June 5, 2017 • 33 mins
Australian Kellerman gets a lot of the credit for developing the women's one-piece bathing suit. But she was also a competitive swimmer, as well as a vaudeville and film star who designed her own mermaid costumes.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Uh,
summer coming, at least in theory, sho. I think I
(00:22):
think summer has definitely arrived where you are, which is Atlanta. Yeah,
I mean, I guess technically it's still cooler than it
usually would be this time of year. Yeah, it is
not warm at all. It's fifty seven degrees right now.
We're recording this on May thirtieth. Yeah, like, I think
our high today might be eighty, which sounds hot to
some people, but for Atlanta at the end of May,
(00:44):
that's really not. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's been a We've
had an unseasonably cool um May up here in New
England anyway, though, at least in theory, summer is either
on the way or here for most but not all
of our listeners. So seems like a good time talk
about swimming. We yes, specifically, we are talking about Annette Kellerman,
(01:07):
who gets a lot of the credit for developing the
woman's one piece bathing suit and then for making it
socially appropriate for women in a lot of the English
speaking world to put on an outfit that you could
actually swim in without drowning and then go out in
public that way, and perhaps kind of ironically, she was Australian,
where it is definitely not coming on summer. So Australians,
(01:32):
we have some Australian history today that is uh, seasonally
incongruous for where you actually live, unless you happen to
be uh somebody who's downloading it late in the game,
in which case store hooray summer for you as well.
Annette Kellerman was born in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia.
She was coy about her birth date, and it's variously
(01:53):
cited as July five or sixth of eighteen eighty six,
eighteen eighty seven, or eighteen eighty eight. The sixth is
the most frequently cited date. Her father, Frederick, was a
violinist born in Australia, and her mother, Alice, was a
pianist and a music teacher who was originally from France.
When she was young, and Nett had to wear braces
(02:13):
on her legs because of persistent weakness, and not only
were these braces painful to wear, but she also found
them embarrassing. The cause is unclear. A few sources site
rickets or polio, and later on in her life she
speculated that hip might have been a calcium deficiency her
according to her own account, actual doctors at the time
(02:35):
said that it was because she had been allowed to
learn to walk too early, or that she had chalk
in her bones. Neither of those are real things would
have caused her to need leg braces. Um, so totally unclear,
but the braces were a real part of her life.
That's so she get when you go to cartoon doctors, like,
chalk in your bones sounds like such a cartoon diagnosis,
(02:57):
and chalk bones is a nickname for like one congenital
bone condition, but it has nothing to do with what
she was experiencing. Is a totally different set of symptoms.
So very weird. Yeah, whatever the cause of her disability,
eventually her father visited a doctor who recommended swimming lessons,
and at first and that was really terrified of this plan,
(03:19):
possibly because it meant exposing her legs to people, which
she did not want to do because they were visibly undeveloped,
and she begged not to have to go, but her
parents and the doctor were all certain that swimming would
really help, so she and her brothers were taken to
Frederick Cavell's baths so they could learn to swim, and
the Cavils were actually a whole family of swimmers there
in the International Swimming Hall of Fame for their combined
(03:41):
contributions to the sport. It took a Net a lot
longer to get the hang of swimming than it took
her brothers. They were both able to swim on their
own after a handful of lessons, but it took a
net close to twenty But once she knew how to
do it, as predicted, it really did help her build
her strength up and her legs, and with the water
(04:02):
supporting her, she could move around without having to wear
the braces, and that would later describe her gradual improvement
through swimming as a process of intense joy. By the
time she reached the age of thirteen, her muscle development
was more or less typical for a child her age,
although she was susceptible to muscle strains and had to
wear very tightly laced boots until she was eighteen. A
(04:24):
lot of the swimming strokes that are recognized and used
competitively today were still new or in the process of
being developed and refined. So what a Net learned at
first was basically the breaststroke, and that was the stroke
that she used mostly when she was exercising at first.
At about the age of fifteen, she started branching out
into learning other strokes, putting dedicated effort into practicing them
(04:46):
and getting better at them, and soon she told her
parents that she wanted to start competing in swimming. Her
first swimming race was a local event, and she wanted
Annette's father had been incredulous when she said she wanted
to enter a swimming race. He had thought of swimming
as something she was doing because of her disability, not
as something she would seriously pursue for her own sake.
(05:09):
But once she had that first win under her belt,
he was instrumental in her progress as a competitive swimmer,
essentially becoming both her trainer and her coach. As soon
as she started seriously competing, a Net started winning races
and setting records. In nineteen o two, at the age
of about sixteen, she won a one hundred yard championship
(05:29):
for New South Wales and also set a world record
for swimming a mile with a time of thirty two
minutes and twenty nine seconds. That same year, she started
participating in long distance swimming races and public diving demonstrations.
Her time in the water wasn't only about competition, though,
She started doing mermaid shows in Australian aquariums along with
(05:53):
other aquatic performances while she was still in her teens.
Although she was winning races and making a name for
her self as a competitive swimmer, she wasn't really able
to earn an income from doing so. So Annette and
her father moved to England with the hope of finding
more lucrative opportunities to compete and perform. Once they arrived
in England, they had a really hard time getting started.
(06:15):
Although Annette already held multiple records and swimming, they didn't
know anyone and Annette didn't have a local reputation to
try to build on, So her father hatched a plan
to drum up some publicity. She would swim twenty six miles,
which was forty two kilometers down the Thames from Putney
to black Wall in five Annette, at about age eighteen,
(06:37):
became the first woman to make this swim, Although it
did indeed bring in a lot of media attention. The
swim itself was terrible. The Thames was filthy, and Annette
later said she felt like she'd swallowed big mouthfuls of
oil from the surface of the river. She had also
had to dodge a lot of flotsam, garbage, tugboats and
barges along the way. But afterward a sports editor from
(07:01):
The Daily Mirror approached her with another idea. The Daily
Mirror was the first paper in the UK to use
photographs rather than illustrations, and the editor thought that articles
on a net complete with photographs of her in the
scandalous swimwear that we're going to talk about a little
bit more later, if you thought that would sell a
lot of papers. So we offered to back her in
(07:23):
attempts and an attempt to swim across the English Channel,
along with paying for and writing about swims along the
coast to train for it. This entire enterprise was wildly
successful in almost every way, and that's training. Swims down
the coast threw huge crowds, and the articles and their
corresponding photos sold lots of papers. She swam an average
(07:45):
of forty five miles or seventy two kilometers per week,
increasing the distance of each swim until she had done
the twenty four miles stretch from Dover to Ramsgate. At
that point she thought she was ready to try to
conquer the Channel. Although that's a slightly shorter stints than
her swim down the Thames, swimming in the English Channel
is far more difficult due to the very cold water,
(08:06):
the waves and the tides. She made her first attempts
to swim across the English Channel along with six men
on August nine oh five. They all started their swim
at about three in the morning, all from different points
along the coast, based on where they thought the currents
and the tides would be the most advantageous. Each swimmer
(08:26):
was accompanied by a steam tug in a row boat
in case they fell into some distress along the way,
and then periodically hot chocolate or food could be handed
down to the swimmers from these boats to keep their
energy up. An advertiser had given a net chocolate to
eat along the way, but the combination of chocolate and
the choppy water really made her sea sick. The further
(08:48):
she went, the bigger her pay day would be those
so she kept herself going through that seasickness by thinking
the longer you stick, the more you get. She stuck
it out for about six and a half hours, and
she was paid thirty pounds. This was the first of
Kellerman's three attempts to swim that swim the English Channel,
and as with her swim down the Thames, she was
(09:08):
the first woman to make the attempt. The closest she
came in these three attempts to actually crossing was about
three quarters of the way, which took ten and a
half hours. Later, Killerman would say she thought she had
the endurance to swim the channel, but not the raw strength.
