WOMEN: No Boondoggling

Altering garments to fit the infinite variety of women’s figures keeps a great many people busy; but it annually costs U. S. manufacturers an estimated $10,000,000. Nobody sympathized with them until they appealed to the Government. The Government agreed that something ought to be done.

This week the Department of Agriculture and the WPA in New Jersey set about getting women’s figures taped; they started a WPA project to measure 100,000 women. Later this research will be continued in five other States. Each subject—matron, maid, scrubwoman, show girl—will be taped in 59 different places, special recordings made to check the “sitting spread.” The purpose: to create a new, unified system of sizing women’s clothing.

No mere boondoggling in New Jersey’s waistlands was this latest WPA project. Hope of the sponsors was that this gynemetric survey would result in making everybody happier, some people better dressed.