'Class' Pictures: Visualizing Social Refinement, and 'Good Breeding' in Seven Sisters Posture Pictures

It was a notorious, dreaded, rite of passage for Seven Sisters college students. As part of a mandatory “posture” class, female students were regularly weighed, rigorously measured, and photographed nude multiple times during their stay. The information and images were reported to the state of Massachusetts and the Eugenics Record Office. Students were photographed repeatedly if their posture needed improvement. Almost everyone’s did.

These images helped the E.R.O. create a set of aspirant “norms” by which students (and society as a whole) were measured and scrutinized: that of the New England, W.A.S.P./Protestant-descended gentry. It also helped “weed out” students with scoliosis, who were incompatible with the eugenics’ ideal of “good breeding.”

This presentation explores photography’s promotion of “good breeding” in the 1930s to motivate young women (eugenics’ primarily mute actors) to drown out the genes of “broken people from broken races.” It juxtaposes the form and circulation of Lewis Hine’s pictures of Boston working-class women with the “posture pictures” made at elite colleges under the guise of science to help refine their carriage and refinement. This comparison exposes a visual codification of class difference between the upper class and working class, who enjoyed substantially less physical comfort than the upper-class W.A.S.P./Protestant descendants that filled the halls and malls of Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, and Wellesley. The “compulsory visibility,” in Michel Foucault’s terms, of the lower-class women expressed “disciplinary power” by affirming the innate subject-hood of poor “Othered” laborer to the gaze of the privileged (the government, the upper-class).