The Enduring Fascination With Women in Water

Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, located some 50 miles north of Tampa, Florida, is best known for its mermaids. Since 1947, synchronized swimmers in shimmering tails have performed for audiences in the park’s 400-seat aquariumlike theater, which is built roughly 16 feet below the surface of the Weeki Wachee River’s crystalline spring. As a young girl, watching their water ballet through a wall of glass, I studied the mermaids’ every move in astonishment. Their talents and allure were otherworldly—the soft billowing of their hair, the smooth weightlessness of their movements, the poise they maintained in environs inhospitable to any mere mortal.

The Weeki Wachee mermaid show was among dozens of roadside attractions that capitalized on the success of Esther Williams, a former competitive swimmer who parlayed her talents in the pool into movie stardom in the 1940s and ’50s. Her films, often dubbed “aquamusicals,” were known for their impressive underwater choreography and synchronized-swimming sequences—as well as their enormous success at the box office.

But our fascination with women in water—an element long associated with femininity—goes back centuries. Ancient Romans flooded the basins of amphitheaters to stage mythological reenactments featuring women swimmers as aquatic nymphs. Gilded Age variety theater was replete with self-proclaimed “water queens,” who performed underwater stunts and tricks at aquariums and dime museums. And in more recent years, the number of aquatic performers working as “professional mermaids” has exploded. Mermaids have long occupied a mythological, even erotic niche in the cultural imagination: When women start swimming, people can’t seem to look away.

Nowhere was this obsession more evident than in the world of late-19th- and early-20th-century mass entertainment, vividly conjured in Vicki Valosik’s Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water, an astonishingly comprehensive account of women’s aquatic pursuits, with special focus on the United Kingdom, where competitive swimming originated, and the United States, where it subsequently flourished. On both sides of the Atlantic, women swimmers such as “Lurline the Water Queen” enchanted audiences with their “tank acts.” In these exhibitions, swimmers—billed as “natationists”—would perform inside portable water tanks, which were rolled onto the stages of theaters and music halls. These solo shows included parlor tricks (such as underwater eating, drinking, and writing), demonstrations of underwater agility (such as flips and contortions), and feats of endurance (such as extreme breath-holding)—not to mention gliding around the tank looking beautiful.

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Remarkably, these swimmer-performers were exempt from prevailing strictures on women’s modesty and physical activity. That might be because they weren’t really considered women at all—they were mermaids. Or they were “nymphs,” or “naiads,” or “undines”; as Valosik writes, these descriptors “gave them an otherworldly patina that set them apart from the requirements of mortal women.” In the 1910s and ’20s, when women swimmers entered the world of competitive sports, these labels persisted—a way of diminishing their achievements while also making these ambitious, bob-haired athletes seem less threatening to gender norms that sought to keep women at home.

As Valosik charts the evolution of women swimmers as both performers and athletes, the specter of the mermaid—a hypersexualized figure with supernatural allure—looms large over both trajectories. Along the way, Valosik interrogates the porous boundary between sport and spectacle, a thin line that women’s swimming, in particular, has always navigated. A competitive synchronized swimmer herself, Valosik balked when she learned that the use of goggles is prohibited while competing, on purely aesthetic grounds: “Are we athletes first or are we performers?” she wonders. “Is what we are doing a sport or is it entertainment?”

For most women swimmers throughout history, the answer has been both. Before they were taken seriously as athletes, female swimmers were popular with the public and embraced by the entertainment industry. Take the intrepid Australian swimmer-performer Annette Kellerman, who in 1905 scored the first corporate-endorsement deal for a female athlete for her closely watched attempted crossing of the English Channel; just four years later, her swimming-and-diving act made her the highest-paid woman in vaudeville. This enthusiasm translated into early acceptance in the sports world: Swimming was the first major competitive sport for women in the U.S., and the first full women’s team that the U.S. sent to the Olympics, in 1920, comprised swimmers and divers.

Female swimmers helped ease Americans into the idea of strong, capable, physically active women—and helped women 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 kind of eroticized, passive to-be-looked-at-ness, to borrow the film theorist Laura Mulvey’s term. But the women of Swimming Pretty wore these labels while simultaneously flipping them on their head, embodying strength, vigor, and autonomy.

