Sunday, July 7, 2019

Victorians on the Beach

From Mimi Matthews:
In Victorian England, it was generally believed that the sexes should be kept apart when bathing. To that end, the gentlemen’s wheeled bathing machines at the beach were often kept as much as a quarter of a mile away from the ladies’ machines. This allowed both ladies and gentlemen to enter their respective machines, change into their swimming costumes, and descend into the waves for a swim all without exposing themselves to the lascivious gazes of the opposite sex. There was only one problem—many Victorian ladies and gentlemen actually wanted to swim in company with each other. When they did so, the scandalous practice was known as promiscuous bathing. 
Though promiscuous bathing was quite popular on the continent, especially in France, in Victorian England the sight of men and women bathing together was still considered to be rather indecent. In the seaside town of Margate, this indecency was exacerbated by the fact that some gentlemen did not feel the need to put on their bathing drawers and, instead, emerged from their bathing machines in what the 2 September 1854 edition of the Leeds Times describes as an “entirely primitive state.” Once in the water, these naked gentlemen had no compunction about approaching the female bathers nearby. (Read more.)
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