Women Have the Daring to Be Real Life Savers

Drowning rates were abysmally high in early 20th-century America, with as many as ten thousand adults and children meeting watery graves each year. Beaches and swimming holes were unguarded, and those who wished to bathe, wade, or swim did so at their own peril. Monday morning newspapers, especially in the summer months, would recount the weekend’s tragic loss of life to the water, sometimes with multiple drowning articles in a single issue.

The 1904 General Slocum tragedy, in which more than a thousand New Yorkers — the majority women and girls — drowned not far from shore after their steamship caught on fire, proved to be a national wake-up call. Within days, mothers, educators, and concerned citizens were being quoted in newspapers decrying the lack of water safety skills, calling for greater swimming education, and exhorting women to learn and fathers to teach their daughters. The New-York Daily Tribune declared, “One of the lessons which the General Slocum horror should bring home to every woman and girl in New York City is the desirability of knowing how to swim.” And many were indeed resolved to learn. A week and a half after the accident, the custodian of New York’s East Side floating bath reported that the number of girls coming to the baths to learn to swim had already doubled and that volunteers had stepped up to teach them. A Brooklyn newspaper headline announced, “Women and Children Eager to Be Swimmers — Swarm to public baths with Slocum Disaster Uppermost in their minds.” Private baths saw similar trends, and swimming instructors across the metropolis were said to be doing a “rattling business.”

The impact of the General Slocum tragedy reverberated across the country, with reporters paying increased attention to local drownings and encouraging readers to learn to swim. One of these was a young marine journalist from Rhode Island, Wilbert E. Longfellow, who had grown despondent over the numerous drownings he had to report on, especially since many of them seemed tragically preventable with either a bit more water safety knowledge on the part of the bather or better supervision at beaches. Following the Slocum disaster, Longfellow, who was in his early twenties, decided to “do something about waterfront drownings instead of writing about them” and joined the Rhode Island branch of the U.S. Volunteer Life Saving Corps (VLSC).

Founded in 1890 in New York, with a few branches across New England, the VLSC was the first lifesaving organization dedicated to protecting the American public — as opposed to sailors and seamen, the domain of earlier organizations — from drowning, which it did by organizing volunteer patrols of popular swimming areas and offering swimming lessons at the public baths. Its good work came to national attention when it was discovered that at least four of the child survivors of the Slocum had been taught to swim by VLSC lifesavers.

Joining the VLSC would turn out to be Longfellow’s first step toward becoming one of swimming’s most influential leaders and colorful figures. However, Longfellow wasn’t a strong swimmer in the beginning and had, in fact, already been rescued twice from near drownings, the second time by a stout woman who hauled him from the water so matter-of-factly it was as if she was plucking wet laundry out of a washer tub. After that experience, reported a newspaper, the young journalist “drew a deep breath and resolved to learn to swim.” As a volunteer with the VLSC, Longfellow met immigrants from England and Scotland who had been affiliated back home with the Royal Life Saving Society. They brought with them more advanced lifesaving techniques and a new method of artificial respiration devised by a Scottish anatomist named Edward Sharpey-Schafer. The technique involved pressing on a prone person’s lower back and was far more effective — and more civilized — than the techniques commonly in use in the United States like socking victims in the face if they resisted help, then rolling them over a barrel to force chest compressions. “Lots of perfectly good barrels have been ruined by rolling drowned people on them,” wrote Longfellow in his typical dry wit. “And it didn’t do the poor victims any good either.” He worked with his Royal Life Saving Society colleagues to simplify their technique, which eventually became known as the prone-pressure method, and began teaching it to other lifesavers, as well as policemen, who were often the first responders to drowning accidents.

Longfellow quickly became a respected leader within the Rhode Island branch of the VLSC and, in 1905, was appointed state superintendent and awarded the title of commodore. He successfully lobbied the Rhode Island State House for funds to purchase lifesaving equipment and to stage lifesaving demonstrations, accomplishing so much with the initial stipend of $200, the legislators gave him $1,200 and $2,000 the following two years, during which he developed crews across Rhode Island and reduced the state’s drowning rate by half.

But in 1907, Commodore Longfellow’s work nearly came to a grinding halt when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine. Doctors sealed him up in a plaster cast from armpits to hips and ordered complete bed rest. Despite dire predictions that he had only months to live, Longfellow — a man on a mission — didn’t give up. He managed to continue his work with the VLSC through bedside conferences, letters, and phone calls, then decided to disregard the bed rest orders altogether, self-prescribing a regiment of fresh air, sunshine, and light swimming exercises (after upgrading to a cast with hinges so he could move his arms and legs). Within two years, he had made a full recovery and in 1910 was recruited to the VLSC headquarters in New York and installed as the organization’s general superintendent.

From the beginning, Longfellow made a point to include female VLSC lifesavers at exhibitions and carnivals, believing that women and girls in the audience would be inspired to see members of their own sex who were healthy, well-poised, and “perfectly able to take care of themselves in the briny deep.” But it was difficult for women to demonstrate their true capabilities in the water when burdened by the shackles of their bathing costumes—a fact that was not lost on VLSC leaders. Longfellow once weighed a wet bloomer suit someone left outside a bathing machine and was shocked to discover it weighed 30 pounds.

