Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. A viral post has been floating around social
Speaker 1: media this summer on a net Kellerman and the first
Speaker 1: women's swimwear. She has always been a favorite of mine,
Speaker 1: although with some pretty big caveats that should become obvious
Speaker 1: over the course of this episode. In this episode, we
Speaker 1: mentioned that Kellerman donated all her costumes to the Sydney
Speaker 1: Opera House, and then we'd put a link to where
Speaker 1: you can see them in our show notes. We don't
Speaker 1: have show notes in quite the same way as we
Speaker 1: did when we first recorded this episode, but we will
Speaker 1: include that link as part of the description in today's
Speaker 1: episode so folks can get it from our website or
Speaker 1: their podcast app. This episode originally came out June fifth,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. So summer's coming, at least
Speaker 1: in theory. Sure, sure, I think summer has definitely arrived
Speaker 1: where you are, which is Atlanta. Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess technically it's still cooler than it usually would be
Speaker 1: this time of year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is. Not warm at all.
Speaker 1: It's fifty seven degrees right now. We're recording this on
Speaker 1: May thirtieth. Yeah, like I think our high today might
Speaker 1: be eighty, which sounds hot to some people, but for
Speaker 1: Atlanta at the end of May, that's really not.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been a We've had an unseasonably cool May
Speaker 1: up here in New England anyway, though at least in theory,
Speaker 1: summer is either on the way or here for most
Speaker 1: but not all, of our listeners. So it seems like
Speaker 1: a good time to talk about swimming. We yes, specifically,
Speaker 1: we are talking about Annette Kellerman, who gets a lot
Speaker 1: of the credit for developing the woman's one piece bathing
Speaker 1: suit and then for making it socially appropriate for women
Speaker 1: in a lot of the English speaking world to put
Speaker 1: on an outfit that you could actually swim in without
Speaker 1: drowning and then go out in public that way. And
Speaker 1: perhaps kind of ironically, she was Australian, where it is
Speaker 1: definitely not coming on summer. So Australians, we have some
Speaker 1: Australian history today that is seasonally incongruous for where you
Speaker 1: actually live. Yeah, unless you happen to be somebody who's
Speaker 1: downloading it late in the game, in which case, sure,
Speaker 1: hooray summer for you as well. Annette Kellerman was born
Speaker 1: in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. She was coy about
Speaker 1: her birth date, and it's variously cited as July fifth
Speaker 1: or sixth of eighteen eighty six, eighteen eighty seven, or
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty eight. The sixth is the most frequently cited date.
Speaker 1: Her father, Frederick, was a violinist born in Australia, and
Speaker 1: her mother, Alice, was a pianist and a music teacher
Speaker 1: who was originally from France. When she was young and
Speaker 1: had to wear braces on her legs because of persistent weakness,
Speaker 1: and not only were these braces painful to wear, but
Speaker 1: she also found them embarrassing.
Speaker 2: The cause is unclear.
Speaker 1: A few sources site rickets or polio, and later on
Speaker 1: in her life she speculated that it might have been
Speaker 1: a calcium deficiency according to her own account. Actual doctors
Speaker 1: at the time said that it was because she had
Speaker 1: been allowed to learn to walk too early, or that
Speaker 1: she had chalk in her bones. Neither of those are
Speaker 1: real things would have caused her to need leg braces,
Speaker 1: so totally unclear, but the braces were a real part
Speaker 1: of her life, so she get when you go to
Speaker 1: cartoon doctors, like chalk in your bones sounds like such
Speaker 1: a cartoon diagnosed with this, and chalk bones is a
Speaker 1: nickname for like one, yeah, congenital bone condition, but it
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with what she was experiencing.