In her book How to Swim, she wrote that she
didn't think a woman would ever successfully swim the English Channel.
(09:32):
She was proven wrong in six when Gertrude utterly crossed
in fourteen hours thirty nine minutes, not only swimming the
channel but beating the previous record time by more than
two hours. Today there are lots of women swim across
the English Channel, including swimming at three consecutive times, like
swimming it across one way and then going back and
(09:53):
then going back across again, which is astounding to me.
So in kellerman first attempt to swim across the English Channel.
The male swimmers who were swimming that night were allowed
to be nude, but she had to wear a swimsuit
that chafed her skin just terribly. And this brings us
to her efforts to make suitable swimwear for women, which
(10:15):
we will talk about more after a sponsor break. That
swim down the Thames and the attempts to cross the
English Channel, We're not Annette Kellerman's only long distance races
in the nineteen hundreds. Before leaving Australia, she had taken
multiple long distance swims down the Yarra River, including becoming
(10:39):
the first woman to complete a ten mile stretch. In
nineteen o five, she participated in a race down the
sin where she tied for third with with Thomas William Burgess.
And her account of this race and how to swim,
she wrote that well, meeting spectators kept calling out that
she was almost there and had just two bridges more,
(10:59):
and when she alized she was not almost there, and
she became just really discouraged because she had worn herself
out doing what she thought was her final push to
the finish line. So when Burgess caught up to her
and saw that she was crying in a very lovely
show of sporting behavior. He stayed with her and encouraged
her for the rest of the of the race, and
that is how they came to tie. In June of six,
(11:23):
Kellerman also won a twenty two mile or thirty six
kilometer race down the Danube. I think anyone also who
has ever run a race knows the the ire of
please don't tell me if you're almost there, when you're not,
when you're not know anyway, it was a little bit
unclear to me whether these were the people in the
guide boat or the people who were just spectators who
(11:43):
were saying this, but like she they got her a
couple of times, and then in like time number three
of them being like, you're almost there, she was like, oh,
I'm not well right. And it's almost always well intentioned,
like if you but let this be a note if
you're ever spectating and sporting that please don't fimb to
the participant because it does more to harm their head
(12:04):
game than than help. And in most of these events,
Kellerman was one of very few women, and sometimes she
was the only woman, and she typically swam them wearing
a swimsuit that was actually made for men, so this
was not unheard of in Australia at this point. Uh
swimming was already a more established sport in Australia than
it was in the United Kingdom or the United States,
(12:27):
but it was astonishing in a lot of the rest
of the English speaking world, where water was for bathing,
not for swimming. Bathing meant getting into the water a
little way and you might wait or play or maybe
float a little out there, but you didn't really swim,
and a lot of people didn't even know how to swim.
(12:47):
The idea of uh man made swimming pool was also
still quite recent at this point, like there had not
even been one built for the Olympics yet. So like
bathing was a thing that happened at a beach, whether
it was like a lakeside beach or a seashore beach,
it did not really happen in a pool. And even
(13:09):
if you wanted to swim, if you were a woman
around the turn of the twentieth century, your bathing entire
was not something you could actually swim in. The standard
bathing costume for women was essentially a dress with a
length that ranged within a couple of inches above or
below the knee. It had a blousey top and puffy,
usually short sleeves, sometimes with the sailor's collar. It was cinched,
(13:31):
belted or ribboned at the waist and worn with stockings
and bathing slippers or sometimes even bathing boots that went
all the way up the calves, and many women wore
their bathing clothes with corsets and other underpinnings. Here is
what a net Kellerman had to say about these outfits.
Quote there is no more reason why you should wear
(13:53):
those awful water overcoats, those awkward, unnecessary, lumpy quote bathing suits.
Then there is that you should wear lead chains. Heavy
bathing suits have caused more deaths by drowning than cramps.
I am certain there isn't a single reason under the
sun why everybody should not wear lightweight suits. Anyone who
(14:14):
persuades you to wear the heavy skurty kind is endangering
your life. Just thinking about wearing tights into the water
is a horrifying prospect to me. Oh, I don't know why.
It just kind of grosses me out. Uh. For competitive
women's swimmers, there was a grudging exception to the standard
(14:36):
of dress they could wear. A men's bathing suit, which
was more like a T shirt and shorts, sometimes constructed
all is one piece, But this also starts a whole
chicken and egg situation. Women weren't supposed to be seen
in a tired that they could actually swim in, which
created a huge barrier for entry for the sport of swimming. Yeah,
if people were like, well, I guess you can wear
(14:58):
a men's suit for this race, that left the question of, like,
all the training you would need to do to be
able to compete in the race in the first place.
It was this whole social standard of what was acceptable
for women to wear that led Kellerman to invent a
new swimsuit. In five she was scheduled for a swimming
performance at London's Bath Club and some of the royal
(15:20):
family was to be in attendance. The men's bathing suit
that she had been wearing was determined to be inappropriate
because it was two revealing. So Kellerman bought a pair
of black stockings and she sewed them to the legs
of her men's bathing suit, creating what was effectively a
one piece garment that covered her from her shoulders to
her feet. From there, she began tweaking and refining this
(15:42):
original design, eventually developing a one piece, form fitting garment
without sleeves. The lengths of the legs varied from full
length and stalking like to stopping at the thigh. Although
this would be considered pretty modest swimwear by a lot
of today's standards, it was not at all all modest
by the standards of the day. Like we said before
(16:03):
the first break, the very idea of a woman in
public and such a garment was enough to sell newspapers.
