Find it in your favorite podcast app.

---

If you are a Pride and Prejudice fan, you may remember Lydia begging her father to go to Brighton and saying, “Mrs. Forster plans to go sea bathing. I’m sure she’d love to go sea bathing.”

And since Lydia did end up going to Brighton, the question is: What did she wear when she went to sea bathing? Jane Austen is silent on this important issue.

The whole concept of a swimsuit would have confused many women of the past. Their responses would have ranged from, “Don’t you just go in naked?” to “Why go in at all?” depending on the era in question.

Swimming in the Pre-Modern World

The evidence for historical women’s swimming is remarkably scanty: one Greek vase of Amazon women, one reference in the Odyssey, one Chinese fresco, a couple of nondescriptive references made by European explorers as they encountered other cultures.

When I tried to track down these references, I found them so vague as to be useless. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if these women are just washing themselves or actually swimming. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if an account that says “all the villagers” really means all the villagers, or just all the villagers the male explorer happens to see, which may not include any of the women.

Often, there’s no description of what, if anything, the swimmers wore.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the Bikini Girls from 4th-century Sicily. They’re wearing what looks like a bikini, but we don’t have any evidence that classical women wore that to go swimming. They’re not swimming in the mosaic. They may not have been swimming ever.

A century later, one Roman writer was wailing about how the strong, hearty legionnaires of the past had bathed only in the River Tiber, but now that there were so many bathhouses in Rome, they had all gone soft and didn’t know how to swim. If the men had gone soft, one can only assume the women had, too.

As the Roman era faded, Europe became increasingly anti-swim. The open water became a place of danger, inhabited by fierce creatures and strong tides. Drowning was a real risk, and in some locations, the solution to that was to forbid swimming, not to teach people how to swim.

Not until the 16th century do we see a resurgence in Europeans’ interest in swimming, and it is slow, slow, slow, especially for women. The wealthy and the educated might have learned to swim (mostly for their health), but your average European woman probably did not.

Victorian Swimwear (if you can call it that…)

It was during the Victorian era that visiting the seaside became a popular pastime, driven in part by cheap railway tickets that made it more accessible to inlanders. So, for the first time, swimming gear was important for a large number of people.

Victorian women followed this procedure:

• Arrive at the beach fully clothed in normal Victorian garb, including every one of the layers.
• Enter a bathing machine. This was a little hut on wheels, pulled by a donkey.
• Inside of the bathing machine, you change into your bathing suit, which is a long-sleeved dress to the knee, plus pantaloons, plus heavy woolen tights. And don’t forget the lace-up shoes. It might even include a corset.

You could bring your own versions of all this, or some bathing machine companies would discreetly lay it out for you in the hut.

Meanwhile, the donkey has pulled you out to sea. When you are fully garbed for your underwater adventure, you open the door and plunge directly in so that no one will see you in your swimming garb. Once you’re in the water, you may fret about your knee-length skirt floating up. But no, not to worry. There are little weights sewn into the hem to keep it down.

One thing’s for sure: you won’t be swimming very fast. For the most part, you won’t actually be swimming at all, since most women were never taught how to swim.

It’s a wonder these Victorian ladies didn’t drown.

Now, it is true that even throughout the Victorian era, standards were loosening up. By the turn of the century, the skirts were still there, but the sleeves might only be cap sleeves. And we have photographic evidence that at least some young women were willing to appear on the sand in this getup, rather than hiding out in a bathing machine.

But they still weren’t wearing anything the modern woman would recognize as a swimsuit.

The Battle for Reasonable Swimwear

Meanwhile, swimming as a sport, even a women’s sport, was growing in popularity. In 1906, an Australian named Annette Kellerman toured Europe as an aquatic ballerina. She had a big glass tank, and she performed for sold-out audiences and popularized the sport of synchronized swimming.

However, she had a problem with the outfit she was expected to wear. She described it as “more stuff than you have on a clothesline.” She eventually took a pair of black stockings and sewed them onto a boy’s swimming suit. The result was still a neck-to-toe suit, but it was form-fitting. It worked much better than shoes and a shirt.

