Page 3 - 2016 Yearbook International Swimming Hall of Fame

This year’s yearbook is dedicated to the memory of the great
women swimmers and divers of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Following
in the footsteps of Annette Kellerman, they were the best-known
group of girl athletes in America.

“ “The cameramen, photo editors and swimming officials worked
together as strange bedfellows,” wrote the celebrated N.Y. Times
reporter Paul Gallico, in 1939. “The newspapers got exciting
pictures that sold papers and the girls got publicity.” It was on this
publicity, he said, that women’s swimming built itself up from
semi-private meets held in tiny indoor pools to a huge and
successful sports attraction that upon several occasions drew more
spectators than a heavyweight prize fight or world series games.
spectators than a heavyweight prize fight or world series games.

There were many theories and explanations for the sudden rise of
women’s swimming to the tremendous popularity that it came to
enjoy in the mid 1930s. But Gallico was convinced that “the
simplest and most valid of all is that they had a sweet innocence,
coupled with undeniable sex appeal. You had the feeling that these
were really girls, women who were not trying to be imitations of
men.”

F For girls in the early 20th Century, wearing swimwear that
exposed their shape and limbs and cutting their hair short were both
liberating and revolutionary symbols of protest against the the
chains of victorian morality that had repressed women since the fall
of Rome.

As the featured historical article in this yearbook points out, this
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symbolism was not lost on the tobacco industry and their ad-men.
In the mid-1920s, smoking was still considered to be a male
activity and either by custom or law, few women smoked and none
smoked in public. It just wasn’t acceptable. The ad-men connected
the positive imagery of swimming to smoking, as another “ancient
prejudice” that had to be overcome, like suffrage, for women’s
rights. Many of our great Olympic champions, both men and
rights.
women of the era, were recruited to promote smoking. Of course
they were unaware of the harm they were doing to themselves and
others and might be viewed as innocent victims of an era when few
had opportunities to make money off their fame as amateur
athletes. These are the men and women who helped to make
swimming the most popular recreational activity in pre-WWII
America and there is no denying that the attention and celebrity
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they received in advertisements played a role in swimming’s
success. We dedicate this issue to their everlasting memory, which
may also serve as a cautionary tale about the advertising industry.

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