July 29, 2023 • 31 mins
This 2017 episode covers Annette Kellerman, who 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.
Annette Kellerman collection at the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences https://collection.maas.museum/search?q=Annette_Kellerman+Costume
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. A viral post has been floating around social
media this summer on a net Kellerman and the first
women's swimwear. She has always been a favorite of mine,
although with some pretty big caveats that should become obvious
over the course of this episode. In this episode, we
mentioned that Kellerman donated all her costumes to the Sydney
(00:24):
Opera House, and then we'd put a link to where
you can see them in our show notes. We don't
have show notes in quite the same way as we
did when we first recorded this episode, but we will
include that link as part of the description in today's
episode so folks can get it from our website or
their podcast app. This episode originally came out June fifth,
(00:44):
twenty seventeen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. So summer's coming, at least
in theory. Sure, sure, I 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.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, it is. Not warm at all.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
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, that's really not.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, it's been a We've had an unseasonably cool 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 it seems like
a good time to talk about swimming. We yes, specifically,
we are talking about Annette Kellerman, who gets a lot
(01:55):
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, we have some
(02:20):
Australian history today that is seasonally incongruous for where you
actually live. Yeah, unless you happen to be somebody who's
downloading it late in the game, in which case, sure,
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 cited as July fifth
(02:42):
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
had to wear braces on her legs because of persistent weakness,
(03:04):
and not only were these braces painful to wear, but
she also found them embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
The cause is unclear.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
A few sources site rickets or polio, and later on
in her life she speculated that it might have been
a calcium deficiency according to her own account. Actual doctors
at the time 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,
(03:33):
so totally unclear, but the braces were a real part
of her life, so she get when you go to
cartoon doctors, like chalk in your bones sounds like such
a cartoon diagnosed with this, and chalk bones is a
nickname for like one, yeah, congenital bone condition, but it
has nothing to do with what she was experiencing.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
It's a totally different set of symptoms, so very weird.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, whatever the cause of her disability, eventually her father
visited a doctor who recommended swimming lessons, and at first
Annette was really terrified of this plan, 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,
(04:19):
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. They're in the
International Swimming Hall of Fame for their combined 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
(04:41):
to twenty But once she knew how to do it,
as predicted, it really did help her build her strength
up in her legs, and with the water supporting her,
she could move around without having to wear the braces.
Annette 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
(05:03):
less typical for a child her age, although she was
susceptible to muscle strains and had to wear very tightly laced.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Boots until she was eighteen.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
A 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 Annette learned at
first was basically the breast stroke, 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
(05:34):
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 won it.
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.
(05:57):
But once she had that first win under her belt,
he was in instrumental in her progress as a competitive swimmer,
essentially becoming both her trainer and her coach. As soon
as she started seriously competing, Annette started winning races and
setting records. In nineteen oh two, at the age of
about sixteen, she won a one hundred yard championship for
(06:17):
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 other
(06:41):
aquatic performances while she was still in her teens. Although
she was winning races and making a name for herself
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. Although Annette
(07:04):
already held multiple records in 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 Blackwall.
In nineteen oh five, a net at about age eighteen,
(07:25):
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'd also had
to dodge a lot of flotsam, garbage, tugboats and barges
along the way. But afterward, a sports editor from the
(07:49):
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. He thought that would sell a lot of papers,
(08:09):
so we offered to back her an attempt in 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. Annette's training swims down the coast drew huge crowds,
and the articles and their corresponding photos sold lots of papers.
(08:32):
She swam an average of forty five miles or seventy
two kilometers per week, increasing the distance of each swim
until she'd done the twenty four mile 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 distance than her swim down the Thames, swimming in
the English Channel is far more difficult due to the
(08:53):
very cold water, the waves and the tides. She made
her first attempts to swim across the English Channel along
with six men on August twenty fourth of nineteen 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 was accompanied by a steam tug
(09:16):
and 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 seasick.
The further she went, the bigger her payday would be.
