When F Scott Fitzgerald fell in love with Zelda Sayre in the late 1910s, he was as impressed by her courage on the high diving board as by her flesh-coloured silk swimming costume. Her fearlessness and strength were part of her allure. During the late 19th and 20th centuries, as Vicki Valosik shows in Swimming Pretty, water was a hugely important arena for women seeking to assert their autonomy and independence.

Ostensibly a history of synchronised swimming – renamed artistic swimming in 2017 – Valosik’s fascinating book opens in London in the 1850s, when the enterprising superintendent of a new ‘natatorium’, hoping to attract more visitors to his swimming pool, began inviting families to ‘aquatic entertainments’ at which his children performed in races and galas. In 1875 his fourteen-year-old daughter, Agnes Beckwith, swam five miles from London Bridge to Greenwich, blowing kisses to cheering onlookers on the riverbanks. A hundred years later, Sports Illustrated magazine hailed this feat as the start of women’s participation in spectator sports.

Opinion was divided on exactly what Agnes’s achievement represented. Although the Sporting Gazette was disgusted by the ‘decidedly revolting … sight of a woman making a public exhibition of herself as an athlete before a roaring mob’, many women were inspired by her example to begin swimming themselves. The genie was out of the bottle. Over the course of her long career as a professional ornamental swimmer, Agnes performed in tanks at music halls and in pleasure gardens as well as in open water. She showed 19th-century women a world in which they could be powerful as well as beautiful. 

Annette Kellerman took Agnes’s achievements to new levels. A superbly confident Australian, she learned to swim as an invalid child, being struck by ‘mermaid fever’. In 1905, eager to establish a career as a professional swimmer, Kellerman became the first women to attempt a Channel crossing. She made it further than her male competitors and won £30, but the effort was perhaps most notable for the costume she chose: not the usual feminine swimwear, a flannel dress and bloomers that might weigh thirty pounds when wet, but a sleek knitted version of a man’s racing suit. For all her many swimming and entertainment successes – she became the most famous woman in 1910s and 1920s America, the inspiration for the young Zelda Fitzgerald’s derring-do, starring in movies, writing books of swimming instruction, performing breathtaking high dives – it is perhaps the swimsuit for which she is best remembered. She defied what she called ‘idiotic male prudes’, encouraging women to throw away their corsets and demonstrating that strong muscles hold up a body better than corsets and can nonetheless appear feminine.

Women first participated in the Olympics in 1900, competing in sailing, golf, tennis, equestrianism and croquet. Swimming and diving became women’s Olympic sports in 1912, but it was not until the 1920 Olympics, held in Belgium, that female athletes really competed on the world stage. This was the first such event to which the US Olympic Committee sent women: fourteen female swimmers and divers joined the 274 men in the US team. After sweeping the board in their events, they became heroines for a generation. Underlining the change in women’s status, the Nineteenth Amendment, granting female suffrage in the United States, was ratified just four days after American women had marched in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Graceful and healthy, swimmers were seen as the epitome of modern, emancipated womanhood. 

Alongside swimming and diving, the rhythmical or synchronised swimming developed by Kellerman and others in the music halls of the early 20th century gradually became a sport in its own right.  It was particularly popular in North American colleges: the first competitions were held in Montreal in 1924 and Chicago in 1939, where the pioneering instructor Katherine Curtis had established one of the earliest water ballet clubs.

In 1940, when the Olympics were cancelled because of the war, Esther Williams, eighteen at the time, was devastated. Already a champion swimmer, she was one of the few women who had perfected the butterfly stroke. Unable to compete, she was persuaded to join the impresario Billy Rose’s sell-out Aquacades.  A year later – the same year synchronised swimming was officially accredited as a sport – she signed with MGM. In 1952, she starred in the biopic of Annette Kellerman, Million Dollar Mermaid. Until reading Swimming Pretty, all I knew about Williams was that she had been the favourite movie star of Judy Blume’s heroine Sally J Friedmann. Now I know why.

Long after women had been permitted to compete, they continued to battle entrenched sexism. As recently as 1984, only 23 per cent of the athletes competing in the Olympics were women. Valosik also explores the riveting political machinations that take place behind the decision of whether to enter a team in a competition. An American judge at the 1978 FINA World Aquatics Championships in Berlin asked her Soviet counterpart when the USSR would field a synchronised swimming team. ‘When we can beat you,’ came the answer.

Valosik is a competitive artistic swimmer as well as a writer. She compellingly conveys how difficult it is to stay underwater for minutes at a time, to kick in concert with seven other potent pairs of legs, to propel one’s body high out of the water – in full makeup and with a dazzling smile. When journalists in the 1980s and 1990s suggested that synchronised swimming was not a real sport, they were invited to join the athletes in the pool. Dave Barry of the Miami Herald surfaced after forty-five gruelling minutes underwater gasping, ‘This is the hardest sport in the world.’ In 1996 it was named one of the five most difficult sports at the Olympics.

It is often the mark of a good book that it sends you online. When I finished Swimming Pretty, I found myself spellbound by clips of Esther Williams and Olympic routines – and of the legendary 1984 Saturday Night Live sketch ‘Synchronized Swimming’.