Sue Gilbert's Reviews Swell: A Waterbiography
Swell: A Waterbiography
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Interesting take on the activity of swimming from a feminist rather than a sporting point of view. What has feminism got to do with swimming you may ask? Well up until around 100 years ago almost no women in the UK could actually swim.
Swimming was deemed a purely masculine activity, unsuitable, unseemly and unhealthy for females. Sure, the wealthier classes could hire a bathing machine at the beach and enter the water decourously in voluminous bathing costumes, but they didn't swim, just dipped themselves, while the lower orders would paddle or even, daringly, wade in the shallows. Swimming was for the blokes and the chaps. Over the past 100 or so years this has changed, but it took a lot of determinesd women to make it happen.
Jenny Landreth intersperses a detailed, sometimes humorous take on the history and the heroines of the women's swimming movement - yes it was a movement, you can't swim without movement! - with her own swimming experiences and her love of her local Tooting Bec Lido.
Has got me thinking, I must swim more often, were is my cozzy?
Swimming was deemed a purely masculine activity, unsuitable, unseemly and unhealthy for females. Sure, the wealthier classes could hire a bathing machine at the beach and enter the water decourously in voluminous bathing costumes, but they didn't swim, just dipped themselves, while the lower orders would paddle or even, daringly, wade in the shallows. Swimming was for the blokes and the chaps. Over the past 100 or so years this has changed, but it took a lot of determinesd women to make it happen.
Jenny Landreth intersperses a detailed, sometimes humorous take on the history and the heroines of the women's swimming movement - yes it was a movement, you can't swim without movement! - with her own swimming experiences and her love of her local Tooting Bec Lido.
Has got me thinking, I must swim more often, were is my cozzy?
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