Famous Nude Swimmers

 

Yet more information on my ongoing study of nudity in America… as well as my recent posts on “Gender Equality Kills Nude Swimming” and “Swimming Nude Was the Norm 30 Years Ago” –

Much of this detail on nude swimming came from Wikipedia:

In ancient and not so ancient times skinny dipping was the only method of swimming. Swimming suits had not been invented.

Benjamin Franklin, an avid swimmer, possessed a copy of the Art of Swimming by Melchisédech Thévenot, which featured illustrations of nude swimmers. Among other notable Americans, Presidents John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt are perhaps the best-known skinny-dippers. Quotations from the diary of Rev. Robert Francis Kilvert, an English skinny-dipper, in Cec Cinder’s The Nudist Idea, show the transition in the England of the 1870s from an acceptance of nude bathing to the mandatory use of bathing suits.

Skinny dipping was once very common in the U.S., especially for young boys and girls swimming in a secluded pond, swimming hole, or section of a river. Swimsuits were originally uncommon in these settings, as they were made out of materials such as wool that required extra care to deal with and were of limited practical benefit.

Although modern swimwear is more practical, skinny dipping remains a fairly common activity in rural areas, where an unwanted audience of outsiders is rather unlikely; yet it may be forbidden even there by law. Today, many swimmers in the U.S. limit their skinny dipping to private locations due to concerns about being nude in public.

Before the YMCA began to admit females in the early 1960s, swimming trunks were not even allowed in the pools, and high school swimming classes for boys sometimes had similar policies, citing the impracticality of providing and maintaining sanitary swimming gear and clogging swimming pools’ filtration systems with lint fibers from the swimsuits. These practices were common because of the perception that there was nothing wrong or sexual about seeing members of the same gender in the nude, especially in these indoor contexts among equals in ‘birthday suit uniform’.

Gender Equality Kills Nude Swimming

Revisiting my ongoing study of nudity in America… as well as my recent post on “Swimming Nude Was the Norm 30 Years Ago” –

An early casualty of gender equity was males-only nude swimming in YMCA pools, middle schools and high schools all over the country. Men and boys had been accustomed to swimming au naturel at the YMCA in Ys everywhere, since the 1890s. The practice may have evolved from problems created by the long, wool swimming suits then in fashion, which apparently shed so much they gummed up the pool filters. Later, nude swimming was justified on the grounds of hygiene. A handbook in use at the Ys in the 1920s required that “A good soap bath must be taken before entering the swimming pool” in the same paragraph that specified “The wearing of swimming suits or supporters will not be allowed except by permission from the director” (Information for Members).

In any case, the custom was phased out as co-ed swimming became more common, although pools continued to be reserved for men from noon to 2 p.m. daily until the mid to late 70s.  Cases like that of Sonstelie -– a newcomer to the Seattle YMCA who wanted to swim during her lunch hour –- fired off a letter asking how an organization supported by the United Way could maintain such a discriminatory policy. “They changed immediately,” she says. “I had never seen an organization move that quickly” (Sonstelie Interview).

The new policy led to what Dick Knapp, the Downtown YMCA’s physical director in the early 1970s, called “interesting times,” since many of the men who regularly used the pool at noon had never had to wear swim suits before. When the gender barriers fell, it took a while for all the men to get used to the new rules.