Posted on No Comments on The Peaceful Gardener: Rose Standish Nichols & the Peace Movement (Part II)

The Peaceful Gardener: Rose Standish Nichols & the Peace Movement (Part II)

By Corinne Zaczek Bermon

To learn about how her family and tutors influenced Rose Nichols, read Part I.

In this second post exploring the world of Rose Standish Nichols, we begin with those who impacted her life and end with her tutelage in landscape architecture.

Rose Nichols was highly influenced by her parents, Arthur Howard Nichols and Elizabeth Homer Nichols, and her two younger sisters, Margaret and Marian, as they grew into adulthood.  Arthur Nichols grew up in Boston’s North End; he graduated from Harvard College in 1862 and Harvard Medical School in 1866.  Arthur Nichols did not grow up in a Brahmin family, but rather as part of the well-educated middling class.  His entrance into Harvard College allowed him to enter into the upper class, by facilitating his marriage into such a family. Arthur Nichols loved to travel in Europe, a passion he passed onto Rose, and as a single man, he continued his medical studies in Paris, Vienna and Berlin.  In 1869, he married Elizabeth Fischer Homer from the prominent Homer family in Roxbury Highlands,

The Nichols House Museum in Beacon Hill
The Nichols family home, now a museum.

Massachusetts.  Arthur became a renowned holistic doctor in Beacon Hill, practicing in the family home at 55 Mount Vernon Street and for several decades was the “summer doctor” at Rye Beach, New Hampshire, where the family spent their summers before buying a home in Cornish, NH.((B. June Hutchinson, “Macdaddy Doodadle, Doodadle Macdade, Mactaddy Doddadle Day” The Nichols House Museum and Archive. http://www.nicholshousemuseum.org/pdf/nichols_family/macdaddy_doodadle.pdf.))

Aside from her parents, Nichols tutors in landscape design also influenced her social activism.  Nichols was only eighteen when her family bought their summer home and from the very beginning, Nichols’ uncle, the famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, pushed his favorite niece to take up garden design after admiring the walled

garden she created at the Nichols’ Cornish, NH summer home, dubbed Mastlands, in the Cornish Colony.  In 1889, after the family had purchased Mastlands, Saint-Gaudens introduced Rose to Charles Platt, a self-trained architect and landscape architect. Platt was one of America’s most influential 20th century designers and was influential in the emergence of the style Beaux-Arts, which Nichols favored throughout her career.((Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Long Island Landscapes and the Women Who Designed Them (New York: WW Norton &Company, 2009), 200-203.))  Along with Saint-Gaudens, Platt encouraged Nichols to travel the world and study gardens in many European countries. Studying with Platt led Nichols to study drafting and lessons in horticulture from Benjamin Watson at the Bussey Institute at Harvard, located adjacent to the Arnold Arboretum in the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain.  At the Bussey Institute, Nichols was encouraged to study in Paris at Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Perhaps the most influential of her landscape design mentors was H. Inigo Triggs in London.  Rose set sail on the SS New England on 27 February 1901 for Liverpool, England with friend, Ellen Cushings and traveled to London to become Triggs’ apprentice.((Arthur Howard Nichols papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.))  Triggs, already an acclaimed landscape architect by the time Nichols joined him in London, had built his career on designing formal gardens and

Copy of the Nichols' first book on gardening, English Pleasure Gardens.
Copy of the Nichols’ first book on gardening, English Pleasure Gardens.

country houses and specialized in historical research to re-create gardens of the past.  During her tenure with Triggs, Rose Nichols finished her research and wrote English Pleasure Gardens, published 19 November 1902.((Ibid.))

