The full title is Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside: How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850-1935, from University of Manitoba Press. (Barbour previously wrote about the evolution of Winnipeg Beach on Lake Winnipeg.)
Basically Barbour observes that (greatly to oversimplify) nobody went to the beach in 19th century Canada. Around Toronto people mostly swam off the wharves in the harbour or here and there in the Don and Humber rivers, or on Toronto Island, or wherever they damn well pleased, pretty much. People meant men and boys: mostly adolescents and unmarried men. They swam without bathing suits.
Barbour explains the reasons why they could do this in modest, Victorian, church-going, 19th century Toronto. For one thing, there were no women around. Nineteenth century women did not stroll around industrial areas on the harbour or in the wooded glades along the river, let alone swim. It's a vivid, largely unremarked clue to the degree of purdah that most women endured in the western world not very long ago. Men had the big world mostly to themselves when they wanted it.
For another thing, a cult grew up celebrating the "bathing boy," as a glorious symbol of young manhood expressing health, strength, and appreciation of nature. Even as social strictures changed, conservative elite males on city council vigorously supported the cult of the naked bathing boy well into the 20th century, even if it was often boys and young men of the working classes who did the naked bathing. More prosperous Toronto males had bathtubs and could bathe at home, but they defended the principle.
What Barbour recounts is the long, slow, often contested evolution from what he calls the "homosocial" bathing of the 19th century into the "heterosocial" beach-going of the early twentieth. The occasional "dirty man" or homosexual activity? Bathing-boy culture mostly denied its existence. Beach culture would try to police it out of sight.
Briefly, Toronto invented beaches (sometimes literally dredging to produce them on the shores of muddy York), and it hired lifeguards to patrol beaches, and it stipulated precisely what would be worn at beaches, and it began to define appropriate behaviour at beaches. At the same time, it introduced Toronto women to the new freedom to swim outdoors. But to do so, they would accept that beachgoing, even in neck-to-knee beachwear, involved a level of personal public display hitherto mostly unknown.
Beaches, shorelines, and riverside paths quickly became prime sites of unchaperoned courting of a kind largely unknown in the previous bathing-boy era. Like other cities in Canada and internationally, Toronto had successfully "written the beach," "scripted the beach."
Barbour draws extensively on international social and cultural theory, but he uses it wisely and lightly. I laughed rather than groaned to discover his coinage, "vernacular swimming," to describe the 19th century practices that gave way to the more officially scripted and controlled behaviour of later times.
Undressed Toronto touches on issues of government, environmental ideas, the extension of policing, urban and industrial policy-making, and many other issues of Toronto's development. Above all, perhaps, Barbour demonstrates how useful gender history can be at opening up new angles on what might seem familiar or inconsequential topics.
A new kind of beach read, for sure.