As women became more interested in exercise at the turn of the 20th century, social anxieties exploded about the “masculinization” of the American woman and the indecency of female physical exertion. But the graceful swimmer-performers of vaudeville allayed these fears: They “twirled around glistening tanks in leotards, silk tights, and pearls,” Valosik writes, and their style of stunt-based “ornamental” swimming was seen as “a physically moderate activity”—even though it was anything but. Swimming, then, was seen as a form of physical activity that didn’t impinge on women’s supposedly innate femininity.

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So when competitive female swimmers took center stage in the 1920s, the public accepted them as an evolution of, rather than an affront to, traditional womanhood. Take Gertrude Ederle, the so-called Grease-Smeared Venus (and the subject of a new movie), who became the first woman to cross the English Channel in 1926, breaking the records of all five men who had preceded her. Upon completing her historic swim, she was greeted with the first ticker-tape parade in New York City history to honor a woman—and, with 2 million attendees, one of the city’s largest up to that point.

Women swimmers’ attire also stoked interest in their endeavors. Valosik writes that the tank-dwelling performers of the 19th century drew crowds with both their daring stunts and their skintight costumes—which, of course, served a practical purpose. Nevertheless, promoters often touted swimmer-performers’ state of undress: When asked why the tank of Annette Kellerman—who had led the charge for fitted one-piece bathing suits to replace the baggy bathing costumes long customary for women—was surrounded onstage by large mirrors, the vaudeville impresario Edward Albee said that “what we are selling here is backsides.” In the decades that followed, the media took a similarly prurient tack in its coverage of women’s competitive swimming.

The fantasies attached to women in water may have drawn spectators to shows and races, but, as Valosik illustrates, what they saw once they got there defied their narrow notions of womanhood. Female competitive swimmers rose to popularity alongside the campaign for women’s suffrage, and they came to embody women’s social and political strides, as evidenced by a 1911 New-York Tribune editorial that declared, “Modern Woman Is Making Rapid Progress in the Water as Well as on Land.” Kellerman’s one-piece suit, the 1920 Olympic team’s bobbed haircuts, even Esther Williams’s athletic physique and the dynamic protagonists she played modeled new kinds of female strength and self-reliance. Williams may have been billed as a passive “bathing beauty,” but in and out of the water, she drove all the action.

Williams’s sly subversiveness is perhaps best encapsulated by an exchange between her and the theater producer Billy Rose, from which Swimming Pretty gets its name. At 19 years old, Williams, a national freestyle champion, was cast as an “Aquabelle” in Rose’s 1940 Acquacade water show. “I don’t want fast,” Rose told Williams, remarking on her swimming style. “I want pretty.” Williams responded, “Mr. Rose, if you’re not strong enough to swim fast, you’re probably not strong enough to swim pretty.” By swimming “pretty,” Valosik shows, women were able to subtly showcase their prowess, helping normalize women’s physical activity—and athletic excellence.

As Valosik points out, the beauty and apparent effortlessness of the “pretty” swimming for which Williams became known sometimes conceals women swimmers’ athleticism a bit too well. Synchronized swimming, which was recently renamed “artistic swimming” (something Valosik has written about for this magazine) has long been associated with showgirl entertainment, despite its extreme physical rigors; it gained Olympic recognition only in 1984 and was swiftly subjected to sexist ridicule. The sport has evolved to be even more physically demanding, partly in response to these dismissive attitudes, creating a rift between swimmers who want it to become more athletic and those who want to remain loyal to its pageant origins. Even today, many competitive teams don’t mind the siren association, and have the word mermaids in their name.

Watching clips of the U.S. artistic-swimming team, which this summer will head to the Olympics for the first time in 16 years, I feel the same wonderment as I did watching the Weeki Wachee mermaid performers—how are they doing that? Whether they’re elite athletes or small-town entertainers, women swimmers can sometimes seem superhuman. And across time, they’ve also often found themselves saddled with cultural baggage and salacious interest. But their power and skills are what have kept us in their thrall—and quietly raised our consciousness. No siren song required.