It's widely reported that in seven Kellerman was arrested for
indecency on Revere Beach in Massachusetts while wearing one of
these swimsuits. Although there's no arrest in the log books,
it's a story that came up again and again and
(16:23):
again during her own lifetime, including from her own mouth,
like I don't think she made this up, but people
have noted that, like they can't find a document that
actually details the arrest. In spite of heavy resistance to
the idea of women being out in public so relatively unclothed,
Kellerman persisted. She launched her own line of women's swimwear,
(16:45):
some of which came with a modesty panel, which was
a close fitting skirt that went from waste to knee,
covering the thighs but bringing along far less fabric and
weight than the previous era of swimsuits. She became so
closely associated to this type of swim where that soon
people were calling anything that looked like it in a
net Kellerman or just a Kellerman, although it was a
(17:06):
name she trademarked and went to court to defend when
she needed to, and at some beaches, Kellerman type suits
were actually banned. As Kellerman became more famous and her
swimsuits became more widely adopted, it gradually became more acceptable
for women to be seen in them and for women
to participate in the sport of swimming, and compounding that,
(17:28):
for swimming in general to be seen as a recreational activity.
Some of this was part of an overall growth in
the popularity of swimming, but it wasn't just happenstance. Kellerman
was an active advocate for women to learn to swim
and for swimming to be seen as an acceptable form
of exercise, recreation, and competition for women. She wrote quote,
(17:52):
I'm not trying to shut men out of swimming there's
enough water in the world for all of us. But
as men can indulge in so many others sports where
women can make a poor showing or cannot compete at all,
Swimming may well be called the women's sport. But unfortunately
this progress did not apply to all women. Even though
(18:12):
Kellerman herself wrote things like quote, there is nothing more
democratic than swimming, and a clean, cool, beautiful, cheap thing
we all from cats to kings can enjoy, swimming was
not actually accessible to everyone. In the United States, public
beaches and as they were built, public swimming pools were
often racially segregated, and the Indigenous population was barred from
(18:34):
many public swimming areas in Australia, So while Kellerman was
a staunch advocate for making swimming accessible to women, that
was really most applicable to white women. And to add
another layer to all of this, a lot of the
swimming strokes that she learned as a child and then
helps to popularize and as an adult were either patterned
(18:55):
after or directly taught to white swimmers by Indigenous Australians
and indigenous people from elsewhere in the Pacific. So like
a lot of the art and skill of swimming drew
from indigenous knowledge, but Indigenous people were excluded from a
lot of public swimming locations. In addition to contributing to
(19:16):
the popularity and at least for some accessibility of swimming,
Annette Kellerman's fame and skill led to a completely different
aspect of her career Vaudeville and Hollywood. We're going to
talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break.
A lot of Annette Kellerman's fame as a swimmer came
(19:39):
because she was naturally a performer. She was definitely talented.
I don't want to overlook that at all. She legitimately
won races, and she set records, and she was one
of the best swimmers of her era. But a lot
of the attention that she got for those successes was
due to showmanship and an openness with her body that
(20:00):
was not really typical for the time. A woman swimmer
was already relatively novel in a lot of places, and
a woman swimmer who flaunted social expectations to proudly wear
a scandalous swimsuit was a real attention getter. This attention
actually led her to a career in Vaudeville. In nineteen
o six, Having performed at the London Hippodrome and won
(20:23):
numerous races in Europe, she sailed for the United States
to perform an amusement parks and theaters. Her vaudeville act
involved a combination of swimming, high diving, water stunts, and
mermaid shows, for which she often designed all of her
own costumes. She would eventually donate all of her costumes
and memorabilia to the Sydney Opera House. We will put
(20:44):
a link in the show notes where you can go
look at them. There's a lot. There are lots and
lots of pictures of this collection that you can browse through,
and they are fascinating. Although water shows already existed in Vaudeville,
Kellerman added a lot of her own flare and incorporated
ballet and other movement in what would become a precursor
to synchronize swimming. Her biggest production at the New York
(21:06):
Hippodrome included a core of two hundred mermaids, all swimming
in tandem. She also tried her hand at other types
of performance, including male impersonation and high wire walking. By
nineteen fourteen, Kellerman had become one of the highest paid
performers in vaudeville. Also during her time in vaudeville, she
got married after proposing to her manager, Louis Sullivan, who
(21:29):
was known as Jimmy in ve Running parallel to her
time in vaudeville, Kellerman also began acting in films. Her
first films were a series of silent shorts made while
she was trying to work out a contract dispute between
two different theater managers. Later on, when other people started
to copy her water act and her pay in vaudeville
(21:50):
consequently plummeted, she turned to film almost entirely. Kellerman's film
roles involved lots of water and swimming, and sometimes also
played off the fact that the South Pacific was pretty
exotic two American audiences, which meant that Kellerman herself was
often seen as exotic as well. Her first full length
(22:11):
movie was Neptune's Daughter, which came out in nineteen fourteen.
She played a mermaid wearing sheer body suits that matched
her skin tone. In nineteen sixteen, she started a film
called The Daughter of the Gods, which was a fantasy drama.
She played Anisia, who was the daughter in question. In
this film, she had a scene in which she was
completely nude, although part of her body was covered by
(22:34):
her hair. It was one of the first fully nude
appearances by a major star in a non pornographic movie.
Her final film, Venus of the South Seas, came out
in nine four. There are definitely people who call the
Daughter of the Gods role like the first nude appearance
(22:54):
by a woman in film, and that seems a little there.
It needs a little more caveats in that um Kellerman
mostly retired from performing in the nineteen thirties. She and
her husband moved to California, where she opened a health
food store. She's apparently a vegetarian her whole life. By
this point she had published books on swimming and on fitness,
(23:16):
and one called Physical Beauty and How to Keep It.
This one, to a modern reader, is maybe a little weird.
It's simultaneously acknowledges the double standards that women face regarding
our bodies and appearances. But at the same time it
is a how to manual for how to have an
ideal body, and it clearly spells out that the point
(23:36):
in doing so is to keep from losing your figure
and consequently your husband as you age. So in some ways,
Like in some ways she was way ahead of her time,
and in some ways she was squarely a product of it.
The system is really bad, but here's how to buy in.
Yeah that yeah, uh that book also, like it's a
(23:59):
little I don't know what what Annette Kellerman's racial views
were about, like the contributions of indigenous swimmers swimming and
all of this sort of stuff, But she has a
couple of lines in this book that, like, you can
tell there are some problematic racial and and racist views
(24:21):
in there, Like at one point she says it's the
only people who need corsets are children and savages, and
by savages in quotation marks, she means Africans, Like I
don't want to I don't want to gloss over that.