Later on, she ditched most of the stockings, and that proved a problem because in 1907 she brought her show to the United States, and American audiences loved her too. But when she showed up on a Boston beach in her new swimwear, ending just above the knee, she was arrested for public indecency.

The laugh ended up on the arresting officer, though. The judge dismissed the case when he accepted her defense, which was not a denial, but a simple explanation that traditional swimwear was cumbersome and inhibitive. And it didn’t stop there. Kellerman began marketing her design and was so successful that that type of swimsuit became known as the Annette Kellerman.

The year 1921 saw America’s first beauty pageant in Atlantic City, and every single one of those gorgeous young hopefuls was up on stage wearing a one-piece swimsuit that ended just above the knee.

Annette Kellerman was by no means unopposed. Those who were staunchly moral were concerned, and police were deployed in many places, enforcing decency laws and measuring inches above the knee.

One location known for its insistence on the dress code was Chicago. As the summer of 1921 approached, Chicago’s commissioner of public works declared Chicago needed strict regulations to make sure the catastrophe in 1920 didn’t occur again.

Speaking of Chicago’s young female beach lovers, he said, “Some of them apparently didn’t have any such thing as a conscience. If it had not been for the unsympathizing policewomen on duty, the city’s beaches would have looked like a second Garden of Eden. No, sir, we are not leaving anything to conscience this year.”

And he wasn’t alone. Louise Rosine was arrested when she refused a policeman’s order to roll her stockings back up. The newspaper report said that she “most emphatically declared today it was none of the city’s business whether she rolled her stockings up or down” and is now in city jail in a state of mutiny and uncovered knees.

The local newspaper also reported that temperatures were so high that seven people fainted from the heat and one person died. But it seems that no one at the time noticed a connection between those two stories.

The even greater irony is that this happened in Atlantic City, the same city that was parading pageant hopefuls in Annette Kellermans to a crowd of thousands. Apparently, uncovered knees were all right if you were young and beautiful. Louise Rosine, the newspapers were quick to point out, was old and obese.

For the record, she was 39 years old.

Competitive Swimming Swimwear

Meanwhile, competitive swimming was gaining in popularity. The first Olympic Games to feature women’s swimming were in 1912 in Stockholm, and the competition within the sport was fierce. These women were tough and ambitious, and they had no intention of letting modesty dictate their participation in the sport.

In the 1923 photograph of American champion swimmers, both the men and women are wearing roughly the same thing: a form-fitting tank top and boy’s shorts, exposing quite a bit of thigh. Whether that outfit is one piece or two piece doesn’t appear to make much difference. The same amount of skin shows either way.

One of those women was Gertrude Ederle, a teenager who was determined to be the first woman to swim the English Channel. Ederle was happy enough with the one-piece wool suit for ordinary swimming, but on her first, failed attempt in the Channel, she was not happy with it at all. The neck rode up and chafed her skin. It also bulged out and caught water, slowing her down.

She and her sister were hard at work inventing something better for her second attempt. She was not happy about the suggestion that she do what some of the men did, in particular Enrico Tiraboschi, who broke the record for swimming the Channel in 1923. He swam a respectful distance from the French shore before kicking off his outfit and swimming the rest in the buff.

At 50 yards from Dover, one of his friends in the support boat reminded him of this awkwardness. Tiraboschi said, “What do you think I’m going to do, swim back to France?”

Eventually, Ederle made her decision. The invention of the bikini was still a couple decades away, but Ederle determined to make the swim in something kind of like it. The female reporter who described her second send-off from France wrote:

“Entering the water, Trudy [Ederle] wore a red diving cap and goggles, and short black silk trunks and a narrow brassiere of navy blue silk, on the front of which is shown a tiny silk American flag and also the emblem of the New York Women’s Swimming Association. The brassiere unties, and once abreast the Channel, she removed it, wearing thereafter only the trunks. If these chafed her, she was resolved to undo and kick them off as she swam.”

