The Seattle Parks Department, pondering womens swim wear since (at least) 1934.
  • Seattle Municipal Archives
  • The Seattle Parks Department, pondering women's swim wear since (at least) 1934.

As Cienna reported yesterday, the Seattle Parks Department is convening a work group to ponder the issue of women with mastectomies wanting to swim topless in public pools. When this group does get together, it may want to study up on a similar demand for relaxed standards that flummoxed the department 78 years ago.

At the time, women wanted to wear what was known as "a bra suit." Today, we'd call it a bikini. And in 1934, according to a page from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that's stored in the Seattle Municipal Archives, the Seattle Parks Board (after the close studying depicted above) ruled that "a strip of bare anatomy between trunks and tops of a bathing suit, even a nice black satin lastex one, isn't quite decent."

However, the board did allow women to begin wearing white bathing suits ("provided they are wool"), and "to permit men to wear trunks, or shorts, without tops."

"Ah, ha!" said Samuel Martin, president of the Seattle Parks Board, according to the May 10, 1934 edition of the P-I. "Now we're modern at last!"