But like that, it's a weird intrusion in a book
that's definitely about um, you know, middle class white women
(24:42):
retaining their figures, which has its own set of social play.
Kellerman also established health spas. She wrote newspaper columns on
health and beauty. She stridently advocated for women to be
encouraged to be fit and active, and she wrote eight
children's book called fairy Tales of the South Seas but
(25:04):
in a lot of ways she had become famous for
her bathing suits and for the body under them. In
nine Dr Dudley, Sergeant of Harvard, had taken the measurements
of about one thousand women and compared them to the
measurements of the Venus de Milo. Kellerman's were closest, and
he dubbed her the perfect Woman, which, along with that
Revere Beach arrest, became part of her ongoing marketing. In
(25:29):
the Harvard Collections, like the Harvard Special Collections, are still
boxes and boxes of these women's measurement cards that were
part of this study, which baffles me on a number
of different It doesn't baffle me that the cards are
still in the collection. It baffles me that, like, let's
measure a thousand women and compare them to a statue
(25:52):
was a study in the first place. So her fame
for her figure and the clothing being bathing suits on
it persisted long after the first decade of the nineteen hundreds,
which was really when Annette Kellerman had introduced and become
famous for the s bathing suit. In nineteen thirty five,
an Associated Press reporter tractor down and got her opinion
(26:15):
on some subtorial Hubbub and Yonkers, New York that was
over women wearing shorts. She recalled that it had only
been a couple of decades since that time she was
arrested and then said, quote, but I've always preached the
importance of caring for the female figure, So the girls
will have to look to their shapes and not to
the courts when they appear in suits. But remember, please,
(26:37):
I am not a nudist. Uh An Associated Press headline
from ninety seven read quote and nett Kellerman still draws
crowd legs of diving Venus hold former beauty so like
people were still basically writing about her body years after
(27:00):
she stopped be performing with it, like she was still
the go to person to talk to you about scandalous
swimwear and women's figures. Kellerman and her husband returned to
Australia a couple of times during the nineteen forties, including
during World War Two when she entertained troops in the
South Pacific. In nineteen fifty two, Esther Williams played her
(27:23):
in the film Million Dollar Mermaid. Kellerman was not a
fan of this film. They called it quote a silly
little yarn and also quote a namby panby attempt. She
was frustrated that she was played by an American in
this movie, and also that the film was more of
a swimming spectacular than an actual biography of her. As
(27:43):
kind of a side note, she was also not a
fan of the bikini after it was introduced, calling it
far too revealing and noting that almost nobody had the
figure to actually wear one. Kellerman and her husband moved
back to Australia for good in nineteen seventy. She was
in did into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in
nineteen four, and she died on November six, ninety five,
(28:06):
at the age of roughly seven. Both sources say eighty
seven or eighty eight. It's uh, it's a little her
late eighties, her late eighties. Who wants to end with
a poem? I do. I'm really excited We've gotten to
end some episodes with pemns lately. This poem ran in
(28:27):
the Boston Post on November seven, of Night No More,
The Gibson Bathing Girls shall grace the Newport's Summer World.
Annette declares her garments wrong at both ends too extremely long.
The Gibson Girl maybe a peach as she perambulates the beach.
But now if in the swim she'd be she must
(28:49):
with sweet Annette agree her heavy skirt she must replace
with filmy Raymon for the race. Thank you, she will
consent to dress in such approach to nothing us he
uh sus Kellerman. Sometimes you will see her name spelled
with two ends instead of one end, which was apparently
(29:11):
a nod to her German heritage that she used when
she published her books, But most sources and as biographies
have it just with one end. Do you have some
listener mail with any number of ends in it? I
sure do. It is from Shannon. It's called a few
Rambling Thoughts. I'm not going to read all the thoughts
because some of them are episode suggestions. I've been listening
(29:34):
to your podcast for a while now. This is my
first time writing to you, though I've often wanted to.
I absolutely love your podcast and listen to it while
I'm driving, while I cleaning, cook et cetera. So thank you.
Thank you for all the awesome work you do and
for always being conscientious and respectful about whatever subject you cover.
I wanted to write for a couple of reasons. First
of all, in your most recent podcast The Ladies of
(29:56):
ben gothlind You mentioned that Eleanor and Sarah were top hats.
In traditional Welsh costume, which seems to originated in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women wore top hats
below or a couple of links for you to look at.
I don't know if this has anything to do with
Eleanor and Sarah's decisions to wear top hats, but I
think it's definitely worth mentioning. I don't think it was
(30:17):
completely unheard of for Welsh women, even if they were
originally Irish of this time period, to be wearing top hats.
And she has a couple of links, and I ran
into some other stuff and we will put things into
the show notes with some links for folks to go
look at it. So yes, Uh, there is a Welsh
hat that is part of Welsh national dress which looks
(30:37):
kind of like a top hat, except it's even taller
and a little skinnier. It's like a chimney hat um.
And it seems as though this was really adopted as
part of Welsh national dress after uh the deaths of
the Ladies of Bengal of thank God, So like they
may have been wearing these hats as part of what
(30:59):
was the fact and where they were living in Wales,
but in terms of it being adopted as an actual
part of Welsh national dress, the hat itself was a
little bit different from what they're wearing in engravings that
show them in hats. Um. And then that standard seems
to have come into play starting right around the time
that they died, but then more definitely by the eighteen forties,
(31:22):
which would have been a little bit after them. So
that's definitely worth talking about because it's, um, it's totally
possible that there were people wearing this is sort of
a local custom, and I my conclusion would be that
it's probably simultaneously both local custom and then also it
was also like the fashion in France at a time
(31:46):
to have on little hats, top hats. I think top
hats are good all the time. Sure, I think we
should bring them back as fairly standard. Fine by me.
Perhaps I will start wearing and I will look terribly pretentious,
but it will be so fun. That does sound fun? Um,
it is it is. The welch had is a slightly
(32:08):
different shape from what you would think of as a
as a top hat, so we will put links the
show notes so people can go check that out for themselves,
and then I'm the rest of the letter uh included
some episode suggestions also, so thank you so much Shannon
for writing in with that. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast or
a history podcast, at how stuff works dot com. We're
(32:28):
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and all of those places. You can come to our
parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com
to look up information on anything your heart desires. I'm
sure there's lots of cool stuff there about swimming. You
(32:49):
can come to our website, which is missing history dot com,
and you will find a total archive of everything Holly
and I have ever done on the show, and all
of the work of past hosts, of which they were many.
