ABSTRACT
College staffers diligently recorded their various biometrics for reporting to the Massachusetts State Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity, the national Eugenics Record Office. This chapter explores issues by tracing history, implementation, and use of posture pictures at Massachusetts women's colleges, starting with photographic practice's roots in late-nineteenth century as eugenics-allied project of collecting and archiving biometric information and emphasizing grace and carriage. It takes a closer look at the history and shifting contexts of posture pictures, and how they affirmed existing power structures. The waist-up photographing of Drana, and the subject’s lack of agency to refuse being subjected to the scrutiny of this gaze, also reappear in late-nineteenth-century posture pictures. After William Sheldon’s work was academically discredited and declared “pornography” by some critics in the 1950s, more students began to question the purpose of posture pictures and the related biometric-data collection project.