It was under Triggs that Nichols began to connect landscape design and city planning to her vision of world peace.  Triggs gave a brief review of the great awakening throughout the world in city development in his book, Town Planning, Past, Present and Possible, which he was working on from the time Nichols apprenticed with Triggs until its publication in 1910.  Triggs gave special consideration to small parks, claiming that peaceful public spaces led to a peaceful state of mind for city dwellers.((H. Inigo Triggs, Town Planning: Past, Present and Possible. (London: Methuen & Co, 1910), 12-15.))  Triggs, himself a pacifist, instilled in his pupil the idea that the promotion of peace did not only have to come in the form of marches and campaigns but through the designing of landscapes, parks and gardens. When Nichols returned from her apprenticeship with Triggs in June 1903, she had adopted this idea, and over the next fifteen years she would use this principle as a way to promote her peace agenda in Europe. In the same year of her return, Nichols became the first woman listed under the heading of “landscape architect” in the Boston City Directory,  and she kept an office at 5 Park Street downtown while she began traveling between New York, Boston and Chicago working on various projects.  Early in her career, Nichols received commissions in Lake Forest, Illinois; Boston; Massachusetts; Long Island, New York; and Newport, Rhode Island. Her reputation grew and she worked in more distant areas such as Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Augusta, Georgia; Tucson, Arizona; and Santa Barbara, California by the 1920s.  Her work was especially valued by her patrons in the Southwest, since her travels to arid Spain in her youth and with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom  gave her a special knowledge in solving problems that were inherent to making a successful garden in a desert.((Mary Bonson Hartt, “Women and the Art of Landscape Gardening,” The Outlook, vol 88, No 13, (March 28, 1908), 702. https://books.google.com/books?isbn=078648733X))

In the next segment, we will learn about Rose Nichols’ work in the Woman’s Peace Party and WILPF during and after World War I.

To learn more about Rose Standish Nichols, visit the Nichols House Museum and take a tour!

Corinne Zaczek Bermon is earning her M.A. in History with a specialization in Archives. She earned a B.A. in American Studies in 2009 and a M.A. in American Studies in 2015 from University of Massachusetts Boston. This series of articles on Rose Standish Nichols represents her award winning research in American Studies. Currently, her work explores the social history of the Otis Everett family living in the South End of Boston in the 1850s. She is designing a digital exhibit that explores Victorian life for the merchant class conducting business in Boston and abroad through the Everett letters.

Posted on No Comments on Sailors, Shopkeepers & Scientists: Women of Nantucket Succeeding in a Man’s World

Sailors, Shopkeepers & Scientists: Women of Nantucket Succeeding in a Man’s World

By: Cheyenne Dunham

Women’s history month provides a time to look back on various female role models from our past–women who inspire us, make us think, and perhaps challenge us to question societal restrictions, as they did. These stories of empowerment, leadership, and success don’t always come from the most obvious places.

Nantucket 1792
Map of Nantucket, 1792.

Nearly 30 miles off the coast of southeastern Massachusetts lies Nantucket, a small and unassuming island that hosted an independent and progressive society in which women long played a vital role. In this place, women existed as prominent religious figures, business owners, educators, scientists, and adventurers before the voices of suffrage permeated the political and social dialogue of the late 19th century.

Nantucket thrived as a whaling port until the 1850s. This caused many of its male residents to venture out for years at a time, on voyages across the world, without the guarantee of returning to their home or loved ones. Subsequently, the women of the island were often left solely responsible for their family’s financial, social, and religious well-being.

Women of Petticoat Row circa 1895. Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association.
Women of Petticoat Row ca.1895. Courtesy of Nantucket Historical Association.

Women held a prominent presence in the public and commercial spheres. One group of women managed an entire section of the town business strip nicknamed “Petticoat Row.”

The island has always been relatively small. Its population peaks, both in its whaling days and current tourist seasons, at around 10,000. In the earlier years, this population total included many of those away at sea. Nantucket’s isolation and self-sufficiency, combined with its early history of political and ideological separation from the mainland, resulted in a unique environment where a woman’s capability and voice in society often equaled their male counterparts. In the Heart of the Sea, author Nathaniel Philbrick explains,

“Given the island’s place on a map, you might expect Nantucketers to be an independent bunch, and you would be right. …More than anything else, it is this place, ‘away off shore,’ that has determined who the Nantucketer is.”((Philbrick, Nathaniel. Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890. (New York : Penguin Books, 2011): xiii, xvi.))

Nantucket produced a wide range of interesting women and influential female leaders. One of the earliest of these notable women was Mary Coffin Starbuck (1645-1719),  the first woman to marry and have a child on the island.
Excerpt from Eliza Brock's Journal Created Aboard the Ship Lexington c. 1853 Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association
Excerpt from Eliza Brock’s Journal Created Aboard the Ship Lexington ca.1853. Courtesy of Nantucket Historical Association.

