Swimming the Crawl to Educate the Modern Body : Visual Material and the Expanding Market for Participatory Sports in the USA, 1890s–1930s

Abstract

This essay outlines how sports photography and film from the early twentieth century have been used to introduce US-Americans to a scientific understanding of human bodies and their motions. It asks how certain groups tried to make sure that this modern perspective became not only ubiquitous but also a marketable commodity. The essay focuses on crawl swimming because its motions became increasingly related to discussing modernity and modern bodies. Furthermore, crawl swimming was densely charged along racial and gendered lines: The modernity of the sporting body and its visual appeal rested significantly on ideas of racial hierarchies and a changing as well as problematic perception of women’s roles in public. In that sense, swimming was doing gender as well as doing race.