Nude or seminude photographs, in front, side, and rear positions, required of freshman students at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools from the 1940s through the 1960s. At Harvard the practice started as early as 1880. While students were told that the photos were taken to assess posture, some participating schools and an archive in Washington, D.C., made the photos available to university and corporate researchers for a variety of purposes without subjects\u2019 permission. Although Yale reports destroying its collection of posture photographs, hundreds of photos from Yale and other institutions are thought still to exist, and rumors of lost or stolen posture photos have circulated widely.<\/p>\n
News of the posture photographs received national attention in 1992, when Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, wrote about them in an op-ed article in The New York Times. Shortly afterward, Yale art history professor George Hersey wrote a letter to the Times, in which he suggested that the photos were used primarily for anthropological research similar to that conducted by the Nazis. According to Hersey, participating institutions were taking these photos in order to draw conclusions about the subjects\u2019 intelligence, temperament, moral worth, and probable future achievement for eugenic purposes. Hundreds of nude posture photos from Harvard illustrate the pages of W. H. Sheldon\u2019s book on body types, Atlas of Man.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nude or seminude photographs, in front, side, and rear positions, required of freshman students at most Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools from the 1940s through the 1960s. At Harvard the practice started as early as 1880. While students were told that the photos were taken to assess posture, some participating schools and an archive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-i"],"yoast_head":"\n