She was not only greatly responsible for bringing Quakerism to the Nantucket community, but she successfully ran her family’s trading post as one of the earliest authoritative businesswomen in the town. Unlike Starbuck, who oversaw the family affairs while her husband was away, some women chose to go to sea alongside the men. Two such women, Susan Austin Veeder (1816-97) and Eliza Spencer Brock (1810-99), kept detailed journals of their experiences  at sea which are now archived at the Nantucket Historical Association.

Photo of Painting by Mrs. H. Dassel c. 1851 Maria Mitchell Looking Through a Telescope Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association
Painting. “Maria Mitchell Looking Through a Telescope,” by Mrs. H. Dassel ca.1851. Courtesy of Nantucket Historical Association.

Outside of the island’s commercial world, women were just as influential in science, education, and social movements. Maria Mitchell (1818-89) was a brilliant scientist and librarian whose accomplishments included discovering a comet, becoming the first professional female astronomer, and eventually becoming a professor at Vassar College. Mitchell became well-known for her influence in astronomy and education on the mainland. However, her early years on Nantucket and her involvement in its progressive community greatly shaped her outlook and future. She attained unprecedented success in her field. By her own successful example, she promoted the potential for all women.  Throughout her life, she advocated for gender equality in any field and encouraged other women to strive for success.

Anna Gardner. Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association.
Anna Gardner. Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association.

Another Nantucket educator also fought for equality but in a different scope. Anna Gardner (1816-91) was a teacher at the African School on the island. Gardner left her position as an educator to protest racial discrimination that had been experienced by one of her students and to more fully dedicate herself to the cause of abolition. She eventually helped organize the first Anti-Slavery Convention on Nantucket and would continue her activism by fighting for both gender and racial equality with organizations such as the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society and the Association for the Advancement of Women, an organization partly founded by Mitchell.

These women represent only a few examples of the many incredible women that can be found throughout the island’s history. As time goes on, authors and historians will undoubtedly uncover more inspirational stories while attempting to interpret the unique role women played in shaping Nantucket since the 17th century. But what was so unique about this place that contributed to such a concentration of powerful figures? Whether it was thanks to situational necessity or progressive and inclusive thinking, this island has produced a legacy of individuals well-deserving of our consideration.

Cheyenne Dunham is earning her M.A. in History with a specialization in Public History. She earned a B.A. in History, minoring in Anthropology, from Eastern Washington University. Currently, her work explores Nantucket’s developmental history alongside the Pacific Northwest’s settlement. She is designing a digital exhibit connecting post-whaling industrial and population shifts on the Massachusetts island with the establishment and growth of Washington State in the second half of the 19th century.

Posted on No Comments on Women of the Past & Present Shaping the Future

Women of the Past & Present Shaping the Future

by Monica Haberny

In January 2017, half a million people showed up for the Women’s March in Washington DC and over four million people participated in their own marches throughout the country to raise awareness for women’s rights. During my internship at the Boston City Archives in Fall 2016, I came across many female activists who worked tirelessly for change in the past two centuries. The following three women represent just a fraction of the inspiring women whose successes and failures can motivate activists fighting for similar issues today.

Florida Ruffin. ca.1890. Wikimedia Commons.
Florida Ruffin. ca.1890. Wikimedia Commons.

Suffragist, journalist, and anti-lynching activist, Florida Ruffin Ridley (1861-1943) became one of the first black teachers in Boston. She came from an educated background. Her father, George Lewis Ruffin, was the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School and the first African American to be a judge in the country. Her mother, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a suffragist and civil rights activist, published the first newspaper for African American women. Ruffin, following in her mother’s footsteps, also worked as a pioneering journalist and activist.

Florida Ruffin's Teacher Qualification Record, 1888, Teacher Qualification registers and index. Courtesy of Boston City Archives.
Florida Ruffin’s Teacher Qualification Record, 1888, Teacher Qualification registers and index. Courtesy of Boston City Archives.

Journalists provide an invaluable service, especially in a digital age where news comes from various sources and is often contested or falsely reported. Florida edited the Women’s Era, her mother’s newspaper. She wrote articles about black history and issues affecting blacks for multiple publications, including the Journal of Negro History and The Boston Globe. She, Pauline Hopkins and Dorothy West all belonged to the Saturday Evening Quill Club, an African American literary group founded in 1925. In addition to her writing career, Florida was involved in co-founding several nonprofits for African American women and was a lifelong political activist.

