Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, positioned some 50 miles north of Tampa, Florida, is greatest identified for its mermaids. Since 1947, synchronized swimmers in shimmering tails have carried out for audiences within the park’s 400-seat aquariumlike theater, which is constructed roughly 16 toes under the floor of the Weeki Wachee River’s crystalline spring. As a younger lady, watching their water ballet by way of a wall of glass, I studied the mermaids’ each transfer in astonishment. Their skills and attract had been otherworldly—the tender billowing of their hair, the sleek weightlessness of their actions, the poise they maintained in environs inhospitable to any mere mortal.
The Weeki Wachee mermaid present was amongst dozens of roadside sights that capitalized on the success of Esther Williams, a former aggressive swimmer who parlayed her skills within the pool into film stardom within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s. Her movies, typically dubbed “aquamusicals,” had been identified for his or her spectacular underwater choreography and synchronized-swimming sequences—in addition to their huge success on the field workplace.
However our fascination with ladies in water—a component lengthy related to femininity—goes again centuries. Historic Romans flooded the basins of amphitheaters to stage mythological reenactments that includes ladies swimmers as aquatic nymphs. Gilded Age selection theater was replete with self-proclaimed “water queens,” who carried out underwater stunts and methods at aquariums and dime museums. And in more moderen years, the variety of aquatic performers working as “skilled mermaids” has exploded. Mermaids have lengthy occupied a mythological, even erotic area of interest within the cultural creativeness: When ladies begin swimming, folks can’t appear to look away.
By Vicki Valosik
Nowhere was this obsession extra evident than on the planet of late-Nineteenth- and early-Twentieth-century mass leisure, vividly conjured in Vicki Valosik’s Swimming Fairly: The Untold Story of Girls in Water, an astonishingly complete account of girls’s aquatic pursuits, with particular deal with the UK, the place aggressive swimming originated, and the US, the place it subsequently flourished. On each side of the Atlantic, ladies swimmers akin to “Lurline the Water Queen” enchanted audiences with their “tank acts.” In these exhibitions, swimmers—billed as “natationists”—would carry out inside moveable water tanks, which had been rolled onto the levels of theaters and music halls. These solo reveals included parlor methods (akin to underwater consuming, consuming, and writing), demonstrations of underwater agility (akin to flips and contortions), and feats of endurance (akin to excessive breath-holding)—to not point out gliding across the tank wanting stunning.
Remarkably, these swimmer-performers had been exempt from prevailing strictures on ladies’s modesty and bodily exercise. That is likely to be as a result of they weren’t actually thought-about ladies in any respect—they had been mermaids. Or they had been “nymphs,” or “naiads,” or “undines”; as Valosik writes, these descriptors “gave them an otherworldly patina that set them other than the necessities of mortal ladies.” Within the 1910s and ’20s, when ladies swimmers entered the world of aggressive sports activities, these labels persevered—a means of diminishing their achievements whereas additionally making these formidable, bob-haired athletes appear much less threatening to gender norms that sought to maintain ladies at dwelling.
As Valosik charts the evolution of girls swimmers as each performers and athletes, the specter of the mermaid—a hypersexualized determine with supernatural attract—looms giant over each trajectories. Alongside the way in which, Valosik interrogates the porous boundary between sport and spectacle, a skinny line that girls’s swimming, particularly, has all the time navigated. A aggressive synchronized swimmer herself, Valosik balked when she realized that using goggles is prohibited whereas competing, on purely aesthetic grounds: “Are we athletes first or are we performers?” she wonders. “Is what we’re doing a sport or is it leisure?”
For most ladies swimmers all through historical past, the reply has been each. Earlier than they had been taken significantly as athletes, feminine swimmers had been standard with the general public and embraced by the leisure business. Take the intrepid Australian swimmer-performer Annette Kellerman, who in 1905 scored the primary corporate-endorsement deal for a feminine athlete for her carefully watched tried crossing of the English Channel; simply 4 years later, her swimming-and-diving act made her the highest-paid girl in vaudeville. This enthusiasm translated into early acceptance within the sports activities world: Swimming was the primary main aggressive sport for girls within the U.S., and the primary full ladies’s workforce that the U.S. despatched to the Olympics, in 1920, comprised swimmers and divers.
Feminine swimmers helped ease Individuals into the concept of robust, succesful, bodily lively ladies—and helped ladies see themselves as such—by leaning into and subtly complicating the enduring fascination with water-dwelling beauties. The figures of the mermaid, the nymph, and the water queen all connote a form of eroticized, passive to-be-looked-at-ness, to borrow the movie theorist Laura Mulvey’s time period. However the ladies of Swimming Fairly wore these labels whereas concurrently flipping them on their head, embodying energy, vigor, and autonomy.
