Ladies, take care of your luxurious tresses before entering the water, and also watch out for wardrobe malfunctions
Writing a book that has an element of social history, I spent quite a lot of time scratching round in the dust of old documents. Some of these documents were dry in every sense, or written in such obfuscating language my eyes would almost rebel against reading them. But every now and again I’d turn up a little bit of treasure. This treasure might not look how you’d expect; for me, it was not always found in the showiest, most glittering writing, or the earthshattering philosophical truth. Sometimes, what I found to be treasure were a few words that gave me a fantastic image, or a glimpse beyond what I was expecting.
It was always a bonus if it made me laugh. Like this one sentence I found in an educational publication produced in 1865. The snappily-titled Ladies National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge were essentially a bunch of educated upper-class women trying to improve the lot of poorer, workingclass women via a series of invigorating pamphlets. It might sound, well, dreadful – patronising and privileged – and in lots of senses they weren’t very progressive; they perpetuated the idea that women should stay in their lane as home-makers and child-bearers. But their intentions were pretty solid, and alongside stuff around the health of mothers and the benefits of fresh air, they produced 14 pages on Why Do Women Not Swim.
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May 2017
 
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