Application from the Housekeeper's League, January 1913. Courtesy of Boston City Archives.
Application from the Housekeeper’s League, January 1913. Courtesy of Boston City Archives.

Ridley raised awareness about race relations; her contemporary Ida Hebbard pioneered the issue of food safety in Boston. Recent documentaries like Food, Inc. and Cowspiracy have challenged people to think about where their food comes from. Hebbard became a food safety activist over a hundred years ago.

She served as president of the Housekeepers League, an all-female group. During the 1910s, the League lobbied for consumer rights, protesting the increasing prices of household foods. Hebbard led the group in protesting the price of eggs in 1912, as well as the price of potatoes and coal in 1917. Potato prices for consumers dropped from 70 cents to 35 cents a peck because of their efforts. More importantly, she advocated for the Bob Veal Bill. This bill banned the sale of calves weighing less than sixty pounds, preventing them from being slaughtered and shipped to Boston the day they were born.

In November 2016, activists like Ida Hebbard succeeded in passing Question 3 on the ballot, which banned the confinement of farm animals in small cages in Massachusetts. Like the Bob Veal Bill, Question 3 will go on to improve the health of people because it improves the lives farm animals.

Grace Lonergan with fiancee Lee Lorch in 1943.
Grace Lonergan with fiancee Lee Lorch in 1943.

Grace Lonergan Lorch, the third Boston woman featured today, championed civil rights and women’s rights in education. Before 1953, Boston Public School teachers were forced to resign before they married. Thus, in the 1880s, Florida Ruffin left her job to marry. Grace Lonergan Lorch changed that for future female teachers. In 1943, she brought a case against the Boston School Committee (BSC) in an attempt to keep her job after she married Lee Lorch. Although the BSC upheld the rule and Lorch was forced to resign when she married, the publicity surrounding the case forced the BSC to end the ban of married women public school teachers ten years later.

During his service in the military during World War II, Lee became aware of racism. During troop transports, he noted, often the black company had to clean the ship. Discrimination made Lee Lorch, a professor and mathematician, very uncomfortable and his wife shared his views. When the couple moved to New York City following the war, they worked to desegregate their home community, Stuyvesant Town apartments, which had banned black families from living in their complex.

The Lorch family being interviewed in 1949 by New York Times reporters about their work in Stuyvestant Town.
The Lorch family being interviewed in 1949 by New York Times reporters about their work in Stuyvestant Town. New York Times, 2010.

Lee led the Town and Village Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town to try to end the ban. In 1949, the Lorch family attempted to find a loophole in the ban and invited a black family to live in their apartment as their “guests.” When their plan backfired, the couple and their daughter, Alice, moved to Pennsylvania, then Tennessee before they moved to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1955.

The couple became very active in civil rights in their new community. Their neighbors were Daisy and L.C. Bates, founders of the Arkansas State Press and active members of the NAACP during the Little Rock Crisis. Alice Lorch became friends with many of the children in their new neighborhood. So, in September 1955, Grace wrote to the local superintendent requesting that her daughter be able to attend the local school. She hoped that Alice would not only be able to attend school with friends, but also promote integration as their neighborhood was predominately black. Although the school board denied her request, Grace continued to be involved in Little Rock’s branch of the NAACP.

The now famous image of Grace Lorch (left) comforting Elizabeth Eckford (right).
The now famous image of Grace Lorch (left) comforting Elizabeth Eckford (right).

On September 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, found herself alone and surrounded by a mob when she attempted to enter Little Rock Central High School.

All nine teenagers had planned to arrive at the school together with their parents, but the meeting place changed. The Eckford’s lack of a phone left Elizabeth uninformed and alone. Grace Lorch, after dropping Alice off at school, passed the high school and saw Elizabeth’s predicament. The civil rights activist fought her way through the angry crowd and helped escort the girl home. The rescue of Elizabeth placed a target on the Lorch family. Alice Lorch found herself bullied at school. Someone placed dynamite in their garage, and they were harassed by both press and the people around them. In 1959, Lee accepted a job from the University of Alberta and moved his family to Canada.

By fighting for causes that were important to them, Florida Ruffin, Ida Hebbard, and Grace Lorch shaped the future and women now continue to do so. Originally from Little Rock, journalist, activist, and speaker Liz Walker became the first African American woman to co-anchor a newscast in Boston in the 1980s. Lauren Singer challenges us to think about where our household goods come from and the environmental impact they may have. In India, Rashmi Misra fights for education in rural communities and giving young women entrepreneurial skills, and Maya Wiley works for civil rights in New York. Like Ruffin, Hebbard, and Lorch before them, these women will go on to influence the next generation of women.