The VLSC had, in the past, taken a humorous approach to the issue and held races in which some male competitors were handicapped by having to wear women’s bathing dresses. But in 1909, Longfellow had a radical idea: Instead of handicapping the men, why not show the public what the fair sex was capable of if given the same freedom in the water as their male counterparts. The VLSC was planning a nine-mile race from Yorkville to Clason Point that passed through Hell Gate, the dangerous sluiceway where so many aboard the General Slocum had lost their lives five years earlier. He asked VLSC lifeguard Adeline Trapp if she could swim the course wearing a man’s suit. Trapp was game, recalling later that all those years of dragging around that extra yardage in the water had stirred up a “terrific rebellion” inside her. Longfellow had to procure a suit from England since American men’s suits consisted of separate trunks and tops (which could slip up in the water and show one’s chest). Freed of the strictures of the bloomer costume, Trapp was successful, becoming the first woman to swim through Hell Gate. The newspapers marveled that a “frail” girl not even 5 feet tall had “outdistanced and outswam fifteen sturdy men contestants.” However, not everyone was pleased. Trapp had just secured a position as a New York schoolteacher, and the Department of Education sent her a letter warning her to never wear a bathing suit that showed any part of her body in public again.

Longfellow regularly received requests for help from organizations all over the country looking to improve local water safety conditions and felt a growing urgency to expand the work of the VLSC to other regions. But when he appealed to the VLSC’s governing board in the spring of 1913 to support a nationwide program to “waterproof America,” they declined, citing budget restrictions and the work still to be done about the four-hundred-plus drownings in New York each year. So Longfellow—never one to be deterred from his mission — resigned and set out on a one-man national tour to spread the gospel of lifesaving. He spent most of the year traveling by train and boat, giving lectures and demonstrations anywhere that would have him: summer camps, recreation conferences, the sporting goods sections of department stores, colleges, and clubhouses of both the YMCA and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). He made the inclusion of women, as well as Black children, a priority in his work. 

During Longfellow’s year of freelance crusading, leaders from the YMCA and the newly formed Boy Scouts of America approached him about launching a national lifesaving and water safety program. Both groups — plus their sister organizations, the Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, and YWCA — offered activities that put youth in contact with water and would benefit from such programming, but neither had the capacity or expertise to spearhead it. Longfellow, who had not only become the nation’s foremost authority on water safety but also wrote the chapter on the subject for the first Boy Scouts Handbook, was clearly the person for the job. And the American Red Cross, with its charter to prevent the recurrence of disasters and to care for the victims of disaster, seemed like the most logical organization to take on the project. In 1914 the American Red Cross Life Saving Corps was launched with a starting budget of $5,000 and Longfellow as its national field representative.

A great coiner of phrases, Longfellow gave the American Red Cross program the motto “every American a swimmer, and every swimmer a lifesaver.” This slogan signaled an important shift toward thinking about water safety in terms of prevention rather than rescue — not only training lifeguards but also providing the public with the skills to take initiative for their own safety. The Red Cross Water Safety Service established two levels of swimming: “beginner” and “swimmer.” Those rising to swimmer had mastered the correct form of fundamental strokes, could safeguard themselves in the water, and were eligible to pursue further training and Red Cross lifeguard certification if they so desired.Longfellow chartered the first Red Cross Life Saving Corps at the Baltimore YMCA, he himself taking the very first lifesaving test and becoming Red Cross Lifesaver #1. Within three years had chartered 61 corps across the country. 

At first, the Red Cross would not agree to make the lifeguard certification program open to women, its leaders citing doubt that they could perform the duties — and also fearing that male swimmers wouldn’t take the program seriously if women were admitted. But having visited hundreds of summer camps, Longfellow had seen how “unprotected and deficient in swimming” those for girls were and knew there was a growing need for female lifesavers. He also fervently believed that lifesavers did not have to be big, burly men, and that proper technique relied on skill and experience far more than brute strength. Longfellow, who weighed around 250 pounds, often demonstrated this point by pulling small children from the audience and having them tow him across the pool by his hair.

Wanting to prove that women were capable, Longfellow established the World’s Life-Saving Alliance for Women, an independent, but parallel, organization that mirrored the lifeguard training and certification process of the Red Cross. He hoped that through the Alliance he could build up a cadre of qualified female lifeguards who would eventually be accepted into the Red Cross Life Saving Corps. The first World’s Life Saving Alliance lifesaving certificate was awarded to a woman in Maryland in 1914, the same year the Red Cross Life Saving Corps began issuing certificates to men.

By the time the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, the Red Cross lifesaving program had footholds in every pocket of the country. Longfellow moved his work to naval stations and army camps, teaching “scores of thousands of fighting men” to swim, while women swimmers prepared to fill in for male lifeguards called away to the front. A paper noted that hundreds of Los Angeles society women were training for the World’s Life Saving Alliance test, as they were “determined to do their bit in this war.” Seeing women in the lifeguard chair was so novel that some beach patrons simply couldn’t behave themselves, as demonstrated at the Jersey Shore when Ruth MacNeely, who had previously been awarded a medal for saving the lives of two classmates, became the first female guard there. “She had not been on duty long before there came cries for help from the ocean,” reported a newspaper. Miss MacNeely immediately swam out to help the man and tow him to shore, finding “he was not badly off and revived at once.” The scene repeated itself several more times that day until it became apparent to the manager that the men just wanted to be rescued by the young woman. 

By the time the war was over, women had more than proven their capabilities as guards, and in May 1920, the Red Cross announced that it would begin accepting women into its lifesaving corps, officially making them part of the organization’s national efforts to reduce drowning. In an article about the decision, the Red Cross Bulletin pointed out that the world had moved beyond “the romantic stage where dependence in time of accident rests on the help of some male hero.” Longfellow celebrated the decision by writing a three-page article for the Ladies’ Home Journal detailing some of the heroics of women who had saved lives at pools, rivers, and beaches across the country, often putting themselves in great danger in the process. “It is plain to see,” wrote Longfellow, “that women have the daring as well as the ability to brave the perils of the deep and to be real life-savers.”

Reprinted from Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water by Vicki Valosik. Copyright © 2024 by Vicki Valosik. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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