Splash! by Howard Means

Author:Howard Means
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

Women’s swimming-lib, 1916-style: The suits were inspired by Annette Kellerman, and there’s not a matron in sight at the start of this open-water race in Sheepshead Bay, off the south end of Brooklyn, New York. (Library of Congress)

Annette Kellerman was already a vaudeville hit before Boston. Her arrest made her a headliner, and her indefatigability began to make her rich. For two solid years, the Australian Mermaid or Diving Venus, as she was known, did two shows a day, fourteen a week, in New York, all around America, as well as Europe, New Zealand, and her native Australia.

In New York she won a popularity contest by a fifty-thousand-vote margin, picked up a peach-colored Buick for her reward, and rode through Times Square on an open float, dressed as a mermaid with a long “seaweed” wig and an estimated two hundred thousand adoring fans cheering on all sides. (It was “beastly cold,” she remembered. “I shivered, but the johnnies didn’t know that.”) On another occasion, she paraded around New York on a white horse, following a band led by John Philip Sousa. (“His feet hurt from the pavement, and he envied me on the horse. Poor Mr. Sousa. His feet always hurt.”)

And then, as if that attention wasn’t enough, Dudley A. Sargent—director of the Hemenway Gymnasium at Harvard College—declared Annette Kellerman almost perfect.

In a lengthy, heavily illustrated December 4, 1910, article in the New York Times, Sargent laid out for the press the results of his decade-long quest to find the “most beautifully formed woman of modern times.” His purpose, Sargent assured readers, was of the noblest sort. He wanted to rescue women from the tyranny of corsets and girdles and reacquaint them with the superior beauty of the ancients.

“At the time of the worship of the beautiful by the Greeks, women quickly discovered the harmonious curves and symmetrical lines that received the approval of the men of that age, and fashioned themselves accordingly,” Sargent told the press. “Then, as the moral fibre of the Greeks grew lax, the courtesans set the fashion.” Waists were cinched. Corsets became ever tighter, so much so that Hippocrates “vigorously reproached the ladies of Cos for too tightly compressing their ribs and interfering with their breathing powers.” And so things were to remain for thousands of years.

To prove the ill effects of corseting, Sargent had women from nearby colleges run for two minutes and thirty seconds, wearing regular gym clothes and then, after a good rest, their corsets. The results? The corsets reduced lung capacity by about one-fifth. Or as Sargent put it: “The tightly corseted woman throws away 20 percent of the air she breathes.”

As for what the perfectly proportioned woman should look like, Sargent posited the Aphrodite of Milos, better known as the Venus de Milo, including her missing arms. Next, he built a database of index cards recording the exhaustive measurements of over ten thousand coeds—from Wellesley, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and other collegiate points far and wide: twenty-five data points in all, everything from girth of head to circumference of the left and right calves.

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