You'll find show notes for all the episodes that Holly
and I have worked on together. We will find some
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that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
(33:10):
dot com or missed in history dot com For more
on this and thousands of other topics. VI is it
how stuff works? Dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Uh,
summer coming, at least in theory, sho. I think I
(00:22):
think summer has definitely arrived where you are, which is Atlanta. Yeah,
I mean, I guess technically it's still cooler than it
usually would be this time of year. Yeah, it is
not warm at all. It's fifty seven degrees right now.
We're recording this on May thirtieth. Yeah, like, I think
our high today might be eighty, which sounds hot to
some people, but for Atlanta at the end of May,
(00:44):
that's really not. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's been a We've
had an unseasonably cool um May up here in New
England anyway, though, at least in theory, summer is either
on the way or here for most but not all
of our listeners. So seems like a good time talk
about swimming. We yes, specifically, we are talking about Annette Kellerman,
(01:07):
who gets a lot of the credit for developing the
woman's one piece bathing suit and then for making it
socially appropriate for women in a lot of the English
speaking world to put on an outfit that you could
actually swim in without drowning and then go out in
public that way, and perhaps kind of ironically, she was Australian,
where it is definitely not coming on summer. So Australians,
(01:32):
we have some Australian history today that is uh, seasonally
incongruous for where you actually live, unless you happen to
be uh somebody who's downloading it late in the game,
in which case store hooray summer for you as well.
Annette Kellerman was born in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia.
She was coy about her birth date, and it's variously
(01:53):
cited as July five or sixth of eighteen eighty six,
eighteen eighty seven, or eighteen eighty eight. The sixth is
the most frequently cited date. Her father, Frederick, was a
violinist born in Australia, and her mother, Alice, was a
pianist and a music teacher who was originally from France.
When she was young, and Nett had to wear braces
(02:13):
on her legs because of persistent weakness, and not only
were these braces painful to wear, but she also found
them embarrassing. The cause is unclear. A few sources site
rickets or polio, and later on in her life she
speculated that hip might have been a calcium deficiency her
according to her own account, actual doctors at the time
(02:35):
said that it was because she had been allowed to
learn to walk too early, or that she had chalk
in her bones. Neither of those are real things would
have caused her to need leg braces. Um, so totally unclear,
but the braces were a real part of her life.
That's so she get when you go to cartoon doctors, like,
chalk in your bones sounds like such a cartoon diagnosis,
(02:57):
and chalk bones is a nickname for like one congenital
bone condition, but it has nothing to do with what
she was experiencing. Is a totally different set of symptoms.
So very weird. Yeah, whatever the cause of her disability,
eventually her father visited a doctor who recommended swimming lessons,
and at first and that was really terrified of this plan,
(03:19):
possibly because it meant exposing her legs to people, which
she did not want to do because they were visibly undeveloped,
and she begged not to have to go, but her
parents and the doctor were all certain that swimming would
really help, so she and her brothers were taken to
Frederick Cavell's baths so they could learn to swim, and
the Cavils were actually a whole family of swimmers there
in the International Swimming Hall of Fame for their combined
(03:41):
contributions to the sport. It took a Net a lot
longer to get the hang of swimming than it took
her brothers. They were both able to swim on their
own after a handful of lessons, but it took a
net close to twenty But once she knew how to
do it, as predicted, it really did help her build
her strength up and her legs, and with the water
(04:02):
supporting her, she could move around without having to wear
the braces, and that would later describe her gradual improvement
through swimming as a process of intense joy. By the
time she reached the age of thirteen, her muscle development
was more or less typical for a child her age,
although she was susceptible to muscle strains and had to
wear very tightly laced boots until she was eighteen. A
(04:24):
lot of the swimming strokes that are recognized and used
competitively today were still new or in the process of
being developed and refined. So what a Net learned at
first was basically the breaststroke, and that was the stroke
that she used mostly when she was exercising at first.
At about the age of fifteen, she started branching out
into learning other strokes, putting dedicated effort into practicing them
(04:46):
and getting better at them, and soon she told her
parents that she wanted to start competing in swimming. Her
first swimming race was a local event, and she wanted
Annette's father had been incredulous when she said she wanted
to enter a swimming race. He had thought of swimming
as something she was doing because of her disability, not
as something she would seriously pursue for her own sake.
(05:09):
But once she had that first win under her belt,
he was instrumental in her progress as a competitive swimmer,
essentially becoming both her trainer and her coach. As soon
as she started seriously competing, a Net started winning races
and setting records. In nineteen o two, at the age
of about sixteen, she won a one hundred yard championship
(05:29):
for New South Wales and also set a world record
for swimming a mile with a time of thirty two
minutes and twenty nine seconds. That same year, she started
participating in long distance swimming races and public diving demonstrations.
Her time in the water wasn't only about competition, though,
She started doing mermaid shows in Australian aquariums along with
(05:53):
other aquatic performances while she was still in her teens.
Although she was winning races and making a name for
her self as a competitive swimmer, she wasn't really able
to earn an income from doing so. So Annette and
her father moved to England with the hope of finding
more lucrative opportunities to compete and perform. Once they arrived
in England, they had a really hard time getting started.
(06:15):
Although Annette already held multiple records and swimming, they didn't
know anyone and Annette didn't have a local reputation to
try to build on, So her father hatched a plan
to drum up some publicity. She would swim twenty six miles,
which was forty two kilometers down the Thames from Putney
to black Wall in five Annette, at about age eighteen,
(06:37):
became the first woman to make this swim, Although it
did indeed bring in a lot of media attention. The
swim itself was terrible. The Thames was filthy, and Annette
later said she felt like she'd swallowed big mouthfuls of
oil from the surface of the river. She had also
had to dodge a lot of flotsam, garbage, tugboats and
barges along the way. But afterward a sports editor from
(07:01):
The Daily Mirror approached her with another idea. The Daily
Mirror was the first paper in the UK to use
photographs rather than illustrations, and the editor thought that articles
on a net complete with photographs of her in the
scandalous swimwear that we're going to talk about a little
bit more later, if you thought that would sell a
lot of papers. So we offered to back her in
(07:23):
attempts and an attempt to swim across the English Channel,
along with paying for and writing about swims along the
coast to train for it. This entire enterprise was wildly
successful in almost every way, and that's training. Swims down
the coast threw huge crowds, and the articles and their
corresponding photos sold lots of papers. She swam an average
(07:45):
of forty five miles or seventy two kilometers per week,
increasing the distance of each swim until she had done
the twenty four miles stretch from Dover to Ramsgate. At
that point she thought she was ready to try to
conquer the Channel. Although that's a slightly shorter stints than
her swim down the Thames, swimming in the English Channel
is far more difficult due to the very cold water,
(08:06):
the waves and the tides. She made her first attempts
to swim across the English Channel along with six men
on August nine oh five. They all started their swim
at about three in the morning, all from different points
along the coast, based on where they thought the currents
and the tides would be the most advantageous. Each swimmer
(08:26):
was accompanied by a steam tug in a row boat
in case they fell into some distress along the way,
and then periodically hot chocolate or food could be handed
down to the swimmers from these boats to keep their
energy up. An advertiser had given a net chocolate to
eat along the way, but the combination of chocolate and
the choppy water really made her sea sick. The further
(08:48):
she went, the bigger her pay day would be those
so she kept herself going through that seasickness by thinking
the longer you stick, the more you get. She stuck
it out for about six and a half hours, and
she was paid thirty pounds. This was the first of
Kellerman's three attempts to swim that swim the English Channel,
and as with her swim down the Thames, she was
(09:08):
the first woman to make the attempt. The closest she
came in these three attempts to actually crossing was about
three quarters of the way, which took ten and a
half hours. Later, Killerman would say she thought she had
the endurance to swim the channel, but not the raw strength.
