This is a picture of a bathing beauty from around 1900. Yes, that is what she swam in. Or rather waded in since few women knew how to swim back then. Note the amount of her body that is covered for modesty’s sake. This was the Victorian Age when people were very uptight about nudity. This is a bit of a flip since early in the century, bathers skinny-dipped in privacy in lakes and ponds. By 1850, improvements in transportation like the spread of railroads made trips to the beach more common. You couldn’t swim nude, so bathing suits were developed and evolved into what we see here. Women were raised to be very modest about their figures, so some women used a “bathing machine” at the beach. This was a walled cart that could be backed up into the shallow water. The bather would change in it and then exit straight into the water. The advent of intercollegiate and Olympic swimming started the trend towards skimpier suits, but even as late as the 1920’s beaches still had “swimsuit police” who would use a ruler to measure how far from your knee your suit started. Too far – you were arrested for indecent exposure.
Bathing beauty around 1900. – Library of Congress
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