(09:38):
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 swing that swim the English Channel,
and as with her swim down the Thames, she was
the first woman to make the attempt. The closest it
(10:00):
came in these three attempts to actually crossing was about.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Three quarters of the way, which took ten and a
half hours.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Later, Kellerman would say she thought she had the endurance
to swim the Channel, but not the raw strength. In
her nineteen eighteen book How to Swim, she wrote that
she didn't think a woman would ever successfully swim the
English Channel. She was proven wrong in nineteen twenty six
when Gertrude utterly crossed in fourteen hours thirty nine minutes,
not only swimming the channel but beating the previous record
(10:29):
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 then going back across again, which
is astounding to me. So in Kellerman's first attempt to
swim across the English Channel, the male swimmers who were
(10:51):
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 we will talk about more after
a sponsor break. That swim down the Thames and the
(11:15):
attempts to cross the English Channel were not a net
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 the first woman to complete
a ten mile stretch. In nineteen oh five, she participated
in a race down the Seine where she tied for
(11:36):
third 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, and when she realized she
was not almost there, and she became just really discouraged
because she had worn herself out doing what she thought
(11:56):
was her final push to the finish line. So when
Burgess caught up to her and saw that she was
crying and a very lovely show of sporting behavior, he
stayed with her and encouraged her for the rest of
the race of the race, and that is how they
came to tie. In June of nineteen oh six, Kellerman
also won a twenty two mile or thirty six kilometer
race down the Danube. I think anyone also who has
(12:19):
ever run a race knows the ire of please don't
tell me if you're almost there, when you're not, When
you're not.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Now I knew.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
It was a little bit unclear to me whether these
were the people in the guideboat or the people who
were just spectators who were saying this. But like she
they got her a couple times, and then in like
time number three of them being like, you're almost there,
she was like, no, I'm not well right, And it's
almost always well intentioned, like if you But let this
be a note if you are ever spectating a sporting event,
(12:49):
please don't fib to the participants because it does more
to harm their head game than help. Yeah. Uh. And
in most of these events, Kellerman was one of very
few women, and sometimes he was the only woman, and
she typically swam them wearing a swimsuit that was actually
made for men, so.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
This was not unheard of in Australia. At this point.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Swimming was already a more established sport in Australia than
it was in the United Kingdom or the United States,
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
(13:30):
float a little out there, but you didn't really swim,
and a lot of people didn't even know how to swim.
The idea of a 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
(13:53):
it was like a lakeside beach or a seashore beach,
it did not really happen in a pool. And even
if you wanted to swim, if you were a woman
around the turn of the twentieth century, your bathing attire
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
(14:13):
below the knee. It had a blousey top and puffy,
usually short sleeves, sometimes with the sailor's collar. It was cinched,
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
(14:35):
what Annette Kellerman had to say about these outfits. Quote
there is no more reason why you should wear those
awful water overcoats, those awkward, unnecessary, lumpy quote bathing suits
than there is that you should wear lead chains. Heavy
bathing suits have caused more deaths by drowning than cramps.
(14:56):
I am certain there isn't a single reason under the
sun why everybody should not wear lightweight suits. Anyone who
persuades you to wear the heavy, skirty kind is endangering
your life. Just thinking about wearing tights into the water
is a horrifying prospect to me.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Oh, I don't know why. It just kind of grosses
me out.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
For competitive women swimmers, there was a grudging exception to
the standard of dress. They could wear a men's bathing suit,
which was more like a T shirt and shorts, sometimes
constructed all as one piece. But this also starts a
whole chicken and egg situation. Women weren't supposed to be
seen in attired that they could actually swim in, which
created a huge barrier for entry for the sport of swimming. Yeah,
(15:45):
I people were like, well, I guess you can wear
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.
Was this whole social standard of what was acceptable for
women to wear that led Kellerman to invent a new swimsuit.
