't bring an end to posture training, but it did bring it into the posture photographs. So when I saw that little piece of evidence, I was really I'll have to admit kind of cheering them on and thinking that that was pretty shrewd of them to do this like. So that was the earliest part of the demise. I should I say the caveat that from the very beginning, you can find resistance to these posture photographs. And primarily, it's women who are able, I think, culturally to fight back to say, "This is this is this will sully my reputation. This is undignified." And so you see beginnings of that, but but by and large, the posture crusaders are able to say yes, but this is science and science is always good. And so just pipe down. So we get the spring rate the panty raids and you get this real and or rumored chronic problem of posture photos being stolen. And then you have the Civil Rights Movement, which I talked about, and I would say the desegregation of education, along with the women's rights movement. And so more and more co-educational institutions are coming up. And I think universities just don't feel like they can deal with the potential reputational damage. And then it also becomes just anathema to think, oh, there's this because they're just so much of diversity of bodies, skin color and gender. But the one thing that really I think, brings it to the end, well there are two things. One is the disability rights movement. So when you have Ed Roberts and Judy Human, to call a D grade posture a disability, is only in the most perfectionist body world, is that really could that be convincing. And that's largely what universities were and we I still think universities are like some of the worst places for true disability diversity. But in any case, it was even more so it wasn't far more homogeneous then. And you couldn't get, you couldn't be accepted to schools, the universities with a moderate to severe disability. And so, you know, it's important to remember that Ed Roberts, one of the ways he one of the first things he had to fight against was the physical education requirement in his high school, so that he could get his diploma, so that he could even gain entry into a university. And for a wheelchair user, it makes no sense to do a standing posture exam. So I think the more and more we get these really diverse bodies, variation of bodies, it again, makes no sense. And then finally, there is the law that in 1972, that protects students, the FERPA where gone are the parietals that was the universities had a lot of control over students in loco parentis, where they were supposed to be take on the role of the parent. With FERPA, you get far more stringent policies on student privacy, and that you can't have something like posture photos with that.

Kelly  41:25  
So I'm sure our listeners can easily imagine all the reasons it's a terrible idea to have archives of nude photos of students, but can you talk a little bit about what we lose when all of these were destroyed? These archives were just literally thrown out or incinerated?

Dr. Beth Linker  41:42  
Yeah. So the New York Times expose in 1995, Ron Rosenbaum who went to Yale, he wrote the piece and really focused on William Sheldon, who was a man by that point already had a was in ill repute. He William Sheldon was a out and out anti Semite. He was an out and out racist. He was taking the posture photos to develop his own science of somatic typing, and he believed that your character was in your biology and it couldn't be changed. So we have three types of people: ectomorphs, endomorphs, and mesomorphs. It wasn't really about posture, though he did use the posture photos. So Ron Rosenbaum finds William Sheldon's papers down at the Smithsonian, and writes a whole expose on it, but conflates the posture photo practice in history with William Sheldon. The aftermath was fairly quick, the piece came out, archivists who have interviewed say like the phones were ringing off the hook back when we had phones, were ringing off the hook with really angered alumni. It is true that there wasn't really informed consent because in loco parentis would not make informed consent necessary. A lot of students did not know where those photos went. Some assumed they had been destroyed. So I'm sure they were pretty outraged that they still the photos still existed, and I can sympathize with that. And there were a lot of, you know, so so every university was in, as they tend to be total reactive mode in panic mode. And the people who basically had the final say was the offices of general counsel, and they did not want angered alumni and possible donors being upset about this. So it really wasn't brought. Archivists weren't brought in to help with the decision making. It was PR and legal, who ordered university archives against archivists against their better judgment to go and destroy anything that they had. So when I went to Radcliffe, I would say in the early 2000 teens, they had a full posture program, their whole physical department, I could not access those records, because it said explicitly because of the 1995 Ron Rosenbaum article, these are not viewable and that's an entire department right of physical education. I think they've opened some of them up. So it just really, I think, unnecessarily closed down, just shut down research into this. And I think archivists were not consulted and quite sure history professors weren't consulted and you know, they could have been de- identified. And the other thing that's ironic about the whole thing is that there are published books and articles that anybody with a library card can access. You can see these posture photos, nude posture photos. And so I just it's a shame that in the other thing I talked about in my book is, you know, these are pretty elite, obviously, elite institutions and elite alumni are coming at universities saying, "Why do these posture photos still exist? Get rid of them." And then I think about the xili images at Harvard, you know, of enslaved people. And those images stay. And then even in the posture photos, they still do exist. William Sheldon posture photos exist, they're restricted. But if you look at the finding aid, it's prisoners, people at non- Ivy League institutions, and hospitals. So their posture pictures still exist. So we talk about archival silences all the time. And usually by that we mean oh, the marginalized aren't in the archive, in this case, actually, marginalized are in the archive. And they've been whitewashed, they've been they've been the white elite have been able to erase themselves and create a silence.

Kelly  46:33  
So there's a ton more in this book that we're not going to get to talk about. It's an incredible read, how can people get a copy?

Dr. Beth Linker  46:40  
So you can head on over to Princeton University Press, Book Shop, all those other places, it'll be available for purchase. 

Kelly  46:47  
Beth, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to read your book. And I've really enjoyed this conversation. 

Dr. Beth Linker  46:52  
Thanks so much, Kelly, it's been a lot of fun.

Teddy  47:13  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode, and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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