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Abstract
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by Lisa Bier. McFarland, 2011. 220 pp. 26 photos, notes, bibliography, index. http://www.mcfarlandpub.com
Fighting the Current is an apt title for Bier's cultural history of American women's swimming. A history of men's swimming in America would read something like "when the temperature rose, men took off their clothes and frolicked in the ocean; when men felt competitive, they organized clubs and raced," but American women have faced obstacles at every step of the development of aquatic sports. Bier does not claim that there were not class or race-based difficulties for swimmers of all genders, but those were mainly problems related to exclusivity. The urban elite did not claim that poor men should not swim; they just didn't want to swim with the working class. Women, on the other hand, faced outright challenges to their desire to swim. Fighting the Current details the myriad forms of cultural oppression that were used to keep women out of the water entirely
Language: en |