In nineteen oh five, she was scheduled for a swimming
(16:07):
performance at London's Bath Club and some of the royal
family was to be in attendance. The men's bathing suit
that she had been wearing was determined to be inappropriate
because it was too 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
(16:27):
her feet. From there, she began tweaking and refining this
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 modest by
(16:50):
the standards of the day. Like we said before, the
first break. The very idea of a woman in public
and such a garment was enough to sell newspapers. It's
widely that in nineteen oh 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,
(17:10):
it's a story that came up again and again and
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,
(17:30):
Kellerman persisted. She launched her own line of women's swimwear,
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 swimwear that soon people
were calling anything that looked like it and Annette Kellerman
(17:53):
or just a Kellerman. Although it was a 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
(18:14):
the sport of swimming, and compounding that, 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,
(18:37):
and competition for women. She wrote quote, I am not
trying to shut men out of swimming.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
There is enough water in the world for.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
All of us. But as men can indulge in so
many other 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 Kellerman herself wrote things like quote,
there is nothing more democratic than swimming and a clean, cool,
(19:08):
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 many public swimming areas in Australia, So while Kellerman
was a staunch advocate for making swimming accessible to women,
(19:31):
that was really most applicable to white women. To add
another layer to all of this, a lot of the
swimming strokes that she learned as a child and then
helped to popularize and as an adult were either patterned
after or directly taught to white swimmers by Indigenous Australians
and Indigenous people from elsewhere in the Pacific. So like
(19:53):
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
the popularity and at least for some accessibility of swimming,
Anett Kellerman's fame and skill led to a completely different
aspect of her career, Vaudeville and Hollywood. We're going to
(20:17):
talk about that after we paused for a sponsor break.
A lot of Annette Kellerman's fame as a swimmer came
because she was naturally a performer. She was definitely talented.
I don't want to overlook that at all. She legitimately
(20:38):
won races and she set records, and she was one
of the best swimmers of her era.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
But a lot of the attention.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
That she got for those successes was due to showmanship
and an openness with her body that was not really
typical for the time. A woman's 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
(21:07):
to a career in vaudeville. In nineteen oh six, having
performed at the London Hippodrome and won numerous races in Europe,
she sailed for the United States to perform at 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
(21:30):
donate oli her costumes and memorabilia to the Sydney Opera House.
We will put 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
(21:51):
what would become a precursor to synchronize swimming. Her biggest
production at the New York Hippodrome included a core of
two hundred mermaids, all swimming in tandem. She also tried
her hand at other types of performance, including mail impersonation
and high wire walking. By nineteen fourteen, Kellerman had become
one of the highest paid performers in vaudeville. Also during
(22:14):
her time in vaudeville, she got married after proposing to
her manager, Lewis Sullivan, who was known as Jimmy, in
nineteen twelve. 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 at a contract dispute between two different theater managers.
(22:36):
Later on, when other people started to copy her water
act and her pay in vaudeville consequently plummeted, she turned
to film almost entirely. Kellerman's film roles involved lots of
water and swimming, and sometimes they also played off the
fact that the South Pacific was pretty exotic to American audiences,
which meant that Kellerman herself was often seen as exotic
(22:59):
as well. Her first full length movie was Neptune's Daughter,
which came out in nineteen fourteen. She played a mermaid
wearing sheer bodysuits that matched her skin tone. In nineteen sixteen,
she starred in a film called The Daughter of the Gods,
which was a fantasy drama. She played Anisha, who was
the daughter in question. In this film, she had a
(23:20):
scene in which she was completely nude, although part of
her body was covered by 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 nineteen twenty four. There
are definitely people who call the Daughter of the Gods
(23:41):
role like the first nude appearance by a woman in film,
and that seems a little it needs a little more
caveats than that. 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
(24:02):
her whole life. By this point, she'd published books on
swimming and on fitness, and one called Physical Beauty and
How to Keep It. This one, to a modern reader,
is maybe a little weird. It simultaneously acknowledges the double
standards that women face regarding our bodies and appearances, but
at the same time it is a how to manual
(24:23):
for how to have an ideal body, and it clearly
spells out that the point 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.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
The system is really bad, but here's how to buy in.