The male reporters present seemed too afraid to describe it very clearly.

And just to wrap up this story here, I’ll let you know that Ederle not only made it across the Channel, but she did it two hours faster than Tiraboschi, the previous record holder. My source does not mention whether she actually removed her scandalous trunks en route, but it does say that hundreds of people were there to welcome her to England’s shores, so you think it would be worth mentioning if she had.

By the end of the 1920s, the swimsuit war was over. The conservatives had lost. Photographic evidence makes it clear that swimsuits in the Annette Kellerman style were everywhere.

And why had they lost? Well, for one thing, familiarity makes anything less shocking. But there’s also another possible angle: when beachside municipalities realized that form-fitting suits on young, beautiful women brought in tourists, well, that changes everything, doesn’t it?

In the 1930s, the big news in swimsuit evolution wasn’t about the women. It was that men began to go without shirts.

The Advance of Super Scanty Swimwear

It wasn’t until 1946 that the bikini was invented, and one rationale for its existence was that fabric was still rationed. Smaller was better. The first one was advertised as so small that it fit in a matchbox held by the model.

As a side note, the bikini she’s wearing looks pretty normal by today’s standards. What doesn’t look normal is that she’s wearing it with shoes that might even be heels.

The ad appeared only a few days after a disastrous nuclear experiment on the South Pacific island named Bikini, so the maker decided to call it that.

The bikini didn’t initially take off, perhaps because it was so small. Even the models felt uncomfortable in it. Some other versions were more popular and had more fabric, including the Atom, which was billed as “the smallest swimsuit in the world,” prompting the bikini inventor to call his “the bathing costume even smaller than the smallest swimsuit in the world.”

Most women in the ’40s and ’50s didn’t want their navels to show, so they couldn’t wear the bikini as invented in 1946. But they could wear the versions that had just a little more coverage.

Even so, the name stuck. When the ’60s rolled around and women were protesting about women’s liberation, they certainly weren’t going to be told to hide the navel. So many bikinis went back to their original proportions. Even the association with dangerous weapons was still there. A 1966 advertisement screamed, “Meet the girls with the thermonuclear navels!”

Bikinis have never gone away since, and it certainly isn’t because fabric is rationed. Previous generations of women have been able to say that they needed the swimsuit to shrink for functionality. Annette Kellerman and Gertrude Ederle simply couldn’t perform in all those Victorian layers. The bikini marked a change in the history of swimwear. Functionality wasn’t the point.

It’s true that the beginning was easier than a one-piece when nature called, but it was hard to claim that as its reason for existence when the inventor was going around advertising that a two-piece suit wasn’t a real bikini unless it could fit through a wedding ring.

In the 1990s, there was a small retreat from the shrinking of the swimsuit. When Anne Cole designed the tankini, she was hailed as the first major inventor in decades in the field of women’s swimwear. Millions of women and parents raced to the store because they realized that not everyone is built like a model, and some of us would like both functionality and a little more coverage. The tankini was an instant hit, but by 2001, some were saying it was just a trend, and on the way out.

The ’90s also saw the introduction of mix-and-match swimwear separates. Judging by my last trip to the clothes store, that’s a trend that is still alive and well. But since this is a history podcast, that’s where today’s story ends.

If you enjoyed this story, please consider supporting the show to help keep it running. Subscribers on Patreon and Substack can get benefits like the weekly newsletter and bonus podcast episodes and ad-free episodes. If you’d rather do a one time donation on Buy Me a Coffee, that’s much appreciated too.

Selected Sources

One of many sources I used for this episode was Gavin Mortimer’s The Great Swim. It’s not really about swimwear, but it covers Gertrude Ederle’s epic journey through the Channel, including what she wore. You can read one take on how Europe rediscovered swimming on History Today. Also, check out the Louvre’s vase of Amazon women swimming for one of the very few sources on ancient women going for a dip. 

The featured image is by Paul Fischer, available on Wikimedia Commons,