Read Online Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World by Glenn Stout - Free Book Online
Authors: Glenn Stout
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doctors told me my hearing would get worse, but I loved the water so much I couldn't stop." Whatever damage exposure to the water might have caused to her hearing, it was more than offset by the joy she experienced in the water.
Her parents seem to have come to the same conclusion—nothing was going to keep Trudy out of the water. So when her mother saw a notice for a swimming and diving exhibition in the Highlands sponsored by something called the Women's Swimming Association (WSA), she was intrigued. But she was drawn to the group by more than the simple fact that it was about swimming. Unlike the Turner societies or other German social groups, the WSA had no ethnic identity—it was an American organization, albeit all-white, without other restrictions on membership. Perhaps, thought Gertrud Ederle, this was the kind of group Trudy might want to belong to, a place where she could meet other young women of various backgrounds just as excited about swimming as she was, and an organization that could simultaneously draw her out of her shell and help her pursue her favorite pastime.
Although the WSA was less than a year old, the organization was already revolutionary, changing the way women looked at themselves, and thereby changing the way men viewed women. It was made for the Ederle girls, who loved the water and loved all things new and American.
The roots of the organization had been born on the day of the
Slocum
tragedy. In the wake of so many deaths, all so pointless and all so avoidable, the issue of women and the morality of swimming had been thrust into the spotlight. Only a few weeks after the tragedy a letter to the editor in the
New York Times
began, '"Self-preservation is the first law of nature,' but to teach its people the 'art of self-preservation' should be the first law of a nation and would tend to lessen the repetition of Slocum tragedies." Captain Tom Riley, Coney Island's best-known lifeguard and swimming instructor, told a reporter, "The burning of the
General Slocum
has aroused thousands of people of the necessity of learning how to swim." Riley addressed the question of women swimmers directly, telling the newspaper bluntly, "The average girl has just as much nerve as the boy in the water and will become as good a swimmer if taught properly," but he offered that "the trouble with grown up women is that sometime in their lives they have been dunked by a would-be funny idiot until they have come to regard the water with terror."
Those who were fighting for women's suffrage and women's rights viewed the tragedy as a call to arms. Suffragists and women's rights advocates immediately began to campaign for changes in women's swimming attire and recommended swimming lessons for women, but at first the movement had little traction.
The major problem was, in a sense, semantic. Over much of the next decade any call to teach women how to "swim" for its own sake inspired moral outrage. Opponents of swimming became half hysterical as they imagined the deleterious effects on public virtue if women were allowed to commingle with men in pools and on public beaches, particularly if they did so while not fully and conservatively clothed.
The reason was a young Australian woman named Annette Kellerman—or women who admired her—because to the minds and fertile imaginations of most American men, Annette Kellerman
was
women's swimming—and absolutely everything that was wrong with it.
As a child growing up in New South Wales, Kellerman suffered from some undiagnosed bone affliction, likely either polio or rickets, which left her with bowed legs, forcing her to wear heavy braces. At the suggestion of a doctor, her father insisted that Kellerman begin taking swimming lessons to strengthen her legs. In Australia, where virtually the entire population lived along the coast, taboos against swimming for both men and women were far less pronounced than elsewhere in the western world. An Englishman named Frederick
Her parents seem to have come to the same conclusion—nothing was going to keep Trudy out of the water. So when her mother saw a notice for a swimming and diving exhibition in the Highlands sponsored by something called the Women's Swimming Association (WSA), she was intrigued. But she was drawn to the group by more than the simple fact that it was about swimming. Unlike the Turner societies or other German social groups, the WSA had no ethnic identity—it was an American organization, albeit all-white, without other restrictions on membership. Perhaps, thought Gertrud Ederle, this was the kind of group Trudy might want to belong to, a place where she could meet other young women of various backgrounds just as excited about swimming as she was, and an organization that could simultaneously draw her out of her shell and help her pursue her favorite pastime.
Although the WSA was less than a year old, the organization was already revolutionary, changing the way women looked at themselves, and thereby changing the way men viewed women. It was made for the Ederle girls, who loved the water and loved all things new and American.
The roots of the organization had been born on the day of the
Slocum
tragedy. In the wake of so many deaths, all so pointless and all so avoidable, the issue of women and the morality of swimming had been thrust into the spotlight. Only a few weeks after the tragedy a letter to the editor in the
New York Times
began, '"Self-preservation is the first law of nature,' but to teach its people the 'art of self-preservation' should be the first law of a nation and would tend to lessen the repetition of Slocum tragedies." Captain Tom Riley, Coney Island's best-known lifeguard and swimming instructor, told a reporter, "The burning of the
General Slocum
has aroused thousands of people of the necessity of learning how to swim." Riley addressed the question of women swimmers directly, telling the newspaper bluntly, "The average girl has just as much nerve as the boy in the water and will become as good a swimmer if taught properly," but he offered that "the trouble with grown up women is that sometime in their lives they have been dunked by a would-be funny idiot until they have come to regard the water with terror."
Those who were fighting for women's suffrage and women's rights viewed the tragedy as a call to arms. Suffragists and women's rights advocates immediately began to campaign for changes in women's swimming attire and recommended swimming lessons for women, but at first the movement had little traction.
The major problem was, in a sense, semantic. Over much of the next decade any call to teach women how to "swim" for its own sake inspired moral outrage. Opponents of swimming became half hysterical as they imagined the deleterious effects on public virtue if women were allowed to commingle with men in pools and on public beaches, particularly if they did so while not fully and conservatively clothed.
The reason was a young Australian woman named Annette Kellerman—or women who admired her—because to the minds and fertile imaginations of most American men, Annette Kellerman
was
women's swimming—and absolutely everything that was wrong with it.
As a child growing up in New South Wales, Kellerman suffered from some undiagnosed bone affliction, likely either polio or rickets, which left her with bowed legs, forcing her to wear heavy braces. At the suggestion of a doctor, her father insisted that Kellerman begin taking swimming lessons to strengthen her legs. In Australia, where virtually the entire population lived along the coast, taboos against swimming for both men and women were far less pronounced than elsewhere in the western world. An Englishman named Frederick
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