Speaker 2: It's a totally different set of symptoms, so very weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, whatever the cause of her disability, eventually her father
Speaker 1: visited a doctor who recommended swimming lessons, and at first
Speaker 1: Annette was really terrified of this plan, possibly because it
Speaker 1: meant exposing her legs to people, which she did not
Speaker 1: want to do because they were visibly undeveloped, and she
Speaker 1: begged not to have to go. But her parents and
Speaker 1: the doctor were all certain that swimming would really help,
Speaker 1: so she and her brothers were taken to Frederick Cavell's
Speaker 1: baths so they could learn to swim. And the Cavils
Speaker 1: were actually a whole family of swimmers. They're in the
Speaker 1: International Swimming Hall of Fame for their combined contributions to
Speaker 1: the sport. It took a net a lot longer to
Speaker 1: get the hang of swimming than it took her brothers.
Speaker 1: They were both able to swim on their own after
Speaker 1: a handful of lessons, but it took a net close
Speaker 1: to twenty But once she knew how to do it,
Speaker 1: as predicted, it really did help her build her strength
Speaker 1: up in her legs, and with the water supporting her,
Speaker 1: she could move around without having to wear the braces.
Speaker 1: Annette would later describe her gradual improvement through swimming as
Speaker 1: a process of intense joy. By the time she reached
Speaker 1: the age of thirteen, her muscle development was more or
Speaker 1: less typical for a child her age, although she was
Speaker 1: susceptible to muscle strains and had to wear very tightly laced.
Speaker 2: Boots until she was eighteen.
Speaker 1: A lot of the swimming strokes that are recognized and
Speaker 1: used competitively today were still new or in the process
Speaker 1: of being developed and refined, so what Annette learned at
Speaker 1: first was basically the breast stroke, and that was the
Speaker 1: stroke that she used mostly when she was exercising at first.
Speaker 1: At about the age of fifteen, she started branching out
Speaker 1: into learning other strokes, putting dedicated effort into practicing them
Speaker 1: and getting better at them, and soon she told her
Speaker 1: parents that she wanted to start competing in swimming. Her
Speaker 1: first swimming race was a local event, and she won it.
Speaker 1: Annette's father had been incredulous when she said she wanted
Speaker 1: to enter a swimming race. He had thought of swimming
Speaker 1: as something she was doing because of her disability, not
Speaker 1: as something she would seriously pursue for her own sake.
Speaker 1: But once she had that first win under her belt,
Speaker 1: he was in instrumental in her progress as a competitive swimmer,
Speaker 1: essentially becoming both her trainer and her coach. As soon
Speaker 1: as she started seriously competing, Annette started winning races and
Speaker 1: setting records. In nineteen oh two, at the age of
Speaker 1: about sixteen, she won a one hundred yard championship for
Speaker 1: New South Wales and also set a world record for
Speaker 1: swimming a mile with a time of thirty two minutes
Speaker 1: and twenty nine seconds. That same year, she started participating
Speaker 1: in long distance swimming races and public diving demonstrations. Her
Speaker 1: time in the water wasn't only about competition, though, She
Speaker 1: started doing mermaid shows in Australian aquariums along with other
Speaker 1: aquatic performances while she was still in her teens. Although
Speaker 1: she was winning races and making a name for herself
Speaker 1: as a competitive swimmer, she wasn't really able to earn
Speaker 1: an income from doing so, so Annette and her father
Speaker 1: moved to England with the hope of finding more lucrative
Speaker 1: opportunities to compete and perform. Once they arrived in England,
Speaker 1: they had a really hard time getting started. Although Annette
Speaker 1: already held multiple records in swimming, they didn't know anyone,
Speaker 1: and Annette didn't have a local reputation to try to
Speaker 1: build on, So her father hatched a plan to drum
Speaker 1: up some publicity. She would swim twenty six miles, which
Speaker 1: was forty two kilometers down the Thames from Putney to Blackwall.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh five, a net at about age eighteen,
Speaker 1: became the first woman to make this swim. Although it
Speaker 1: did indeed bring in a lot of media attention, the
Speaker 1: swim itself was terrible. The Thames was filthy, and Annette
Speaker 1: later said she felt like she'd swallowed big mouthfuls of
Speaker 1: oil from the surface of the river. She'd also had
Speaker 1: to dodge a lot of flotsam, garbage, tugboats and barges
Speaker 1: along the way. But afterward, a sports editor from the
Speaker 1: Daily Mirror approached her with another idea. The Daily Mirror
Speaker 1: was the first paper in the UK to use photographs
Speaker 1: rather than illustrations, and the editor thought that articles on
Speaker 1: a net complete with photographs of her in the scandalous
Speaker 1: swimwear that we're going to talk about a little bit
Speaker 1: more later. He thought that would sell a lot of papers,
Speaker 1: so we offered to back her an attempt in an
Speaker 1: attempt to swim across the English Channel, along with paying
Speaker 1: for and writing about swims along the coast to train
Speaker 1: for it. This entire enterprise was wildly successful in almost
Speaker 1: every way. Annette's training swims down the coast drew huge crowds,
Speaker 1: and the articles and their corresponding photos sold lots of papers.
