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The University of North Carolina Press
288 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 29 illus., notes, bibl., index
A Social History of Swimming Pools in America
2007 William F. "Buck" Dawson Author's Award, International Swimming Hall of Fame
A 2007 Best of the Best from University Presses selection by a panel of public and academic librarians for the Association of American University Presses
From nineteenth-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.
Americans have intensely contested the use of municipal pools because they are such intimate public spaces. Swimmers undress side by side, share the same water, and exhibit themselves on pool decks and sand beaches. Wiltse’s analysis of a variety of pool disputes illuminates underlying tensions in American society over women's bodies, the social geography of urban spaces, the spread of diseases, cultural authority, and interracial mingling. Contested Waters offers a panorama of American life. It is, at once, a story of class and race conflicts, burgeoning cities and suburbs, competing visions of social reform, eroticized public culture, democratized leisure, and Americans' recent retreat from public life.
"An expertly researched and well-written new book. . . [that] gives a detailed overview of how race played a major role in defining one of America's favorite leisure pastimes."
--Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
"Incisive."
--New Yorker
"[A] skillful excavation of lives of Davenport's middle-class working women/reformers, prostitutes, and public men. . . . Wood's analysis of the relationship of middle-class working women and the city's lower class women involved in sex commerce reveals new insights into the lives of each."
--Western Historical Quarterly
"Intelligent, compelling social history."
--Atlantic Monthly
"It quickly becomes clear that Wilte's Contested Waters isn't a dreary historical catalog of shapes and styles of swimming pools vast and small. It's the colorful story of America's municipal swimming pools in the 19th and 20th centuries. Against that backdrop it becomes a story of America. It's all here: a sense of this country's benevolence, its community relations, civic wars, social strata, sexuality and sexism as well as our capacity for having a good time. Chronicled along with these are our ill-feeling prejudice, ignorance and racial strife. . . . [Contested Waters offers] a good course in America. All its traits, fine and lamentable are found here--the most vivid being, alas, our stinking racism."
--Dick Cavett, New York Times Book Review
"This is well done, clearly written, thoroughly researched history, and it effectively makes important points about the tensions that confounded America during the Civil Rights movement. . . . Wiltse uses the municipal swimming pool as a fascinating window onto social changes and urban tensions across the 20th century."
--Publishers Weekly
Cloth: $29.95
© 2007 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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