Once a year, in a mirrored studio on campus, they would shed their itchy, matronly uniforms—green tweed skirts and jackets, green neckties over tan button-down shirts, tan stockings held up with garter belts—and take turns presenting themselves before a big camera. This creepy ritual, it turns out, was a regular rite of passage in the upper echelons of American education. Starting in the s, so did thousands of undergraduates at most of the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges, among other top-flight schools.
Thanks to the medical consensus that slouching caused health problems, remedial spine-straightening courses were standard fare at all levels of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century upper-crust schooling. Nude photo sessions, indeed, were the final exams in such posture courses. The fervor spread further in , when the American Posture League started evangelizing at exclusive east coast schools. Apparently, in the first half of the twentieth century, nobody batted an eye at naked exercise classes.
For the bewildered adolescents subjected to her methods, the experience was far closer to an anxiety dream than a reliable gauge of their progress in physical education. Girls went to class in their birthday suits. Johannesen, of Sweden—a tall, bony woman with a dour expression—would stand in a tweed suit and tell us to suck in our stomachs, urge our adductor muscles to contract and relax.
Today, all of this would be gruesome scandal fodder. Even the scattered impressionistic recollections of my grandmother made me feel queasy, knowing that being a pubescent girl feels something like becoming a werewolf—you sprout patches of fur and sacs of fat—and hiding your mutating body feels essential to survival. But apparently, in the first half of the twentieth century, nobody batted an eye at naked exercise classes.
It was private. The neo-authoritarian culture of prep-school obedience kept her quiet. Who was I to complain about exercising in the altogether? For a while, it was. Men performed the exercises in jockstraps. Was the Mensendieck System ritual humiliation cleverly disguised as a classy European exercise fad?
Or, as Madame Mensendieck and her cultish followers contended, did the system help women gain self-knowledge and control over their bodies and, by extension, over their destinies? As its roots clearly show, the posture craze was of a piece with the entire modernist project in the West: it offered a simple, direct way to reinvent the basic coordinates of human experience for a new age teeming with bold new philosophies of self-improvement.
She knitted them together in an archetypally optimistic American philosophy that marked the birth of modern exercise culture: the aspirational precepts of the American Dream applied to the human body. The notion that you could transform your physical self without external help from corsets and bustles—and that doing so would ensure your passage into upward mobility—was relatively new and, to elites and strivers alike, very seductive. Later, she trained as a sculptor in Paris. To be sure, not everyone could be a Venus or an Adonis, but it seemed that many did not develop the full potentialities of their bodies.
She also identified new problems facing the untrussed woman: without external scaffolding, her back and stomach muscles were weak. Erect posture, she submitted, was the very crux of human civilization. Mensendieck adopted this view, as have a range of contemporary feminist-aligned subgroups, such as Femen, the eastern European topless protest movement and its various offshoots. The System consisted of a set of gentle exercises, each designed to strengthen a particular muscle, to be practiced unclothed. Claiming her techniques required live instruction, Mensendieck opened certified schools in New York City and across Europe, where upper-class hausfraus traded in the bulky knickerbockers and sailor tops of turn-of-the-century athletic wear for nothing at all.
Though embraced by feminists and the medical establishment alike, she was as susceptible as anyone to the prejudices of her time. Instead, they needed training to become beautiful childbearing machines.
For all her pretensions to up-to-the-minute scientific authority, Mensendieck, like her fellow posture campaigners, brought a distinctly missionary zeal to her cause. But since science and ideology were virtually interchangeable in Progressive-era America, Mensendieck also indulged in more speculative flights of cultural fancy. They would, however, be terrorized by rumors that their nude photos had leaked to the neighboring Brunswick School for Boys.
According to a classmate, after Ethel Skakel married Robert F. Can I have three wallet-sized? The mirrored studio was a clinical setting. Nude photos were diagnostic tools, like X-rays. Everyone who does a nude is thinking about sex. There is flirtation, seduction, and winning of confidence. Sex was the glaring subtext of this apparently sanitized fixation on naked beauty. She remembers slamming her teenaged hips against the wall of her bedroom, over and over until they bruised, hoping this would shrink them back to their narrow prepubescent shape.
Young Joan never could quite suss out why Ms. Johannesen and her ilk drank the posture Kool-Aid. The ancient myth of physical beauty as key to upward mobility becomes a modern fairy tale, as Mensendieck herself relates in Look Better, Feel Better.
At its core, this reaction is self-congratulatory: we would never. Consent was not yet the byword of the day. Whether Joan and friends wanted to exercise naked was as irrelevant as whether they wanted to take algebra. In both cases, they were assured that it was for their own good. Times in She sought to change that: Decades before Our Bodies, Ourselves made the then-radical recommendation that women examine their vulvas in hand mirrors, Posture Lady nudged women toward studying their stripped-down anatomies.
In investigating the story behind his own nude-posing trials as a Yale freshman in the mids—by which point Mensendieck System classes had been phased out, though posture photos remained part of physical exams—Rosenbaum unmasked a vast, twisted experiment run by since-discredited anthropologists and eugenicists E.
Hooton and W. In other words, they were racists masquerading as scientists: in one repugnant paper, Sheldon asserted that African Americans stopped developing intellectually at the age of ten. If this sounds eerily familiar, recall that the Nazis compiled similar archives of nude photos to analyze for racial and characterological content. Even after this short-lived controversy in Seattle, the posture photo ritual persisted.
They remain in a Smithsonian vault, restricted from researchers, Trump-nude-seekers, and other prying eyes. Greenwich Academy, which phased out the Mensendieck System in the s, offered minimal comment on its history with the technique. But a derivative of the practice is taught by physiotherapists in Norway and the Netherlands, and about eighty Mensendieck purists teach in Denmark.
Slowly clench and unclench. Repeat three times. I did this, grateful there was no Swedish lady in a tweed suit watching. So I stopped. The exercises were no more strenuous than those you might encounter in a chair yoga session. Performing them felt more like casting spells than working out. Granted, I quit after ten minutes, surely not long enough to make a fair judgment. Carey Dunne is a Brooklyn-based writer covering art and design. Baffler Newsletter New email subscribers receive a free copy of our current issue.
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