In her book How to Swim, she wrote that she
didn't think a woman would ever successfully swim the English Channel.
(09:32):
She was proven wrong in six when Gertrude utterly crossed
in fourteen hours thirty nine minutes, not only swimming the
channel but beating the previous record time by more than
two hours. Today there are lots of women swim across
the English Channel, including swimming at three consecutive times, like
swimming it across one way and then going back and
(09:53):
then going back across again, which is astounding to me.
So in kellerman first attempt to swim across the English Channel.
The male swimmers who were swimming that night were allowed
to be nude, but she had to wear a swimsuit
that chafed her skin just terribly. And this brings us
to her efforts to make suitable swimwear for women, which
(10:15):
we will talk about more after a sponsor break. That
swim down the Thames and the attempts to cross the
English Channel, We're not Annette Kellerman's only long distance races
in the nineteen hundreds. Before leaving Australia, she had taken
multiple long distance swims down the Yarra River, including becoming
(10:39):
the first woman to complete a ten mile stretch. In
nineteen o five, she participated in a race down the
sin where she tied for third with with Thomas William Burgess.
And her account of this race and how to swim,
she wrote that well, meeting spectators kept calling out that
she was almost there and had just two bridges more,
(10:59):
and when she alized she was not almost there, and
she became just really discouraged because she had worn herself
out doing what she thought was her final push to
the finish line. So when Burgess caught up to her
and saw that she was crying in a very lovely
show of sporting behavior. He stayed with her and encouraged
her for the rest of the of the race, and
that is how they came to tie. In June of six,
(11:23):
Kellerman also won a twenty two mile or thirty six
kilometer race down the Danube. I think anyone also who
has ever run a race knows the the ire of
please don't tell me if you're almost there, when you're not,
when you're not know anyway, it was a little bit
unclear to me whether these were the people in the
guide boat or the people who were just spectators who
(11:43):
were saying this, but like she they got her a
couple of times, and then in like time number three
of them being like, you're almost there, she was like, oh,
I'm not well right. And it's almost always well intentioned,
like if you but let this be a note if
you're ever spectating and sporting that please don't fimb to
the participant because it does more to harm their head
(12:04):
game than than help. And in most of these events,
Kellerman was one of very few women, and sometimes she
was the only woman, and she typically swam them wearing
a swimsuit that was actually made for men, so this
was not unheard of in Australia at this point. Uh
swimming was already a more established sport in Australia than
it was in the United Kingdom or the United States,
(12:27):
but it was astonishing in a lot of the rest
of the English speaking world, where water was for bathing,
not for swimming. Bathing meant getting into the water a
little way and you might wait or play or maybe
float a little out there, but you didn't really swim,
and a lot of people didn't even know how to swim.
(12:47):
The idea of uh man made swimming pool was also
still quite recent at this point, like there had not
even been one built for the Olympics yet. So like
bathing was a thing that happened at a beach, whether
it was like a lakeside beach or a seashore beach,
it did not really happen in a pool. And even
(13:09):
if you wanted to swim, if you were a woman
around the turn of the twentieth century, your bathing entire
was not something you could actually swim in. The standard
bathing costume for women was essentially a dress with a
length that ranged within a couple of inches above or
below the knee. It had a blousey top and puffy,
usually short sleeves, sometimes with the sailor's collar. It was cinched,
(13:31):
belted or ribboned at the waist and worn with stockings
and bathing slippers or sometimes even bathing boots that went
all the way up the calves, and many women wore
their bathing clothes with corsets and other underpinnings. Here is
what a net Kellerman had to say about these outfits.
Quote there is no more reason why you should wear
(13:53):
those awful water overcoats, those awkward, unnecessary, lumpy quote bathing suits.
Then there is that you should wear lead chains. Heavy
bathing suits have caused more deaths by drowning than cramps.
I am certain there isn't a single reason under the
sun why everybody should not wear lightweight suits. Anyone who
(14:14):
persuades you to wear the heavy skurty kind is endangering
your life. Just thinking about wearing tights into the water
is a horrifying prospect to me. Oh, I don't know why.
It just kind of grosses me out. Uh. For competitive
women's swimmers, there was a grudging exception to the standard
(14:36):
of dress they could wear. A men's bathing suit, which
was more like a T shirt and shorts, sometimes constructed
all is one piece, But this also starts a whole
chicken and egg situation. Women weren't supposed to be seen
in a tired that they could actually swim in, which
created a huge barrier for entry for the sport of swimming. Yeah,
if people were like, well, I guess you can wear
(14:58):
a men's suit for this race, that left the question of, like,
all the training you would need to do to be
able to compete in the race in the first place.
It was this whole social standard of what was acceptable
for women to wear that led Kellerman to invent a
new swimsuit. In five she was scheduled for a swimming
performance at London's Bath Club and some of the royal
(15:20):
family was to be in attendance. The men's bathing suit
that she had been wearing was determined to be inappropriate
because it was two revealing. So Kellerman bought a pair
of black stockings and she sewed them to the legs
of her men's bathing suit, creating what was effectively a
one piece garment that covered her from her shoulders to
her feet. From there, she began tweaking and refining this
(15:42):
original design, eventually developing a one piece, form fitting garment
without sleeves. The lengths of the legs varied from full
length and stalking like to stopping at the thigh. Although
this would be considered pretty modest swimwear by a lot
of today's standards, it was not at all all modest
by the standards of the day. Like we said before
(16:03):
the first break, the very idea of a woman in
public and such a garment was enough to sell newspapers.
