Made to measure : the tape measure and the construction of the ideal American, 1800-1939

Today, most Americans use the tape measure to track children’s height or to find measurements for clothing. In this report, I trace the history of the tape measure from its invention by English tailors in the early 1800s through its uses by racial scientists, bodybuilders, performers, and average Americans attempting to validate their racial and gender-coded identities. I argue that the tape measure is an incredibly important artifact of the push for standardization of the human body that accelerated between the mid-1800s through 1939. As an object that served white supremacist regimes and allowed for the collapse of objective measurement into subjective social implications of superiority, the tape measure can be considered a haunted object in line with hauntology. In this way, the tape measure serves as reminder of not only the violent introduction of standardization that perpetuated existing racist, sexist, and ableist attitudes and policies, but a suggestion of a lost future and how modernity may have preceded without standardization, the road not taken. This paper is one perspective on a phenomenon that incorporated many other tools and scales for its purposes; the scale, the IQ test, the Kinsey scale, etc. all served the purpose of quantifying aspects of human experience and being in order to establish norms and perpetuate echelons of worthiness. The central thrust of this paper ends in 1939, with the first meaningful survey of American women’s measurements in order to establish standardized clothing styles. However, the paper obviously also ends suggesting the start of World War II and some of the most profound consequences of eugenic thought entrenched and legitimized by “objective” scientific measurement of human worth and evolution.