Speaker 1: She swam an average of forty five miles or seventy
Speaker 1: two kilometers per week, increasing the distance of each swim
Speaker 1: until she'd done the twenty four mile stretch from Dover
Speaker 1: to Ramsgate. At that point she thought she was ready
Speaker 1: to try to conquer the Channel. Although that's a slightly
Speaker 1: shorter distance than her swim down the Thames, swimming in
Speaker 1: the English Channel is far more difficult due to the
Speaker 1: very cold water, the waves and the tides. She made
Speaker 1: her first attempts to swim across the English Channel along
Speaker 1: with six men on August twenty fourth of nineteen oh five.
Speaker 1: They all started their swim at about three in the morning,
Speaker 1: all from different points along the coast, based on where
Speaker 1: they thought the currents and the tides would be the
Speaker 1: most advantageous. Each swimmer was accompanied by a steam tug
Speaker 1: and a row boat in case they fell into some
Speaker 1: distress along the way, and then periodically hot chocolate or
Speaker 1: food could be handed down to the swimmers from these
Speaker 1: boats to keep their energy up. An advertiser had given
Speaker 1: a net chocolate to eat along the way, but the
Speaker 1: combination of chocolate and the choppy water really made her seasick.
Speaker 1: The further she went, the bigger her payday would be.
Speaker 1: Those so she kept herself going through that seasickness by
Speaker 1: thinking the longer you stick, the more you get. She
Speaker 1: stuck it out for about six and a half hours,
Speaker 1: and she was paid thirty pounds. This was the first
Speaker 1: of Kellerman's three attempts to swing that swim the English Channel,
Speaker 1: and as with her swim down the Thames, she was
Speaker 1: the first woman to make the attempt. The closest it
Speaker 1: came in these three attempts to actually crossing was about.
Speaker 2: Three quarters of the way, which took ten and a
Speaker 2: half hours.
Speaker 1: Later, Kellerman would say she thought she had the endurance
Speaker 1: to swim the Channel, but not the raw strength. In
Speaker 1: her nineteen eighteen book How to Swim, she wrote that
Speaker 1: she didn't think a woman would ever successfully swim the
Speaker 1: English Channel. She was proven wrong in nineteen twenty six
Speaker 1: when Gertrude utterly crossed in fourteen hours thirty nine minutes,
Speaker 1: not only swimming the channel but beating the previous record
Speaker 1: time by more than two hours. Today there are lots
Speaker 1: of women swim across the English Channel, including swimming at
Speaker 1: three consecutive times, like swimming it across one way and
Speaker 1: then going back and then going back across again, which
Speaker 1: is astounding to me. So in Kellerman's first attempt to
Speaker 1: swim across the English Channel, the male swimmers who were
Speaker 1: swimming that night were allowed to be nude, but she
Speaker 1: had to wear a swimsuit that chafed her skin just terribly.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to her efforts to make suitable
Speaker 1: swimwear for women, which we will talk about more after
Speaker 1: a sponsor break. That swim down the Thames and the
Speaker 1: attempts to cross the English Channel were not a net
Speaker 1: Kellerman's only long distance races in the nineteen hundreds. Before
Speaker 1: leaving Australia, she had taken multiple long distance swims down
Speaker 1: the Yarra River, including becoming the first woman to complete
Speaker 1: a ten mile stretch. In nineteen oh five, she participated
Speaker 1: in a race down the Seine where she tied for
Speaker 1: third with Thomas William Burgess, and her account of this
Speaker 1: race and how to swim, she wrote that well, meeting
