How Swimwear Revolutionized Women's Maritime Safety

As the exhibition Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style opens (Design Museum, London, March 28 -Augst 17 2025) maritime historian Jo Stanley looks at the pre-twentieth century links between women swimmers, shipwrecks and fashion. 

‘Don’t women have the right to save themselves from drowning when men aren’t around to protect them? Then how can we learn to swim wearing more material than you hang on a clothes line?’  (Annette Kellerman)  

Annette Kellerman, one of the ‘suffragette-swimmers’ is seen as a key person in starting women’s increased access to swimming. Around 1907 few western women swam. Those who tried it learnt in grotesque pantaloons and mob caps.  

Thousands of lives were lost partly because of cultural attitudes towards women on the waves: ‘Not only in matters of swimming, but in all forms of activity, woman’s natural development is seriously restricted  the idea that it is most un-ladylike to be possessed of legs or know how to use them,’ the ‘Australian Mermaid’ and White Star line passenger thought.  

Splash!, focusing on the 1920s, refers to Annette’s controversial pushing for a hydrodynamic one-piece that revealed her nude knees.  Who knows how many people survived the sea and how much women’s general health improved because they could learn water skills - in the new rational dress.

Amber Butchart, the ‘keen but incredibly unaccomplished sea swimmer’ guest curator of Splash, says ‘Fitness became fashionable in the 1920s. Swimming was a big part of this. Swimwear manufacturers began marketing their products for active swimming, rather than leisurely bathing. At the same time, technical innovations in knitting machines made swimsuits more form-fitting, and more appealing.  

‘Making swimwear more fashion-forward may well have helped improve maritime safety, along with links to Hollywood stars. You could say swimsuit design saved lives. From Annette Kellerman in the early 20th century to the aquatic extravaganzas of Esther Williams in the 1950s, swimming became associated with glamorous lifestyles. Piers, promenades, liners and lidos all became fashionable spaces to see and be seen.’  

Shipping lines designed vessels with proper pools, not just canvas sacks of seawater rigged on unpretentious decks with never a parasol or cocktail in sight. Cunard’s Franconia and Carinthia were the first to be designed with both indoor and outdoor pools, in 1931. Women bought costumes in the new shipboard shopping malls, rather than just borrowing standard stock from a pool attendant.   

At the seaside, beach byelaws and fierce ‘sheriffettes’ no longer deterred ‘immodest’ women practising their strokes. Girl Guides won swimming badges. At Co-op and police galas girls competed, trained by women and chaperoned by ‘ladies' dressing-room stewardesses’. In the 1920s women trying to break Channel records, such as Trudy Ederle, proliferated.  

Newly allowed into the Olympics, women like Lucy Morton (see her medal in the exhibition) were lionised. Shipping companies loved the PR. Cunard not only carried Trudy on the Berengaria, which aeroplanes showered with celebratory flowers. The company also employed the line’s first (celebrity) swimming instructress. Hilda James enhanced cruising’s appeal to a new passenger demographic: solo sporty women. No longer a girl in a knitted costume which was ‘scratchy and horribly revealing, especially when wet,‘ Hilda had graduated to being a be-medalled on-board influencer.  

Cunard’s Hilda James, courtesy of https://www.lostolympics.co.uk/ 

The culture by no means changed totally  overnight. In 1925 the director of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Swimming Club was shocked that at the Aquatic Gala at Westminster Baths only three of the RSMP office’s ‘many good women swimmers …. had the courage to enter. These were not the days when women were shy, and he wondered why these lady athletes were so shy.’ The answer was partly that  Victorian associations of modesty and virtue lingered. But also male voyeurism  meant that in dressing for swimming you risked being embarrassingly assessed and scored, as in this 1925 cartoon.  

Clothing and cultural attitudes were not enabling. Eve Tar Archive. 

I’d assumed the General Slocum sinking in 1904, not Miss Kellerman, had pivotally turned women towards ‘the aquatic arts’. So many on a church picnic outing died when their paddle steamer caught fire on New York’s East River that Tom Riley, a Coney Island swimming instructor, thought it ‘has aroused thousands of people to the necessity of learning how to swim’. Feminists called for swimming lessons and more enabling swim wear. Tom found ‘the average girl has just as much nerve as the boy in the water’. However some grownups had ‘been dunked by a would-be funny idiot until they have come to regard the water with terror’.  