Yeah that.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah, uh that book also like it's a little I
don't really know what Annette Kellerman's racial views were about,
like the contributions of indigenous swimmers to swimming and all
of those sort of stuff. But she has a couple
of lines in this book that, like you can tell
there are some problematic racial and racist views in there,
(25:11):
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 huh, I don't
want to gloss over that, but like that's it's a
weird intrusion in a book that's definitely about, you know,
middle class white women retaining their figures, which has its
(25:35):
own set of social.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Play.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Kellerman also established health spas. She wrote newspaper columns on
health and beauty. She's stridently advocated for women to be
encouraged to be fit and active, and she wrote a
children's book called Fairy Tales of the South Seas. But
in a lot of ways she had become famous for
her bathing suits and for the body under them. In
nineteen oh nine, doctor Dudley Sergent of Harvard had taken
(26:03):
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 the Harvard Collections, like the Harvard Special Collections, are
still boxes and boxes of these women's measurement cards that
(26:26):
were part of this study, which baffles me on a
number of different Yeah, 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 was a study in.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
The first place.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
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 this bathing suit. In
nineteen thirty five, an Associated Press reporter tractor down and
got her opinion on some suitorial hubbub in Yonkers, New
(27:08):
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, I am not a newdist An Associated
(27:37):
Press headline from nineteen thirty seven read quote Anett Kellerman
still draws crowd legs of diving venus hold former beauty
so like people were still basically writing about her body
years after she stopped me performing right with it, like
she was still the go to person to talk to
you about scandalous swimwear and women's figures. Kellerman and her
(28:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
In nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Esther Williams played her 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 pamby 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 kind of a side note, she
(28:35):
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 inducted into the International Swimming Hall
of Fame in nineteen seventy four, and she died on
November sixth, nineteen seventy five, at the age of roughly
(28:58):
eighty seven bost sources say eighty seven or eighty eight.
It's a it's a little her late eighties, her late eighties.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Who wants to end with a poem? I do.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
I'm really excited. We've gotten to end some episodes with
poems lately. This poem ran in the Boston Post on
November seventh of nineteen oh eight. No more the Gibson
bathing Girls shall grace the Newport summer whirl. Annette declares
her garments wrong at both ends, too extremely long. The
(29:32):
Gibson girl may be a peach as she perambulates the beach,
but now if in the swim she'd be she must,
with sweet Annette agree her heavy skirt she must replace
with filmy raiment for the race.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
She will consent to dress in such approach to nothingness.
So that's a Nick Kellerman. Sometimes you will see her
name spelled with two ends instead of one in which
was apparently a nod to her German heritage that she
used when she published her books, but most sources and
(30:08):
as biographies have it just with one end. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
(30:28):
current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at Missed
End History, and you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(30:49):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. A viral post has been floating around social
media this summer on a net Kellerman and the first
women's swimwear. She has always been a favorite of mine,
although with some pretty big caveats that should become obvious
over the course of this episode. In this episode, we
mentioned that Kellerman donated all her costumes to the Sydney
(00:24):
Opera House, and then we'd put a link to where
you can see them in our show notes. We don't
have show notes in quite the same way as we
did when we first recorded this episode, but we will
include that link as part of the description in today's
episode so folks can get it from our website or
their podcast app. This episode originally came out June fifth,
(00:44):
twenty seventeen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. So summer's coming, at least
in theory. Sure, sure, I 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.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, it is. Not warm at all.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
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, that's really not.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, it's been a We've had an unseasonably cool 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 it seems like
a good time to talk about swimming. We yes, specifically,
we are talking about Annette Kellerman, who gets a lot
(01:55):
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, we have some
(02:20):
Australian history today that is seasonally incongruous for where you
actually live. Yeah, unless you happen to be somebody who's
downloading it late in the game, in which case, sure,
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 cited as July fifth
(02:42):
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
had to wear braces on her legs because of persistent weakness,
(03:04):
and not only were these braces painful to wear, but
she also found them embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
The cause is unclear.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
A few sources site rickets or polio, and later on
in her life she speculated that it might have been
a calcium deficiency according to her own account. Actual doctors
at the time 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,
(03:33):
so totally unclear, but the braces were a real part
of her life, so she get when you go to
cartoon doctors, like chalk in your bones sounds like such
a cartoon diagnosed with this, and chalk bones is a
nickname for like one, yeah, congenital bone condition, but it
has nothing to do with what she was experiencing.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
It's a totally different set of symptoms, so very weird.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, whatever the cause of her disability, eventually her father
visited a doctor who recommended swimming lessons, and at first
Annette was really terrified of this plan, 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,
(04:19):
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. They're in the
International Swimming Hall of Fame for their combined 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
(04:41):
to twenty But once she knew how to do it,
as predicted, it really did help her build her strength
up in her legs, and with the water supporting her,
she could move around without having to wear the braces.