Monica Haberny is currently working on her Master’s degree, specializing in Archives. She received her Bachelor’s in History from Montclair State University (2013). Currently, she is working on a digital exhibit on Kathleen Sullivan, the only woman on the Boston School Committee during the start of Boston’s public school integration, for Stark & Subtle Divisions. She has a strong interest in the history of nutrition, activism, and animal rights, and hopes to use these interests in her final capstone project.

Posted on No Comments on The Peaceful Gardener: Rose Standish Nichols & the Peace Movement Part I

The Peaceful Gardener: Rose Standish Nichols & the Peace Movement Part I

By Corinne Zaczek Bermon

Just outside of Rome in the 1920s, fifty year old Rose Standish Nichols walked through the gardens of Villa Torlonia perhaps thinking about her two favorite topics: landscape architecture and world peace.

Once belonging to Cardinal Albani, the gardens were rented by future dictator Benito Mussolini, who had not launched his campaign to make Italy a world empire yet.

Nichols strolled through the gardens as she researched her third book, Italian Pleasure Gardens.((Rose Standish Nichols. 1931. Italian Pleasure Gardens. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 191. ))  Although she did not document if she had a conversation with “Il Duce,” Nichols had a history of visiting dignitaries and enchanting them with conversations about their gardens before moving on to politics. An extraordinary woman, Nichols used her place in society, her profession, and her countless connections, to work for the women’s peace movement that began before World War I. Her story and her role in the international pacifist movement remains mostly untold.     

Rose Standish Nichols was born on January 11, 1872, into an Boston Brahmin family. She lived at 55 Mount Vernon Street in the

Portrait of Rose Standish Nichols by Taylor Greer, 1912. Wikimedia Commons.
Portrait of Rose Standish Nichols by Taylor Greer, 1912. Wikimedia Commons.

prestigious Beacon Hill neighborhood Boston, for most of her life. The eldest of three daughters born to Arthur Howard Nichols, a prominent holistic doctor, and Elizabeth Homer Nichols, a social activist who worked with the Boston Children’s Aid Association and the Boston Female Asylum, Rose enjoyed an extensive education. She showed a lifelong appreciation for beauty and peace, influenced by her uncle, noted American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and her activist parents who taught her the importance of peace and social reform.  Her father taught her how to question and challenge what she thought was amiss in the world.(( George Taloumis, “Rose Standish Nichols, Sixty Years Ago She Organized the Beacon Hill Reading Club (1896)” Boston Sunday Globe, September 16, 1956. The Nichols House Museum and Archive.))

Rose Nichols spent most of her summers traveling, and in Europe she met many new people she counted as friends. Among her acquaintances she included royalty, such as Maria Feodorovna, Grand Duchess of Russia, the Marquess da Frontieira Maria Mascarenhas Barreto, of Portugal and numerous queens, countesses, lords, cardinals and archbishops.((Margery P. Trumball, “Selections from the Published Writings of Rose Standish Nichols.” (PhD diss., Dartmouth College, 1989).)) 

Surrounding herself with prominent people gave Nichols a global social circle consistent with her upper class status, and through staying within this network of family friends, she could travel safely to Europe for gardening, social visits, and peace work. This was a time period in which a woman who traveled alone would have her respectability questioned and Nichols rarely traveled alone.((Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).)) Despite being raised in an era when Victorian notions governed women’s place in society, Nichols attended a pilot program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in landscape architecture in the late

Picture taken of the MIT landscape architecture cohort in 1900.
Students in the MIT landscape architecture cohort. Unfortunately, Rose is not pictured here.

1890s and was given the status of a “special student.”  Women students were attracted to the MIT program because it provided excellent opportunities, which they were denied elsewhere.  This pilot program coincided with the 19th century idea that gardening was a hobby suitable for women in their socially constricted environments. Still, women in Nichols’ cohort were not given the status of full-time students because MIT had not fully developed their landscape architecture program and would not do so for a few more years.((Eran Ben-Joseph et al. “Against All Odds: MIT’s Pioneering Women of Landscape Architecture” http://web.mit.edu/ebj/www/LAatMIT/LandArch@MITlow.pdf.))