Speaker 1: spectators kept calling out that she was almost there and
Speaker 1: had just two bridges more, and when she realized she
Speaker 1: was not almost there, and she became just really discouraged
Speaker 1: because she had worn herself out doing what she thought
Speaker 1: was her final push to the finish line. So when
Speaker 1: Burgess caught up to her and saw that she was
Speaker 1: crying and a very lovely show of sporting behavior, he
Speaker 1: stayed with her and encouraged her for the rest of
Speaker 1: the race of the race, and that is how they
Speaker 1: came to tie. In June of nineteen oh six, Kellerman
Speaker 1: also won a twenty two mile or thirty six kilometer
Speaker 1: race down the Danube. I think anyone also who has
Speaker 1: ever run a race knows the ire of please don't
Speaker 1: tell me if you're almost there, when you're not, When
Speaker 1: you're not.
Speaker 2: Now I knew.
Speaker 1: It was a little bit unclear to me whether these
Speaker 1: were the people in the guideboat or the people who
Speaker 1: were just spectators who were saying this. But like she
Speaker 1: they got her a couple times, and then in like
Speaker 1: time number three of them being like, you're almost there,
Speaker 1: she was like, no, I'm not well right, And it's
Speaker 1: almost always well intentioned, like if you But let this
Speaker 1: be a note if you are ever spectating a sporting event,
Speaker 1: please don't fib to the participants because it does more
Speaker 1: to harm their head game than help. Yeah. Uh. And
Speaker 1: in most of these events, Kellerman was one of very
Speaker 1: few women, and sometimes he was the only woman, and
Speaker 1: she typically swam them wearing a swimsuit that was actually
Speaker 1: made for men, so.
Speaker 2: This was not unheard of in Australia. At this point.
Speaker 1: Swimming was already a more established sport in Australia than
Speaker 1: it was in the United Kingdom or the United States,
Speaker 1: but it was astonishing in a lot of the rest
Speaker 1: of the English speaking world, where water was for bathing,
Speaker 1: not for swimming. Bathing meant getting into the water a
Speaker 1: little way, and you might wait or play or maybe
Speaker 1: float a little out there, but you didn't really swim,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people didn't even know how to swim.
Speaker 1: The idea of a man made swimming pool was also
Speaker 1: still quite recent at this point, like there had not
Speaker 1: even been one built for the Olympics yet. So like
Speaker 1: bathing was a thing that happened at a beach, whether
Speaker 1: it was like a lakeside beach or a seashore beach,
Speaker 1: it did not really happen in a pool. And even
Speaker 1: if you wanted to swim, if you were a woman
Speaker 1: around the turn of the twentieth century, your bathing attire
Speaker 1: was not something you could actually swim in. The standard
Speaker 1: bathing costume for women was essentially a dress with a
Speaker 1: length that ranged within a couple of inches above or
Speaker 1: below the knee. It had a blousey top and puffy,
Speaker 1: usually short sleeves, sometimes with the sailor's collar. It was cinched,
Speaker 1: belted or ribboned at the waist and worn with stockings
Speaker 1: and bathing slippers or sometimes even bathing boots that went
Speaker 1: all the way up the calves, and many women wore
Speaker 1: their bathing clothes with corsets and other underpinnings. Here is
Speaker 1: what Annette Kellerman had to say about these outfits. Quote
Speaker 1: there is no more reason why you should wear those
Speaker 1: awful water overcoats, those awkward, unnecessary, lumpy quote bathing suits
Speaker 1: than there is that you should wear lead chains. Heavy
Speaker 1: bathing suits have caused more deaths by drowning than cramps.
