20 Jobs That Once Had Shockingly Strict Weight Rules

In 1959, NASA engineer Maxime Faget wrote the rules governing the selection of the nation’s first Mercury astronauts. Since the spacecraft measured barely six feet in diameter and the launch vehicles could only carry limited payloads, he set the weight limit at 180 pounds and the height at 5-foot-11 inches. This eliminated any would-be military test pilot whose service records showed a weight above the ceiling, disqualifying him before the rigorous physical examinations required by NASA. Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Gus Grissom qualified, and each was strapped into his own personalized launch couch, custom-molded to fit his body.

In 1930, Boeing Air Transport, an early predecessor of United Airlines, hired a small crew of nurse-stewardesses in Chicago, led by Ellen Church, a registered nurse. The plane was so light on payload that the airline limited stewardesses to no more than 115 lbs. and 5’4″ tall. As planes grew larger in the 1950s, however, airlines continued to weigh their flight crews, employing charts based on height to determine whether or not a stewardess should be allowed to fly with a weight gain of only two pounds.

Dolly Dimples, the stage name of Celesta Geyer, was a circus fat lady. Isaac Sprague was a living skeleton who toured with shows including Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey for many years. Fat ladies needed to be 300 to 400 pounds or more, while living skeletons were supposed to weigh between 43 and 75 pounds. Both were checked by the circus manager on the scale, and any deviation from the advertised weight could cost them the act.

Prior to each race, the track’s clerk of the scales would weigh the jockeys and make sure they were within a certain range determined by The Jockey Club, established in 1894. That weight typically ranged from 110 to 118 pounds, including equipment. If the jockey didn’t meet his assigned weight, he wouldn’t be allowed to ride and would forfeit his earnings. Many would sit in rubber sweat boxes, take laxatives, and deprive themselves of food and water.

New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine, who was also the director of its School of American Ballet, took an already spindly tradition of Russian and European ballet and squeezed it down to something even skinnier. Dancers of average height might top out at 100 pounds, which they were weighed for at regular mandatory weigh-ins in the studio. This was not only a matter of how the line looked on stage. Male partners also had to be able to lift their female counterparts safely overhead. Fall over that weight and you lose your leading roles.

In World War II, Navy doctors screening men for submarines had to consider things beyond general health. Compartments within submarines, connected by hatches only 25 by 20 inches, were separated from each other, and crew members’ bunks were barely wider. If a sailor weighed more than 180 to 190 pounds, or had a heavy midsection, he’d be turned down. An overweight man might get stuck in an emergency escape hatch, or might never fit in his own bunk.

Fashion houses such as Christian Dior, Jacques Fath, and Cristóbal Balenciaga employed salaried “house mannequins” whose job was to model the latest designs in front of buyers. Once Dior’s New Look established a narrow-waisted silhouette, mannequins had to maintain a waist measurement between 20 and 22 inches and a maximum weight of 105 to 115 pounds. They were measured regularly, usually with a tape measure and scale. Because sample dresses were only cut once a season, and they couldn’t be let out or taken in, even a one-pound weight gain might get them fired.

For Russell Markert, the choreographer who created the precision dance group that evolved into the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, every dancer in the line had to be identical. They were required to stay under a certain weight ceiling. Women were typically expected to weigh around 120 to 125 pounds, measured at backstage weigh-ins, with extra weight resulting in an unpaid suspension. Markert also put his tallest dancers in the middle and the shortest on either end to further the illusion of a perfectly straight row across the stage.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the minimum weight requirement for the New York Police Department was between 140 and 150 pounds. It was a minimum, not a maximum. In those days, officers were out on the beat alone, without radio communications or patrol cars, so their weight was sometimes their only weapon when they went to break up a fight or keep back a mob. Men under the weight limit would fail the physical exam, and these minimums would only be struck down by the courts many years later.

Aeromedical examiners for U.S. Army Air Force fighter training programs restricted candidates to around 170 to 180 pounds, depending on their height, if they were destined for single-seat airplanes such as the P-51 Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt. Additional weight changed the plane’s balance in tight maneuvers and made it harder to get in and out of the cockpit. Parachutes had weight limits, too, and too much weight could rip the chute or break your legs when you hit the ground. Crews of bombers faced other limitations.