It's widely reported that in seven Kellerman was arrested for
indecency on Revere Beach in Massachusetts while wearing one of
these swimsuits. Although there's no arrest in the log books,
it's a story that came up again and again and
(16:23):
again during her own lifetime, including from her own mouth,
like I don't think she made this up, but people
have noted that, like they can't find a document that
actually details the arrest. In spite of heavy resistance to
the idea of women being out in public so relatively unclothed,
Kellerman persisted. She launched her own line of women's swimwear,
(16:45):
some of which came with a modesty panel, which was
a close fitting skirt that went from waste to knee,
covering the thighs but bringing along far less fabric and
weight than the previous era of swimsuits. She became so
closely associated to this type of swim where that soon
people were calling anything that looked like it in a
net Kellerman or just a Kellerman, although it was a
(17:06):
name she trademarked and went to court to defend when
she needed to, and at some beaches, Kellerman type suits
were actually banned. As Kellerman became more famous and her
swimsuits became more widely adopted, it gradually became more acceptable
for women to be seen in them and for women
to participate in the sport of swimming, and compounding that,
(17:28):
for swimming in general to be seen as a recreational activity.
Some of this was part of an overall growth in
the popularity of swimming, but it wasn't just happenstance. Kellerman
was an active advocate for women to learn to swim
and for swimming to be seen as an acceptable form
of exercise, recreation, and competition for women. She wrote quote,
(17:52):
I'm not trying to shut men out of swimming there's
enough water in the world for all of us. But
as men can indulge in so many others sports where
women can make a poor showing or cannot compete at all,
Swimming may well be called the women's sport. But unfortunately
this progress did not apply to all women. Even though
(18:12):
Kellerman herself wrote things like quote, there is nothing more
democratic than swimming, and a clean, cool, beautiful, cheap thing
we all from cats to kings can enjoy, swimming was
not actually accessible to everyone. In the United States, public
beaches and as they were built, public swimming pools were
often racially segregated, and the Indigenous population was barred from
(18:34):
many public swimming areas in Australia, So while Kellerman was
a staunch advocate for making swimming accessible to women, that
was really most applicable to white women. And to add
another layer to all of this, a lot of the
swimming strokes that she learned as a child and then
helps to popularize and as an adult were either patterned
(18:55):
after or directly taught to white swimmers by Indigenous Australians
and indigenous people from elsewhere in the Pacific. So like
a lot of the art and skill of swimming drew
from indigenous knowledge, but Indigenous people were excluded from a
lot of public swimming locations. In addition to contributing to
(19:16):
the popularity and at least for some accessibility of swimming,
Annette Kellerman's fame and skill led to a completely different
aspect of her career Vaudeville and Hollywood. We're going to
talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break.
A lot of Annette Kellerman's fame as a swimmer came
(19:39):
because she was naturally a performer. She was definitely talented.
I don't want to overlook that at all. She legitimately
won races, and she set records, and she was one
of the best swimmers of her era. But a lot
of the attention that she got for those successes was
due to showmanship and an openness with her body that
(20:00):
was not really typical for the time. A woman swimmer
was already relatively novel in a lot of places, and
a woman swimmer who flaunted social expectations to proudly wear
a scandalous swimsuit was a real attention getter. This attention
actually led her to a career in Vaudeville. In nineteen
o six, Having performed at the London Hippodrome and won
(20:23):
numerous races in Europe, she sailed for the United States
to perform an amusement parks and theaters. Her vaudeville act
involved a combination of swimming, high diving, water stunts, and
mermaid shows, for which she often designed all of her
own costumes. She would eventually donate all of her costumes
and memorabilia to the Sydney Opera House. We will put
(20:44):
a link in the show notes where you can go
look at them. There's a lot. There are lots and
lots of pictures of this collection that you can browse through,
and they are fascinating. Although water shows already existed in Vaudeville,
Kellerman added a lot of her own flare and incorporated
ballet and other movement in what would become a precursor
to synchronize swimming. Her biggest production at the New York
(21:06):
Hippodrome included a core of two hundred mermaids, all swimming
in tandem. She also tried her hand at other types
of performance, including male impersonation and high wire walking. By
nineteen fourteen, Kellerman had become one of the highest paid
performers in vaudeville. Also during her time in vaudeville, she
got married after proposing to her manager, Louis Sullivan, who
(21:29):
was known as Jimmy in ve Running parallel to her
time in vaudeville, Kellerman also began acting in films. Her
first films were a series of silent shorts made while
she was trying to work out a contract dispute between
two different theater managers. Later on, when other people started
to copy her water act and her pay in vaudeville
(21:50):
consequently plummeted, she turned to film almost entirely. Kellerman's film
roles involved lots of water and swimming, and sometimes also
played off the fact that the South Pacific was pretty
exotic two American audiences, which meant that Kellerman herself was
often seen as exotic as well. Her first full length
(22:11):
movie was Neptune's Daughter, which came out in nineteen fourteen.
She played a mermaid wearing sheer body suits that matched
her skin tone. In nineteen sixteen, she started a film
called The Daughter of the Gods, which was a fantasy drama.
She played Anisia, who was the daughter in question. In
this film, she had a scene in which she was
completely nude, although part of her body was covered by
(22:34):
her hair. It was one of the first fully nude
appearances by a major star in a non pornographic movie.
Her final film, Venus of the South Seas, came out
in nine four. There are definitely people who call the
Daughter of the Gods role like the first nude appearance
(22:54):
by a woman in film, and that seems a little there.
It needs a little more caveats in that um Kellerman
mostly retired from performing in the nineteen thirties. She and
her husband moved to California, where she opened a health
food store. She's apparently a vegetarian her whole life. By
this point she had published books on swimming and on fitness,
(23:16):
and one called Physical Beauty and How to Keep It.
This one, to a modern reader, is maybe a little weird.
It's simultaneously acknowledges the double standards that women face regarding
our bodies and appearances. But at the same time it
is a how to manual for how to have an
ideal body, and it clearly spells out that the point
(23:36):
in doing so is to keep from losing your figure
and consequently your husband as you age. So in some ways,
Like in some ways she was way ahead of her time,
and in some ways she was squarely a product of it.
The system is really bad, but here's how to buy in.
Yeah that yeah, uh that book also, like it's a
(23:59):
little I don't know what what Annette Kellerman's racial views
were about, like the contributions of indigenous swimmers swimming and
all of this sort of stuff, But she has a
couple of lines in this book that, like, you can
tell there are some problematic racial and and racist views
(24:21):
in there, Like at one point she says it's the
only people who need corsets are children and savages, and
by savages in quotation marks, she means Africans, Like I
don't want to I don't want to gloss over that.
But like that, it's a weird intrusion in a book
that's definitely about um, you know, middle class white women
(24:42):
retaining their figures, which has its own set of social play.