Speaker 1: I am certain there isn't a single reason under the
Speaker 1: sun why everybody should not wear lightweight suits. Anyone who
Speaker 1: persuades you to wear the heavy, skirty kind is endangering
Speaker 1: your life. Just thinking about wearing tights into the water
Speaker 1: is a horrifying prospect to me.
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know why. It just kind of grosses
Speaker 2: me out.
Speaker 1: For competitive women swimmers, there was a grudging exception to
Speaker 1: the standard of dress. They could wear a men's bathing suit,
Speaker 1: which was more like a T shirt and shorts, sometimes
Speaker 1: constructed all as one piece. But this also starts a
Speaker 1: whole chicken and egg situation. Women weren't supposed to be
Speaker 1: seen in attired that they could actually swim in, which
Speaker 1: created a huge barrier for entry for the sport of swimming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I people were like, well, I guess you can wear
Speaker 1: a men's suit for this race. That left the question of,
Speaker 1: like all the training you would need to do to
Speaker 1: be able to compete in the race in the first place.
Speaker 1: Was this whole social standard of what was acceptable for
Speaker 1: women to wear that led Kellerman to invent a new swimsuit.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh five, she was scheduled for a swimming
Speaker 1: performance at London's Bath Club and some of the royal
Speaker 1: family was to be in attendance. The men's bathing suit
Speaker 1: that she had been wearing was determined to be inappropriate
Speaker 1: because it was too revealing. So Kellerman bought a pair
Speaker 1: of black stockings and she sewed them to the legs
Speaker 1: of her men's bathing suit, creating what was effectively a
Speaker 1: one piece garment that covered her from her shoulders to
Speaker 1: her feet. From there, she began tweaking and refining this
Speaker 1: original design, eventually developing a one piece, form fitting garment
Speaker 1: without sleeves. The lengths of the legs varied from full
Speaker 1: length and stalking like to stopping at the thigh. Although
Speaker 1: this would be considered pretty modest swimwear by a lot
Speaker 1: of today's standards, it was not at all modest by
Speaker 1: the standards of the day. Like we said before, the
Speaker 1: first break. The very idea of a woman in public
Speaker 1: and such a garment was enough to sell newspapers. It's
Speaker 1: widely that in nineteen oh seven Kellerman was arrested for
Speaker 1: indecency on Revere Beach in Massachusetts while wearing one of
Speaker 1: these swimsuits. Although there's no arrest in the log books,
Speaker 1: it's a story that came up again and again and
Speaker 1: again during her own lifetime, including from her own mouth, like,
Speaker 1: I don't think she made this up, but people have
Speaker 1: noted that, like they can't find a document that actually
Speaker 1: details the arrest. In spite of heavy resistance to the
Speaker 1: idea of women being out in public so relatively unclothed,
Speaker 1: Kellerman persisted. She launched her own line of women's swimwear,
Speaker 1: some of which came with a modesty panel, which was
Speaker 1: a close fitting skirt that went from waste to knee,
Speaker 1: covering the thighs but bringing along far less fabric and
Speaker 1: weight than the previous era of swimsuits. She became so
Speaker 1: closely associated to this type of swimwear that soon people
Speaker 1: were calling anything that looked like it and Annette Kellerman
Speaker 1: or just a Kellerman. Although it was a name she
Speaker 1: trademarked and went to court to defend when she needed to,
Speaker 1: and at some beaches, Kellerman type suits were actually banned.
Speaker 1: As Kellerman became more famous and her swimsuits became more
Speaker 1: widely adopted, it gradually became more acceptable for women to
Speaker 1: be seen in them and for women to participate in
Speaker 1: the sport of swimming, and compounding that, for swimming in
Speaker 1: general to be seen as a recreational activity. Some of
Speaker 1: this was part of an overall growth in the popularity
Speaker 1: of swimming, but it wasn't just happenstance. Kellerman was an
Speaker 1: active advocate for women to learn to swim and for
Speaker 1: swimming to be seen as an acceptable form of exercise, recreation,
Speaker 1: and competition for women. She wrote quote, I am not
Speaker 1: trying to shut men out of swimming.