As ladies grew to become extra fascinated about train on the flip of the Twentieth century, social anxieties exploded concerning the “masculinization” of the American girl and the indecency of feminine bodily exertion. However the swish swimmer-performers of vaudeville allayed these fears: They “twirled round glistening tanks in leotards, silk tights, and pearls,” Valosik writes, and their type of stunt-based “decorative” swimming was seen as “a bodily reasonable exercise”—regardless that it was something however. Swimming, then, was seen as a type of bodily exercise that didn’t impinge on ladies’s supposedly innate femininity.
So when aggressive feminine swimmers took middle stage within the Nineteen Twenties, the general public accepted them as an evolution of, quite than an affront to, conventional womanhood. Take Gertrude Ederle, the so-called Grease-Smeared Venus (and the topic of a brand new film), who grew to become the primary girl to cross the English Channel in 1926, breaking the information of all 5 males who had preceded her. Upon finishing her historic swim, she was greeted with the primary ticker-tape parade in New York Metropolis historical past to honor a lady—and, with 2 million attendees, one of many metropolis’s largest as much as that time.
Girls swimmers’ apparel additionally stoked curiosity of their endeavors. Valosik writes that the tank-dwelling performers of the Nineteenth century drew crowds with each their daring stunts and their skintight costumes—which, in fact, served a sensible objective. Nonetheless, promoters typically touted swimmer-performers’ state of undress: When requested why the tank of Annette Kellerman—who had led the cost for fitted one-piece bathing fits to exchange the saggy bathing costumes lengthy customary for girls—was surrounded onstage by giant mirrors, the vaudeville impresario Edward Albee stated that “what we’re promoting right here is backsides.” Within the many years that adopted, the media took a equally prurient tack in its protection of girls’s aggressive swimming.
The fantasies hooked up to ladies in water might have drawn spectators to reveals and races, however, as Valosik illustrates, what they noticed as soon as they acquired there defied their slender notions of womanhood. Feminine aggressive swimmers rose to recognition alongside the marketing campaign for girls’s suffrage, they usually got here to embody ladies’s social and political strides, as evidenced by a 1911 New-York Tribune editorial that declared, “Fashionable Girl Is Making Speedy Progress within the Water as Effectively as on Land.” Kellerman’s one-piece swimsuit, the 1920 Olympic workforce’s bobbed haircuts, even Esther Williams’s athletic physique and the dynamic protagonists she performed modeled new sorts of feminine energy and self-reliance. Williams might have been billed as a passive “bathing magnificence,” however out and in of the water, she drove all of the motion.
Williams’s sly subversiveness is maybe greatest encapsulated by an alternate between her and the theater producer Billy Rose, from which Swimming Fairly will get its identify. At 19 years previous, Williams, a nationwide freestyle champion, was solid as an “Aquabelle” in Rose’s 1940 Acquacade water present. “I don’t need quick,” Rose instructed Williams, remarking on her swimming type. “I would like fairly.” Williams responded, “Mr. Rose, if you happen to’re not robust sufficient to swim quick, you’re most likely not robust sufficient to swim fairly.” By swimming “fairly,” Valosik reveals, ladies had been in a position to subtly showcase their prowess, serving to normalize ladies’s bodily exercise—and athletic excellence.
As Valosik factors out, the sweetness and obvious effortlessness of the “fairly” swimming for which Williams grew to become identified typically conceals ladies swimmers’ athleticism a bit too nicely. Synchronized swimming, which was lately renamed “creative swimming” (one thing Valosik has written about for this journal) has lengthy been related to showgirl leisure, regardless of its excessive bodily rigors; it gained Olympic recognition solely in 1984 and was swiftly subjected to sexist ridicule. The game has advanced to be much more bodily demanding, partly in response to those dismissive attitudes, making a rift between swimmers who need it to grow to be extra athletic and people who need to stay loyal to its pageant origins. Even at the moment, many aggressive groups don’t thoughts the siren affiliation, and have the phrase mermaids of their identify.
Watching clips of the U.S. artistic-swimming workforce, which this summer season will head to the Olympics for the primary time in 16 years, I really feel the identical wonderment as I did watching the Weeki Wachee mermaid performers—how are they doing that? Whether or not they’re elite athletes or small-town entertainers, ladies swimmers can typically appear superhuman. And throughout time, they’ve additionally typically discovered themselves saddled with cultural baggage and salacious curiosity. However their energy and expertise are what have stored us of their thrall—and quietly raised our consciousness. No siren music required.
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