Rose Nichols had two important influences that led her to work in social reform: her family and her landscape design tutors.  The Nichols family was active in social reform and political movements, such as women’s suffrage, relief efforts and anti-imperialism. Rose Nichols’ landscape design tutors also shaped her thinking that the local would impact the global.  From them, she learned a specific method of using landscape design as an introduction to talking to world dignitaries, which also included viewing design itself as a method of peace.  However, Nichols was unable to accept egalitarian ideals embraced by many of her fellow reformers.  Being raised in the mid-Victorian Era meant that Nichols believed social classes should live in separate parts of town and differed significantly in their attitudes toward politics and religion. Consequently, the upper class was most likely to associate with others who shared their social status, opinions and values. As part of the elite class, Nichols had her own code of conduct and value system, which one belonging to this particular social class had to conform to.

While in general women had few options outside of marriage and childrearing, Rose Nichols chose to do neither.  She, instead, supported herself as a garden designer, traveling across the United States and Europe as she learned and perfected her craft.  She believed in the universalizing power of gardening and was introduced to gardening by her maternal grandfather, Thomas Johnston Homer, who allowed her to cultivate a small corner of his

Bostonians entering a streetcar in the mid-1800s.
Bostonians entering the streetcar.

garden in Roxbury Highlands, a streetcar suburb of the city of Boston at that time. Nichols was not yet ten years old but according to her youngest sister Margaret’s memoirs, Rose Nichols industriously planned and worked in her small plot with their grandfather.((Margaret Homer Shurcliff, Lively Days: Some Memoirs (Boston: Private Publication by Shurcliff Family, 1965).))  Her education further prepared her for entry into the rather exclusively male field of landscape architecture.  Nichols attended private schools in Boston, among them the progressive Mrs. Shaw’s School, which did not differentiate its courses on the basis of gender.  Girls learned woodworking alongside needlepoint and were encouraged to read widely, especially in history and the classics, and to acquire a working knowledge of several languages.  Nichols entered adulthood with the ability to speak Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian, which helped her move into international circles as an organizer for Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and to undertake research for her gardening books.((Taloumis, 22.))

In the next post of this series on Rose Standish Nichols, we will explore her groundbreaking profession as a noted landscape architect.

To learn more about Rose Nichols, please visit the Nichols House Museum for a tour.

Corinne Zaczek Bermon is earning her M.A. in History with a specialization in Archives. She earned a B.A. in American Studies in 2009 and a M.A. in American Studies in 2015 from University of Massachusetts Boston. This series of articles on Rose Standish Nichols represents her award winning research in American Studies. Currently, her work explores the social history of the Otis Everett family living in the South End of Boston in the 1850s. She is designing a digital exhibit that explores Victorian life for the merchant class conducting business in Boston and abroad through the Everett letters.

Posted on No Comments on Drowning in Culture: Women & Swimming in the 20th Century US

Drowning in Culture: Women & Swimming in the 20th Century US

In the contemporary US, both boys and girls learn to swim as part of physical education. In the early 1900s, however, many men learned to swim but few women received instruction. Often, women actively shunned the water. When a fire broke out on the steamboat General Slocum in 1904, eyewitnesses reported that women, certain they would drown if they jumped overboard,  “waited until the flames were upon them, until they felt their flesh blister, before they took the alternative of the river.”((“1,000 Lives May Be Lost In Burning of the Excursion Boat Gen. Slocum,” New York Times (June 16, 1904), 1.))

Bodies washed ashore after the steamship, General Slocum, caught fire, 1904. Wikimeida Commons.

Of the estimated 978 women and children aboard the cruise, nearly all died. Most drowned just a few feet from shore in relatively shallow waters.

The New York Times opined, “one of the lessons which the General Slocum horror should bring home to every woman and girl in New York City is the desirability of knowing how to swim.”((“1,000 Lives May Be Lost In Burning of the Excursion Boat Gen. Slocum,” New York Times (June 16, 1904), 1.)) While catastrophes like this commanded national attention, thousands of accidental drowning deaths occurred in the US annually. Most fatalities involved women and children.

Why did so few women know how to swim in the early 20th century?

Some physicians and conservatives concluded that women were biologically inferior or incapable of swimming. One common cultural stereotype held that men were innately predisposed to athleticism. Many saw swimming–especially open water swimming–as a masculine sport, far too challenging for women.