Speaker 2: There is enough water in the world for.
Speaker 1: All of us. But as men can indulge in so
Speaker 1: many other sports where women can make a poor showing
Speaker 1: or cannot compete at all, swimming may well be called
Speaker 1: the women's sport. But unfortunately this progress did not apply
Speaker 1: to all women. Even though Kellerman herself wrote things like quote,
Speaker 1: there is nothing more democratic than swimming and a clean, cool,
Speaker 1: beautiful cheap thing we all from cats to kings, can enjoy.
Speaker 1: Swimming was not actually accessible to everyone. In the United States,
Speaker 1: public beaches and as they were built, public swimming pools
Speaker 1: were often racially segregated, and the Indigenous population was barred
Speaker 1: from many public swimming areas in Australia, So while Kellerman
Speaker 1: was a staunch advocate for making swimming accessible to women,
Speaker 1: that was really most applicable to white women. To add
Speaker 1: another layer to all of this, a lot of the
Speaker 1: swimming strokes that she learned as a child and then
Speaker 1: helped to popularize and as an adult were either patterned
Speaker 1: after or directly taught to white swimmers by Indigenous Australians
Speaker 1: and Indigenous people from elsewhere in the Pacific. So like
Speaker 1: a lot of the art and skill of swimming drew
Speaker 1: from indigenous knowledge, but Indigenous people were excluded from a
Speaker 1: lot of public swimming locations. In addition to contributing to
Speaker 1: the popularity and at least for some accessibility of swimming,
Speaker 1: Anett Kellerman's fame and skill led to a completely different
Speaker 1: aspect of her career, Vaudeville and Hollywood. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk about that after we paused for a sponsor break.
Speaker 1: A lot of Annette Kellerman's fame as a swimmer came
Speaker 1: because she was naturally a performer. She was definitely talented.
Speaker 1: I don't want to overlook that at all. She legitimately
Speaker 1: won races and she set records, and she was one
Speaker 1: of the best swimmers of her era.
Speaker 2: But a lot of the attention.
Speaker 1: That she got for those successes was due to showmanship
Speaker 1: and an openness with her body that was not really
Speaker 1: typical for the time. A woman's swimmer was already relatively
Speaker 1: novel in a lot of places, and a woman swimmer
Speaker 1: who flaunted social expectations to proudly wear a scandalous swimsuit
Speaker 1: was a real attention getter. This attention actually led her
Speaker 1: to a career in vaudeville. In nineteen oh six, having
Speaker 1: performed at the London Hippodrome and won numerous races in Europe,
Speaker 1: she sailed for the United States to perform at amusement
Speaker 1: parks and theaters. Her vaudeville act involved a combination of swimming,
Speaker 1: high diving, water stunts, and mermaid shows, for which she
Speaker 1: often designed all of her own costumes. She would eventually
Speaker 1: donate oli her costumes and memorabilia to the Sydney Opera House.
Speaker 1: We will put a link in the show notes where
Speaker 1: you can go look at them. There's a lot. There
Speaker 1: are lots and lots of pictures of this collection that
Speaker 1: you can browse through, and they are fascinating. Although water
Speaker 1: shows already existed in vaudeville, Kellerman added a lot of
Speaker 1: her own flare and incorporated ballet and other movement in
Speaker 1: what would become a precursor to synchronize swimming. Her biggest
Speaker 1: production at the New York Hippodrome included a core of
Speaker 1: two hundred mermaids, all swimming in tandem. She also tried
Speaker 1: her hand at other types of performance, including mail impersonation
Speaker 1: and high wire walking. By nineteen fourteen, Kellerman had become
Speaker 1: one of the highest paid performers in vaudeville. Also during
Speaker 1: her time in vaudeville, she got married after proposing to
Speaker 1: her manager, Lewis Sullivan, who was known as Jimmy, in
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve. Running parallel to her time in vaudeville, Kellerman
Speaker 1: also began acting in films. Her first films were a
Speaker 1: series of silent shorts made while she was trying to
Speaker 1: work at a contract dispute between two different theater managers.
