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UW-Madison took nude `posture' photos
Milwaukee Journal, The, Jan 31, 1995 by TOM VANDEN BROOK
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Madison, Wis. The strangest aspect, a Milwaukee woman recalls, was that nobody questioned the need to bare all.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, thousands of University of Wisconsin-Madison women, as part of a physical education requirement, were photographed nude. Men, presumably, were considered exempt from poor posture and therefore the camera's naked eye.

Officials say they incinerated the photographs in the 1970s.

"We felt very awkward, very embarrassed and very humiliated," said the 1965 UW graduate who now lives in Milwaukee. "But did we protest? No. We simply said, `Holy ----,' and had our pictures taken naked.

"We were all just sheep. This seemed to have some scientific merit. We didn't question it."

Nationally, particularly at elite East Coast schools, snapping so-called posture photographs was considered a normal, if somewhat awkward, rite of college passage for decades for men and women.

A recent story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine revealed that Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President George Bush may have posed in the buff during their Yale University days. After the newspaper report and ensuing controversy, the Yale pictures and negatives were destroyed last week. Body Shape Theory

The New York Times reported that the Smithsonian Institution's archival branch had been the repository of posture photos from a national study. Included among the photos, the Times noted, were women from UW's Class of 1953.

The study had been led by a researcher who had sought to determine a relationship between body shape and intellect. That potential link now has been dismissed by most scientists. After the researcher, W.H. Sheldon, died in 1977, the photos were given to the Smithsonian. The pictures have been available only to researchers and students.

At UW-Madison, the athletic department subjected undergraduate women to nude photography as part of what was then a physical education requirement. Instructors told the women that the photographs were taken with an eye aimed at improving their posture. Numbers were attached to the photos; names were not.

There was no similar effort aimed at men.

A UW System spokesman said the practice of posture photos appeared to be confined to the Madison campus only.

Rumors of Copies

On Langdon St. in Madison, the crowded street that holds most of the UW's fraternities and sororities, rumors of contraband copies flowed freely during the 1950s and '60s, said one alumnus who asked not to be identified.

"It was something of an urban legend when I was in school in the '60s," he said. "All these fraternity guys bragged that they had copies. But nobody ever saw them."

The Milwaukee woman, who asked to remain anonymous, described her freshman physical education class as an exercise in group indoctrination.

"Fundamentals of Movement," the alumna remembers, required women to wear skimpy blue outfits that they dubbed derisively, "Fundies Undies." Principles of proper posture, movement and relaxation were espoused in class.

And then there were the photographs.

"I remember that there were footprints painted on the floor," she said. "You stood in these and they took photos of you nude from the side and front. I don't remember if it was a man or a woman taking the pictures. I do remember that it was an ancient camera, even by 1960s standards. It looked like it came from the Civil War.

"It was all terribly humiliating. They made you feel like a convicted felon."

Nor, she said, did anybody offer suggestions on how to improve one's posture based on the photos.

"No one ever explained to us how to improve or, in fact, if there were any problems with our posture," she said. "For all we knew, we could had been consigned to the Seventh Ring of Hell for bad posture."

Instead, UW-Madison officials dispatched the photos to the inferno.

Photos Incinerated in '70s

"They've all been destroyed," said Frank Cook, director of UW-Madison's archives. "They were all burned in the early 1970s."

Cook said that only a few UW-Madison and state officials arranged for what he called a "confidential destruction" of the photos.

"Nobody wanted to keep these things," Cook said. "I could only see embarrassment coming from it. Only a small number of people were involved in their destruction."

Copyright 1995
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.