Annette 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
(05:03):
less typical for a child her age, although she was
susceptible to muscle strains and had to wear very tightly laced.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Boots until she was eighteen.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
A 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 Annette learned at
first was basically the breast stroke, 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
(05:34):
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 won it.
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.
(05:57):
But once she had that first win under her belt,
he was in instrumental in her progress as a competitive swimmer,
essentially becoming both her trainer and her coach. As soon
as she started seriously competing, Annette started winning races and
setting records. In nineteen oh two, at the age of
about sixteen, she won a one hundred yard championship for
(06:17):
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 other
(06:41):
aquatic performances while she was still in her teens. Although
she was winning races and making a name for herself
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. Although Annette
(07:04):
already held multiple records in 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 Blackwall.
In nineteen oh five, a net at about age eighteen,
(07:25):
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'd also had
to dodge a lot of flotsam, garbage, tugboats and barges
along the way. But afterward, a sports editor from the
(07:49):
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. He thought that would sell a lot of papers,
(08:09):
so we offered to back her an attempt in 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. Annette's training swims down the coast drew huge crowds,
and the articles and their corresponding photos sold lots of papers.
(08:32):
She swam an average of forty five miles or seventy
two kilometers per week, increasing the distance of each swim
until she'd done the twenty four mile 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 distance than her swim down the Thames, swimming in
the English Channel is far more difficult due to the
(08:53):
very cold water, the waves and the tides. She made
her first attempts to swim across the English Channel along
with six men on August twenty fourth of nineteen 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 was accompanied by a steam tug
(09:16):
and 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 seasick.
The further she went, the bigger her payday would be.
(09:38):
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 swing that swim the English Channel,
and as with her swim down the Thames, she was
the first woman to make the attempt. The closest it
(10:00):
came in these three attempts to actually crossing was about.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Three quarters of the way, which took ten and a
half hours.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Later, Kellerman would say she thought she had the endurance
to swim the Channel, but not the raw strength. In
her nineteen eighteen book How to Swim, she wrote that
she didn't think a woman would ever successfully swim the
English Channel. She was proven wrong in nineteen twenty six
when Gertrude utterly crossed in fourteen hours thirty nine minutes,
not only swimming the channel but beating the previous record
(10:29):
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 then going back across again, which
is astounding to me. So in Kellerman's first attempt to
swim across the English Channel, the male swimmers who were
(10:51):
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 we will talk about more after
a sponsor break. That swim down the Thames and the
(11:15):
attempts to cross the English Channel were not a net
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 the first woman to complete
a ten mile stretch. In nineteen oh five, she participated
in a race down the Seine where she tied for
(11:36):
third 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, and when she realized she
was not almost there, and she became just really discouraged
because she had worn herself out doing what she thought
(11:56):
was her final push to the finish line. So when
Burgess caught up to her and saw that she was
crying and a very lovely show of sporting behavior, he
stayed with her and encouraged her for the rest of
the race of the race, and that is how they
came to tie. In June of nineteen oh six, Kellerman
also won a twenty two mile or thirty six kilometer
race down the Danube. I think anyone also who has
(12:19):
ever run a race knows the ire of please don't
tell me if you're almost there, when you're not, When
you're not.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Now I knew.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
It was a little bit unclear to me whether these
were the people in the guideboat or the people who
were just spectators who were saying this. But like she
they got her a couple times, and then in like
time number three of them being like, you're almost there,
she was like, no, I'm not well right, And it's
almost always well intentioned, like if you But let this
be a note if you are ever spectating a sporting event,
(12:49):
please don't fib to the participants because it does more
to harm their head game than help. Yeah. Uh. And
in most of these events, Kellerman was one of very
few women, and sometimes he was the only woman, and
she typically swam them wearing a swimsuit that was actually
made for men, so.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
This was not unheard of in Australia. At this point.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Swimming was already a more established sport in Australia than
it was in the United Kingdom or the United States,
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
(13:30):
float a little out there, but you didn't really swim,
and a lot of people didn't even know how to swim.