Speaker 1: Later on, when other people started to copy her water
Speaker 1: act and her pay in vaudeville consequently plummeted, she turned
Speaker 1: to film almost entirely. Kellerman's film roles involved lots of
Speaker 1: water and swimming, and sometimes they also played off the
Speaker 1: fact that the South Pacific was pretty exotic to American audiences,
Speaker 1: which meant that Kellerman herself was often seen as exotic
Speaker 1: as well. Her first full length movie was Neptune's Daughter,
Speaker 1: which came out in nineteen fourteen. She played a mermaid
Speaker 1: wearing sheer bodysuits that matched her skin tone. In nineteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: she starred in a film called The Daughter of the Gods,
Speaker 1: which was a fantasy drama. She played Anisha, who was
Speaker 1: the daughter in question. In this film, she had a
Speaker 1: scene in which she was completely nude, although part of
Speaker 1: her body was covered by her hair. It was one
Speaker 1: of the first fully nude appearances by a major star
Speaker 1: in a non pornographic movie. Her final film, Venus of
Speaker 1: the South Seas, came out in nineteen twenty four. There
Speaker 1: are definitely people who call the Daughter of the Gods
Speaker 1: role like the first nude appearance by a woman in film,
Speaker 1: and that seems a little it needs a little more
Speaker 1: caveats than that. Kellerman mostly retired from performing in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. She and her husband moved to California, where
Speaker 1: she opened a health food store. She's apparently a vegetarian
Speaker 1: her whole life. By this point, she'd published books on
Speaker 1: swimming and on fitness, and one called Physical Beauty and
Speaker 1: How to Keep It. This one, to a modern reader,
Speaker 1: is maybe a little weird. It simultaneously acknowledges the double
Speaker 1: standards that women face regarding our bodies and appearances, but
Speaker 1: at the same time it is a how to manual
Speaker 1: for how to have an ideal body, and it clearly
Speaker 1: spells out that the point in doing so is to
Speaker 1: keep from losing your figure and consequently your husband as
Speaker 1: you age. So in some ways, like in some ways
Speaker 1: she was way ahead of her time, and in some
Speaker 1: ways she was squarely a product of it.
Speaker 2: The system is really bad, but here's how to buy in.
Speaker 2: Yeah that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, uh that book also like it's a little I
Speaker 1: don't really know what Annette Kellerman's racial views were about,
Speaker 1: like the contributions of indigenous swimmers to swimming and all
Speaker 1: of those sort of stuff. But she has a couple
Speaker 1: of lines in this book that, like you can tell
Speaker 1: there are some problematic racial and racist views in there,
Speaker 1: Like at one point she says it's the only people
Speaker 1: who need corsets are children and savages, and by savages
Speaker 1: in quotation marks, she means Africans, like huh, I don't
Speaker 1: want to gloss over that, but like that's it's a
Speaker 1: weird intrusion in a book that's definitely about, you know,
Speaker 1: middle class white women retaining their figures, which has its
Speaker 1: own set of social.
Speaker 2: Play.
Speaker 1: Kellerman also established health spas. She wrote newspaper columns on
Speaker 1: health and beauty. She's stridently advocated for women to be
Speaker 1: encouraged to be fit and active, and she wrote a
Speaker 1: children's book called Fairy Tales of the South Seas. But
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways she had become famous for
Speaker 1: her bathing suits and for the body under them. In
Speaker 1: nineteen oh nine, doctor Dudley Sergent of Harvard had taken
Speaker 1: the measurements of about one thousand women and compared them
Speaker 1: to the measurements of the Venus de Milo. Kellerman's were closest,
Speaker 1: and he dubbed her the perfect Woman, which along with
Speaker 1: that Revere Beach arrest became part of her ongoing marketing
Speaker 1: in the Harvard Collections, like the Harvard Special Collections, are
Speaker 1: still boxes and boxes of these women's measurement cards that
Speaker 1: were part of this study, which baffles me on a
Speaker 1: number of different Yeah, it doesn't baffle me that the
Speaker 1: cards are still in the collection. It baffles me that, like,
Speaker 1: let's measure a thousand women and compare them to a
Speaker 1: statue was a study in.