The 190-pound Mark V, used for decades by Navy and commercial divers engaged in marine salvage and harbor work, consisted of a heavy copper helmet and a suit to which were fastened lead weights on the chest, back, and boots. Many diving schools would not accept recruits weighing less than 150 or 160 pounds, reasoning that a smaller man would be unable to haul the weight of the Mark V onto a deck, or overcome the pull of the current once he was submerged.

Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., who staged the Ziegfeld Follies at New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre, left the showgirls to his chief choreographer Ned Wayburn, who wrote a how-to manual on the subject. The tall showgirls were expected not to go over 115 to 125 pounds, and their weight was checked regularly on scales. A heavy showgirl might be fined, laid off without pay, or replaced outright.

From the 18th through the 19th centuries, British and American cavalry regiments capped a trooper’s bare weight, without clothing or gear, at 150 to 160 pounds. Even with this limit, a cavalry horse already carried more than 80 pounds of saddle, bedroll, saber, carbine, and ammunition. Commanders followed an unwritten rule, keeping the total saddled load under a fifth of the horse’s own weight. Men who exceeded the limit were simply reassigned to the infantry.

The Bell System, AT&T’s nationwide network of telephone companies, hired hundreds of thousands of women as switchboard operators between the 1910s and 1940s. The job description dictated strict height limits, requiring sufficient arm span to reach the highest jacks on the field. There was also a weight chart which usually placed the height/weight limit at around 130 to 140 lbs. They were expected to sit for eight hours at a time on very narrow chairs, arranged tightly along very long switchboards, and any female operator who exceeded these limits could not easily fit between the chairs in the narrow aisles.

Weight classes evolved from flyweight, at 112 pounds, up to featherweight, lightweight, and middleweight, at 160 pounds. They began to form when the Marquess of Queensberry Rules established gloved boxing in 1867. Before 1960, state commissions, such as New York’s, typically conducted an official weigh-in on the morning of the fight, which meant that boxers had very little time to replenish fluids lost by water weight. If a boxer was unable to make weight, he could either lose the fight, pay the opponent, or have the bout called off.

The Boston and Chicago fire departments also required male recruits to be 150 to 160 pounds, as most city boards of the early 1900s did. In those days, there was no lightweight synthetic gear and no power tools, so raw body weight helped a firefighter brace himself as he held a heavy brass hose nozzle against water pressure that wasn’t assisted, held up a solid oak ladder, or lugged a grown adult down an escape ladder. The medical examiner rejected men below that floor.

The coxswain steers the boat and calls out the rate at which the oars should be pulled. Since a light coxswain made a boat faster, some crews forced their steerers to starve themselves. The Intercollegiate Rowing Association, which governed U.S. college rowing from 1895, set a floor of 110 pounds for female coxswains and 125 pounds for males. If a coxswain came in below the minimum, they were still eligible to race. They simply had to carry sandbags or blocks of lead to bring them up to the required weight.

According to the mobilization guidelines released by the U.S. War Department at the beginning of World War II, if you weighed less than 110 lbs, you could be turned away from military service. Army surgeons imposed the threshold because they believed those under 110 lbs would not have the endurance to carry a full combat ruck on their backs while marching. Men under this weight limit were either deemed ineligible for service or placed in designated units for those needing extra calories to reach the required weight before entering basic training.

In the 19th century, children in Manchester, England, and Lowell, Massachusetts, were hired as scavengers to crawl under the self-acting mules, massive cotton-spinning machines, to collect loose waste while the iron carriage ran back and forth over their heads, with barely two feet of space. Children weighing no more than about 45 or 50 pounds were preferred. The practice was reported to Parliament in Britain.

In the wake of the Great Fire of London in 1666, new coal chimneys had narrow, nine-by-nine-inch brick flues turned at right angles. Master sweeps, who hired poor parish children to work in them, deliberately kept the boys hungry, under 40 or 50 pounds, so that they did not get stuck. A campaigner named Jonas Hanway pushed Parliament toward reform, but these measures were ignored for decades.

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