Kellerman also established health spas. She wrote newspaper columns on
health and beauty. She stridently advocated for women to be
encouraged to be fit and active, and she wrote eight
children's book called fairy Tales of the South Seas but
(25:04):
in a lot of ways she had become famous for
her bathing suits and for the body under them. In
nine Dr Dudley, Sergeant of Harvard, had taken the measurements
of about one thousand women and compared them to the
measurements of the Venus de Milo. Kellerman's were closest, and
he dubbed her the perfect Woman, which, along with that
Revere Beach arrest, became part of her ongoing marketing. In
(25:29):
the Harvard Collections, like the Harvard Special Collections, are still
boxes and boxes of these women's measurement cards that were
part of this study, which baffles me on a number
of different It doesn't baffle me that the cards are
still in the collection. It baffles me that, like, let's
measure a thousand women and compare them to a statue
(25:52):
was a study in the first place. So her fame
for her figure and the clothing being bathing suits on
it persisted long after the first decade of the nineteen hundreds,
which was really when Annette Kellerman had introduced and become
famous for the s bathing suit. In nineteen thirty five,
an Associated Press reporter tractor down and got her opinion
(26:15):
on some subtorial Hubbub and Yonkers, New York that was
over women wearing shorts. She recalled that it had only
been a couple of decades since that time she was
arrested and then said, quote, but I've always preached the
importance of caring for the female figure, So the girls
will have to look to their shapes and not to
the courts when they appear in suits. But remember, please,
(26:37):
I am not a nudist. Uh An Associated Press headline
from ninety seven read quote and nett Kellerman still draws
crowd legs of diving Venus hold former beauty so like
people were still basically writing about her body years after
(27:00):
she stopped be performing with it, like she was still
the go to person to talk to you about scandalous
swimwear and women's figures. Kellerman and her husband returned to
Australia a couple of times during the nineteen forties, including
during World War Two when she entertained troops in the
South Pacific. In nineteen fifty two, Esther Williams played her
(27:23):
in the film Million Dollar Mermaid. Kellerman was not a
fan of this film. They called it quote a silly
little yarn and also quote a namby panby attempt. She
was frustrated that she was played by an American in
this movie, and also that the film was more of
a swimming spectacular than an actual biography of her. As
(27:43):
kind of a side note, she was also not a
fan of the bikini after it was introduced, calling it
far too revealing and noting that almost nobody had the
figure to actually wear one. Kellerman and her husband moved
back to Australia for good in nineteen seventy. She was
in did into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in
nineteen four, and she died on November six, ninety five,
(28:06):
at the age of roughly seven. Both sources say eighty
seven or eighty eight. It's uh, it's a little her
late eighties, her late eighties. Who wants to end with
a poem? I do. I'm really excited We've gotten to
end some episodes with pemns lately. This poem ran in
(28:27):
the Boston Post on November seven, of Night No More,
The Gibson Bathing Girls shall grace the Newport's Summer World.
Annette declares her garments wrong at both ends too extremely long.
The Gibson Girl maybe a peach as she perambulates the beach.
But now if in the swim she'd be she must
(28:49):
with sweet Annette agree her heavy skirt she must replace
with filmy Raymon for the race. Thank you, she will
consent to dress in such approach to nothing us he
uh sus Kellerman. Sometimes you will see her name spelled
with two ends instead of one end, which was apparently
(29:11):
a nod to her German heritage that she used when
she published her books, But most sources and as biographies
have it just with one end. Do you have some
listener mail with any number of ends in it? I
sure do. It is from Shannon. It's called a few
Rambling Thoughts. I'm not going to read all the thoughts
because some of them are episode suggestions. I've been listening
(29:34):
to your podcast for a while now. This is my
first time writing to you, though I've often wanted to.
I absolutely love your podcast and listen to it while
I'm driving, while I cleaning, cook et cetera. So thank you.
Thank you for all the awesome work you do and
for always being conscientious and respectful about whatever subject you cover.
I wanted to write for a couple of reasons. First
of all, in your most recent podcast The Ladies of
(29:56):
ben gothlind You mentioned that Eleanor and Sarah were top hats.
In traditional Welsh costume, which seems to originated in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women wore top hats
below or a couple of links for you to look at.
I don't know if this has anything to do with
Eleanor and Sarah's decisions to wear top hats, but I
think it's definitely worth mentioning. I don't think it was
(30:17):
completely unheard of for Welsh women, even if they were
originally Irish of this time period, to be wearing top hats.
And she has a couple of links, and I ran
into some other stuff and we will put things into
the show notes with some links for folks to go
look at it. So yes, Uh, there is a Welsh
hat that is part of Welsh national dress which looks
(30:37):
kind of like a top hat, except it's even taller
and a little skinnier. It's like a chimney hat um.
And it seems as though this was really adopted as
part of Welsh national dress after uh the deaths of
the Ladies of Bengal of thank God, So like they
may have been wearing these hats as part of what
(30:59):
was the fact and where they were living in Wales,
but in terms of it being adopted as an actual
part of Welsh national dress, the hat itself was a
little bit different from what they're wearing in engravings that
show them in hats. Um. And then that standard seems
to have come into play starting right around the time
that they died, but then more definitely by the eighteen forties,
(31:22):
which would have been a little bit after them. So
that's definitely worth talking about because it's, um, it's totally
possible that there were people wearing this is sort of
a local custom, and I my conclusion would be that
it's probably simultaneously both local custom and then also it
was also like the fashion in France at a time
(31:46):
to have on little hats, top hats. I think top
hats are good all the time. Sure, I think we
should bring them back as fairly standard. Fine by me.
Perhaps I will start wearing and I will look terribly pretentious,
but it will be so fun. That does sound fun? Um,
it is it is. The welch had is a slightly
(32:08):
different shape from what you would think of as a
as a top hat, so we will put links the
show notes so people can go check that out for themselves,
and then I'm the rest of the letter uh included
some episode suggestions also, so thank you so much Shannon
for writing in with that. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast or
a history podcast, at how stuff works dot com. We're
(32:28):
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history,
and on Twitter at miss in History, our tumbler and
our Instagram and our pinterest name we are Missing History
and all of those places. You can come to our
parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com
to look up information on anything your heart desires. I'm
sure there's lots of cool stuff there about swimming. You
(32:49):
can come to our website, which is missing history dot com,
and you will find a total archive of everything Holly
and I have ever done on the show, and all
of the work of past hosts, of which they were many.
You'll find show notes for all the episodes that Holly
and I have worked on together. We will find some
other cool stuff there too, so you can do all
that and a whole lot more at how stuff works
(33:10):
dot com or missed in history dot com For more
on this and thousands of other topics. VI is it
how stuff works? Dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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