Speaker 2: The first place.
Speaker 1: So her fame for her figure and the clothing being
Speaker 1: bathing suits on it persisted long after the first decade
Speaker 1: of the nineteen hundreds, which was really when Annette Kellerman
Speaker 1: had introduced and become famous for this bathing suit. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five, an Associated Press reporter tractor down and
Speaker 1: got her opinion on some suitorial hubbub in Yonkers, New
Speaker 1: York that was over women wearing shorts. She recalled that
Speaker 1: it had only been a couple of decades since that
Speaker 1: time she was arrested, and then said, quote, but I've
Speaker 1: always preached the importance of caring for the female figure,
Speaker 1: So the girls will have to look to their shapes
Speaker 1: and not to the courts. When they appear in suits.
Speaker 1: But remember please, I am not a newdist An Associated
Speaker 1: Press headline from nineteen thirty seven read quote Anett Kellerman
Speaker 1: still draws crowd legs of diving venus hold former beauty
Speaker 1: so like people were still basically writing about her body
Speaker 1: years after she stopped me performing right with it, like
Speaker 1: she was still the go to person to talk to
Speaker 1: you about scandalous swimwear and women's figures. Kellerman and her
Speaker 1: husband returned to Australia a couple of times during the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties, including during World War Two when she entertained
Speaker 1: troops in the South Pacific.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: Esther Williams played her in the film Million Dollar Mermaid.
Speaker 1: Kellerman was not a fan of this film. They called
Speaker 1: it quote a silly little yarn and also quote a
Speaker 1: namby pamby Attempt. She was frustrated that she was played
Speaker 1: by an American in this movie, and also that the
Speaker 1: film was more of a swimming spectacular than an actual
Speaker 1: biography of her. As kind of a side note, she
Speaker 1: was also not a fan of the bikini after it
Speaker 1: was introduced, calling it far too revealing and noting that
Speaker 1: almost nobody had the figure to actually wear one. Kellerman
Speaker 1: and her husband moved back to Australia for good in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. She was inducted into the International Swimming Hall
Speaker 1: of Fame in nineteen seventy four, and she died on
Speaker 1: November sixth, nineteen seventy five, at the age of roughly
Speaker 1: eighty seven bost sources say eighty seven or eighty eight.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a little her late eighties, her late eighties.
Speaker 2: Who wants to end with a poem? I do.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited. We've gotten to end some episodes with
Speaker 1: poems lately. This poem ran in the Boston Post on
Speaker 1: November seventh of nineteen oh eight. No more the Gibson
Speaker 1: bathing Girls shall grace the Newport summer whirl. Annette declares
Speaker 1: her garments wrong at both ends, too extremely long. The
Speaker 1: Gibson girl may be a peach as she perambulates the beach,
Speaker 1: but now if in the swim she'd be she must,
Speaker 1: with sweet Annette agree her heavy skirt she must replace
Speaker 1: with filmy raiment for the race.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: She will consent to dress in such approach to nothingness.
Speaker 1: So that's a Nick Kellerman. Sometimes you will see her
Speaker 1: name spelled with two ends instead of one in which
Speaker 1: was apparently a nod to her German heritage that she
Speaker 1: used when she published her books, but most sources and
Speaker 1: as biographies have it just with one end. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
Speaker 1: is out of the archive, if you heard an email
Speaker 1: address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the
Speaker 1: course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
Speaker 1: current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: You can find us all over social media at Missed
Speaker 1: End History, and you can subscribe to our show on
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else
Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
Speaker 1: is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.