The idea of a 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
(13:53):
it was like a lakeside beach or a seashore beach,
it did not really happen in a pool. And even
if you wanted to swim, if you were a woman
around the turn of the twentieth century, your bathing attire
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
(14:13):
below the knee. It had a blousey top and puffy,
usually short sleeves, sometimes with the sailor's collar. It was cinched,
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
(14:35):
what Annette Kellerman had to say about these outfits. Quote
there is no more reason why you should wear those
awful water overcoats, those awkward, unnecessary, lumpy quote bathing suits
than there is that you should wear lead chains. Heavy
bathing suits have caused more deaths by drowning than cramps.
(14:56):
I am certain there isn't a single reason under the
sun why everybody should not wear lightweight suits. Anyone who
persuades you to wear the heavy, skirty kind is endangering
your life. Just thinking about wearing tights into the water
is a horrifying prospect to me.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Oh, I don't know why. It just kind of grosses
me out.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
For competitive women swimmers, there was a grudging exception to
the standard of dress. They could wear a men's bathing suit,
which was more like a T shirt and shorts, sometimes
constructed all as one piece. But this also starts a
whole chicken and egg situation. Women weren't supposed to be
seen in attired that they could actually swim in, which
created a huge barrier for entry for the sport of swimming. Yeah,
(15:45):
I people were like, well, I guess you can wear
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.
Was this whole social standard of what was acceptable for
women to wear that led Kellerman to invent a new swimsuit.
In nineteen oh five, she was scheduled for a swimming
(16:07):
performance at London's Bath Club and some of the royal
family was to be in attendance. The men's bathing suit
that she had been wearing was determined to be inappropriate
because it was too 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
(16:27):
her feet. From there, she began tweaking and refining this
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 modest by
(16:50):
the standards of the day. Like we said before, the
first break. The very idea of a woman in public
and such a garment was enough to sell newspapers. It's
widely that in nineteen oh 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,
(17:10):
it's a story that came up again and again and
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,
(17:30):
Kellerman persisted. She launched her own line of women's swimwear,
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 swimwear that soon people
were calling anything that looked like it and Annette Kellerman
(17:53):
or just a Kellerman. Although it was a 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
(18:14):
the sport of swimming, and compounding that, 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,
(18:37):
and competition for women. She wrote quote, I am not
trying to shut men out of swimming.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
There is enough water in the world for.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
All of us. But as men can indulge in so
many other 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 Kellerman herself wrote things like quote,
there is nothing more democratic than swimming and a clean, cool,
(19:08):
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 many public swimming areas in Australia, So while Kellerman
was a staunch advocate for making swimming accessible to women,
(19:31):
that was really most applicable to white women. To add
another layer to all of this, a lot of the
swimming strokes that she learned as a child and then
helped to popularize and as an adult were either patterned
after or directly taught to white swimmers by Indigenous Australians
and Indigenous people from elsewhere in the Pacific. So like
(19:53):
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
the popularity and at least for some accessibility of swimming,
Anett Kellerman's fame and skill led to a completely different
aspect of her career, Vaudeville and Hollywood. We're going to
(20:17):
talk about that after we paused for a sponsor break.
A lot of Annette Kellerman's fame as a swimmer came
because she was naturally a performer. She was definitely talented.
I don't want to overlook that at all. She legitimately
(20:38):
won races and she set records, and she was one
of the best swimmers of her era.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
But a lot of the attention.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
That she got for those successes was due to showmanship
and an openness with her body that was not really
typical for the time. A woman's 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
(21:07):
to a career in vaudeville. In nineteen oh six, having
performed at the London Hippodrome and won numerous races in Europe,
she sailed for the United States to perform at 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
(21:30):
donate oli her costumes and memorabilia to the Sydney Opera House.
We will put 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
(21:51):
what would become a precursor to synchronize swimming. Her biggest
production at the New York Hippodrome included a core of
two hundred mermaids, all swimming in tandem. She also tried
her hand at other types of performance, including mail impersonation
and high wire walking. By nineteen fourteen, Kellerman had become
one of the highest paid performers in vaudeville. Also during
(22:14):
her time in vaudeville, she got married after proposing to
her manager, Lewis Sullivan, who was known as Jimmy, in
nineteen twelve. 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 at a contract dispute between two different theater managers.