Frederick J. Garbit, M.D., “The Woman’s Medical Companion and Guide To Health.” The Josephine Long Wishart Collection: Mother, Home, and Heaven, Courtesy the College of Wooster Special Collections.

Others realized that women’s aversion to water and unfortunate tendency to drown had less to do with biological deficiency than it did with cultural customs.

Louisa Dresel and two women in bathing suits at Mingo's Beach, Beverly, Mass., 1900. Image courtesy of Schlesinger Library.
Louisa Dresel and two women in bathing suits at Mingo’s Beach, Beverly, Mass., 1900. Image courtesy of Schlesinger Library.

In the early 1900s, cultural beliefs required modesty of women. As a result, women’s swimsuits consisted of multiple layers: dark wool tights, knee-length bloomers, a sailor-style blouse with balloon sleeves, a belt, and full skirt. The average woman’s swimsuit used seven to ten yards of woolen fabric depending on the style.

Margaret Wessell Piersol learning to swim, 1896, Courtesy Radcliffe College Archives, Schlesinger Library.

Women ventured to bath houses located along river banks and ocean beaches to cool themselves and allow their children to play in the water. Their long, heavy bathing suits permitted frolicking in the surf. But the full, water-logged skirt often tangled around a woman’s legs and immobilized her. Ironically, the fear of drowning in the swimsuit that cultural etiquette demanded women wear deterred many women from learning to swim.

Even if a woman knew how to swim, the weighted fabric could drag her down. In the summer, each week, newspaper headlines recounted numerous deaths–mostly of women–from drowning at beaches and lakes. Often women drowned while trying to save a child.

The deaths of nearly 1000 women in the General Slocum incident called attention to drowning as a public health and safety issue. Confronted with this threat to safety, municipalities initiated “Learn to Swim” campaigns targeting women. Postcards, posters, and newspaper articles encouraged and warned women to learn to swim as a life-saving measure for themselves and–more importantly–for the nation’s children.

Postcard promoting swimming for girls and women, circa 1905. Personal collection.
Postcard promoting swimming for girls and women, circa 1905. Personal collection.

As cities began offering swimming instruction to women, individuals advocating swimsuit reform–like Lucille Eaton Hill, Edwyn Sandys and Annette Kellerman–began finding audiences receptive.

Campaigns about public safety worked together with advertisements glamorizing swimming for women. They began to dismantle the stereotype that open water swimming was a masculine sport unsuitable for women.

Public safety advertisements successfully persuaded the general public that men and women could (and should) swim together on beaches because men could both safeguard women and teach them basic elements of swimming.

This interaction of the sexes in a sport designated as masculine, like swimming, contradicted custom. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries middle-class propriety delineated appropriate interactions between the sexes in most social settings–especially sports. Swimming pools were often segregated by gender and race but the dangers posed by the surf allowed conservatives to condone mixed-gender swimming, despite the fact that swimming exposed more of the body than other sports.

Mixed-gender swim group in New York, August, 1906. By G. C. Hovey, Mid Manhattan Picture Collection, Library of Congress.

The early 20th century “Learn to Swim” campaign succeeded. Mixed-gender amateur swim groups formed in most major US cities. Soon women began competing against men in open water marathons. Women’s success contradicted cultural beliefs about women’s physical frailty.

Open water swimming race from the Battery to Coney Island, New York, 1908. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
Open water swimming race from the Battery to Coney Island, New York, 1908. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

But the campaign may have had unintentional effects. Early “Learn to Swim” campaigns that targeted women may have inadvertently (or purposefully) reinforced another cultural stereotype: that swimming was a “white” activity.

Today, death by drowning is capturing headlines again. This time, however, the victims are predominantly nonwhites: 70 percent of African-American children don’t know how to swim. They are three times more likely to drown than other children. This begs the question: are our cultural stereotypes killing us?

 

Marilyn Morgan, Director of the Archives Program and Lecturer of History and UMass Boston.

Marilyn Morgan is the Director of the Archives Program & Lecturer of History at UMass Boston. Her first book, a cultural history of open water swimming and swimwear in America is unexpected to be released in 2018. She is at work on a new project on the history of gender, food, and advertising. Check out her blog or follow her on Twitter @Mare_Morgan