Swiftly stenographer Charlotte Epstein founded the National Women's Life Saving League in 1914, and the Women's Swimming Association in the US in 1917. By 1921 ‘No other nation has developed swimming amongst its women to such an advanced extent as they have done.’ The US had caught up with Australia.   

Actually, women developed water skills decades earlier, and in the UK too. in 1858 novelist Elizabeth Eiloart successfully campaigned for women’s access to Marylebone’s new baths. Agnes Beckwith and Emily Parker became famous teenage ‘lady natationistes’ on display from  the 1870s, backed by male relatives.  

Newspaper accounts of shipwrecks referred to ‘plucky’ women swimmers coping with maritime crises as if it was fairly unremarkable. When stewardess Miss Fry in 1875 was on the Royal Dane from Copenhagen she ‘was precipitated from the ladderhead foremost into the sea … any ordinary young woman would have been drowned long before the steamer could have been stopped  … But Miss Fry is one of the most competent lady swimmers on Tyneside’ boasted the local paper:  ‘immediately she found herself in the water she threw herself onto her back, divested herself of her boots, and floated with ease and safety.’ 

Australian passenger Emily Lacey successfully swam away after ‘worst single-incident disaster in Queensland history’. Her Quetta was shipwrecked on uncharted rocks on 19 April 1890. Emily thought ‘I was going to be drowned I came up again, surrounded by Cingalese and sheep .… When I saw a raft a short distance out , and swam for it, and was dragged on to it by the purser … as he told me he could not swim, I left him and swam for the shore ….  saw another raft … to which I made my way so I left it and took to swimming again.’ Finally Emily was rescued after swimming for sixteen hours without a lifebelt. 

These plain feats, by earlier swimmers wearing just what they stood up in, are echoed by survivors of major disasters, some of whom were alumni of posh schools with pools. Helena Hollis,  a widowed mother of three who was a stewardess on the Empress of Ireland in 1914, told newspapers she escaped in her nightwear, without even her cardigan.  ‘When I was clear of the wreck I swam right out. It was the first I had done … for ten years, and at first I was afraid that 1 could not last long enough in the cold water … I sank for a second time.. .in sheer desperation, just keeping on.’  

Passenger Mrs Kirtley,  a strong swimmer, said ‘I could not get at a boat, and so the only chance was to dive and trust to my swimming capacity and luck .… went no inconsiderable distance under. Striking upwards, I got to the surface … a man who was almost in a state of collapse caught hold of me …. try as I would I could not get him to release his grip. With a supreme effort I managed to throw one of my legs over the side of the boat rail, but the man still clung to me.‘  Women had turned the tide and become rescuers not rescuees. 

In the next decades swimming became even less remarkable for woman. When Hollywood aquamusicals began in 1940s glamour escalated. State schools included swimming lessons in municipal baths. But as late as 2019 Lloyd's Register Foundation’s first World Risk Poll found 68 per cent of women (and 43 per cent of men) couldn’t swim unassisted. Today’s main maritime disasters are on ferries. Women’s disproportionately high fatality rate here is thought to be partly a consequence of Muslim women’s poor access to swimming lessons. An unknown number of illegal immigrants drown in Channel crossings. Sea safety still has further to go. But ships’ crew and air cabin crew are now required  to be able to swim and tread water. 

Research you could do: create women’s  microhotsories by follow up newspaper reports of local women swimming after shipwrecks.  

• New films to catch: Vindication Swim (2024); Young Woman and the Sea, 2004 about Trudy Ederle) 

• Books to enjoy: Jenny Landreth, Swell: A Waterbiography, Bloomsbury Sport, 2018.  

• Podcasts to hear: Amber Butchart’ s https://shows.acast.com/making-a-splash.  

• Lloyd’s articles to read: Tom Scott, https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/whats-on/online-exhibitions/breaking-the-glass-ceiling-for-women-in-maritime-sar#