(22:36):
Later on, when other people started to copy her water
act and her pay in vaudeville consequently plummeted, she turned
to film almost entirely. Kellerman's film roles involved lots of
water and swimming, and sometimes they also played off the
fact that the South Pacific was pretty exotic to American audiences,
which meant that Kellerman herself was often seen as exotic
(22:59):
as well. Her first full length movie was Neptune's Daughter,
which came out in nineteen fourteen. She played a mermaid
wearing sheer bodysuits that matched her skin tone. In nineteen sixteen,
she starred in a film called The Daughter of the Gods,
which was a fantasy drama. She played Anisha, who was
the daughter in question. In this film, she had a
(23:20):
scene in which she was completely nude, although part of
her body was covered by 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 nineteen twenty four. There
are definitely people who call the Daughter of the Gods
(23:41):
role like the first nude appearance by a woman in film,
and that seems a little it needs a little more
caveats than that. 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
(24:02):
her whole life. By this point, she'd published books on
swimming and on fitness, and one called Physical Beauty and
How to Keep It. This one, to a modern reader,
is maybe a little weird. It simultaneously acknowledges the double
standards that women face regarding our bodies and appearances, but
at the same time it is a how to manual
(24:23):
for how to have an ideal body, and it clearly
spells out that the point 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.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
The system is really bad, but here's how to buy in.
Yeah that.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah, uh that book also like it's a little I
don't really know what Annette Kellerman's racial views were about,
like the contributions of indigenous swimmers to swimming and all
of those sort of stuff. But she has a couple
of lines in this book that, like you can tell
there are some problematic racial and racist views in there,
(25:11):
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 huh, I don't
want to gloss over that, but like that's it's a
weird intrusion in a book that's definitely about, you know,
middle class white women retaining their figures, which has its
(25:35):
own set of social.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Play.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Kellerman also established health spas. She wrote newspaper columns on
health and beauty. She's stridently advocated for women to be
encouraged to be fit and active, and she wrote a
children's book called Fairy Tales of the South Seas. But
in a lot of ways she had become famous for
her bathing suits and for the body under them. In
nineteen oh nine, doctor Dudley Sergent of Harvard had taken
(26:03):
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 the Harvard Collections, like the Harvard Special Collections, are
still boxes and boxes of these women's measurement cards that
(26:26):
were part of this study, which baffles me on a
number of different Yeah, 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 was a study in.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
The first place.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
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 this bathing suit. In
nineteen thirty five, an Associated Press reporter tractor down and
got her opinion on some suitorial hubbub in Yonkers, New
(27:08):
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, I am not a newdist An Associated
(27:37):
Press headline from nineteen thirty seven read quote Anett Kellerman
still draws crowd legs of diving venus hold former beauty
so like people were still basically writing about her body
years after she stopped me performing right with it, like
she was still the go to person to talk to
you about scandalous swimwear and women's figures. Kellerman and her
(28:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
In nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Esther Williams played her 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 pamby 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 kind of a side note, she
(28:35):
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 inducted into the International Swimming Hall
of Fame in nineteen seventy four, and she died on
November sixth, nineteen seventy five, at the age of roughly
(28:58):
eighty seven bost sources say eighty seven or eighty eight.
It's a it's a little her late eighties, her late eighties.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Who wants to end with a poem? I do.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
I'm really excited. We've gotten to end some episodes with
poems lately. This poem ran in the Boston Post on
November seventh of nineteen oh eight. No more the Gibson
bathing Girls shall grace the Newport summer whirl. Annette declares
her garments wrong at both ends, too extremely long. The
(29:32):
Gibson girl may be a peach as she perambulates the beach,
but now if in the swim she'd be she must,
with sweet Annette agree her heavy skirt she must replace
with filmy raiment for the race.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
She will consent to dress in such approach to nothingness.
So that's a Nick Kellerman. Sometimes you will see her
name spelled with two ends instead of one in which
was apparently a nod to her German heritage that she
used when she published her books, but most sources and
(30:08):
as biographies have it just with one end. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
(30:28):
current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at Missed
End History, and you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(30:49):
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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