Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water

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Shortlisted for the Vikki Orvice Award for Women’s Sports Writing (Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards)

A groundbreaking history of how women found synchronicity―and power―in water.

“If you’re not strong enough to swim fast, you’re probably not strong enough to swim ‘pretty,’” said a young Esther Williams to theater impresario Billy Rose. Since the nineteenth century, tensions between beauty and strength, aesthetics and athleticism have both impeded and propelled the careers of female swimmers―none more so than synchronized swimmers, for whom Williams is often considered godmother.

In this revelatory history, Vicki Valosik traces a century of aquatic performance, from vaudeville to the Olympic arena, and brings to life the colorful cast of characters whose “pretty swimming” not only laid the groundwork for an altogether new sport but forever changed women’s relationships with water. Williams, who became a Hollywood sensation for her splashy “aquamusicals,” was just one in a long, bedazzled line of swimmers who began their careers as athletes but found greater opportunity, and often social acceptance, in the world of show business.

Early starlets like Lurline the Water Queen performed “scientific” swimming, a set of moves previously only practiced by men―including Benjamin Franklin―that focused on form and exhibited mastery in the water. Demonstrating their fancy feats in aquariums and water tanks rolled onto music hall stages, these women stunned Victorian audiences with their physical dexterity and defied society’s rigid expectations of what was proper and possible for their sex.

Far more than bathing beauties, they ushered in sensible swimwear and influenced lifesaving and physical education programs, helping to drop national drowning rates and paving the way for new generations of female athletes. When a Chicago physical educator matched their aquatic movements to music in the 1920s, young girls flocked to take part in “synchronized swimming.” But despite overwhelming love from audiences and the Olympic ambitions of its practitioners, “synchro” was long perceived as little more than entertaining pageantry, and its athletes would face a battle against the current to earn a spot at the highest echelons of sport.

Now, on the fortieth anniversary of synchronized swimming’s elevation to Olympic status, Swimming Pretty honors its incredible history of grit, glamor, and sheer athleticism.

60 black-and-white illustrations

From the Publisher

Vicki Valosik on “Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water”

What inspired you to write Swimming Pretty?

I came to the book through my own experience as a synchronized swimmer. When I joined a masters “synchro” team nearly 15 years ago, I was immediately captivated by the difficulty and beauty of the sport. As a writer, I naturally became curious about its history and was surprised to discover that the origins of what has become an incredibly athletic Olympic event (now known as “artistic swimming”) could be traced back several centuries. Delving deeper into the research, I realized that the story was bigger than that of a single sport and that synchro’s development was richly interwoven with fascinating cultural trends and threads over the years, such as the creation of lifesaving and physical education programs, the fight for women’s suffrage, the development of competitive sports for women, and the upstream battle women faced to be taken seriously as athletes. It was a story of women’s empowerment in the water that had never been told – so I decided to tell it!

How did your own experience as a synchronized swimmer inform your research and writing?

Coming to synchronized swimming as an adult made me understand, and hopefully helped me relay to readers, the physical difficulty of the sport. It requires strength, flexibility, and endurance, all delivered with absolute precision and unity of movement while upside down and in the deep end. It has also provided me with first-hand experience of the tensions between aesthetics and athleticism inherent in the sport. For example, despite the difficultly, athletes are expected to smile through the pain, forgo basic equipment like goggles just because it looks better, and—according to the rules—maintain “an illusion of ease” throughout a routine. But as I began researching, I realized that women swimmers have been navigated these tensions between beauty and strength, sport and spectacle, for generations – long before they ever began swimming in synch. Swimming starlets of the stage and screen, like vaudeville sensation Annette Kellerman and movie star Esther Williams, often started out as champion athletes competing in races or setting endurance records but found greater opportunity, and sometimes greater social acceptance, in the world of show business where they could present their power with poise.

Are there lessons you hope readers will take away from Swimming Pretty?

While synchronized/artistic swimming may be thought of as a niche sport, the story of how it came to be provides a new lens through which to understand the diverse paths to women’s liberation in the 20th century. Its early practitioners—swimming athletes of the stage, sideshow, and cinema—were vocal advocates for women’s swimming and sensible swimwear. Not only did the “pretty swimming” of female performers inspire others of their sex to take to the water for health and recreation, safety, and competitive sport, but these women—plus a few men along the way—revolutionized women’s swimwear, dropped national drowning rates, and paved the way for new generations of swimming athletes. In the process, they laid the foundation for an altogether new aquatic sport. Now, forty years after synchro’s Olympic induction, it is my hope that the book will illuminate the important role that these early forebears played not only in synchro’s development but also in turning America into a nation of swimmers—while also paying homage to the athletes of recent generations who have elevated artistic swimming into the difficult, dynamic sport it is today.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Liveright
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 25, 2024
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1324093048
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1324093046
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.5 x 9.3 inches

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