Product Description
In 1926, before skirt lengths inched above the knee and before anyone was ready to accept that a woman could test herself physically, a plucky American teenager named Trudy Ederle captured the imagination of the world when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel. It was, and still is, a feat more incredible and uncommon than scaling Mount Everest. Upon her return to the United States, "Trudy of America" became the most famous woman in the world. And just as quickly, she disappeared from the public eye. Set against the backdrop of the roaring 1920s, Young Woman and the Sea is the dramatic and inspiring story of Ederle's pursuit of a goal no one believed possible, and the price she paid. The moment Trudy set foot on land, triumphant, she had shattered centuries of stereotypes and opened doors for generations of women to come. A truly magnetic and often misunderstood character whose story is largely forgotten, Trudy Ederle comes alive in these pages through Glenn Stout's exhaustive new research.
A Q&A with Glenn Stout, Author of Young Woman and the Sea
Q: What attracted you to the story of Trudy Ederle? How did you first hear about it?
A: I stumbled across her story nearly a decade ago while working with the late David Halberstam on the collection we did together, The Best Sports Writing of the Century. Although a story about Trudy did not make it into that volume, I was nevertheless intrigued by the brief account I read. Despite the fact that I had previously written a great deal about women's sports figures and sports history--writing profiles of pioneers such as Eleanora Sears and Louise Stokes, and ghostwriting biographies Mia Hamm, the tennis-playing Williams sisters, skater Tara Lipinski and others--Trudy's story had somehow eluded me. Over the next five or six years, as I fulfilled other commitments, I periodically researched her story until I was able to determine there was enough for a book; no one had ever written a biography of her before. You know, when she swam the Channel she was only nineteen years old, the first woman to do so. Only five others--all men--had swum the Channel at the time, and Trudy beat the men's record by nearly two hours! That stunned me, particularly after I learned that fewer people have swum the Channel than have climbed Mount Everest. Even today, swimming the Channel is one of the most difficult athletic feats on the planet.
So I started poking around at the story. Even a cursory look at old newspaper accounts convinced me of its importance, because Trudy and her achievement are groundbreaking: in the mid-1920s there were virtually no female athletes. In fact there was still considerable debate over not only whether women had the right to compete as athletes, but whether they were even physically able to do so. When Trudy swam the Channel two hours faster than a man, she blew that argument right out of the water, forever and for all time. I cannot think of a more important female athlete--not even Babe Didrikson or Billie Jean King is comparable. She's a terrific role model for any young woman--or, for that matter, anyone of any age or gender..
Q: In the book you provide a very detailed account of Trudy's swim that, in a sense, allows the reader to accompany her across. How were you able to do that?
A: That was a real challenge. All I could do was try to steep myself in research and then combine that with my own life experiences in an attempt to gain access to hers. I knew when I started the book that I somehow needed to give the reader a feel for what it was like for her to spend fourteen-and-a-half hours in the Channel. Fortunately, at about the time I began working on the book I started spending a great deal of time on the water myself. I’m not much of a swimmer, but I live on Lake Champlain in Vermont and have kayaked hundreds of miles in all sorts of weather conditions, giving me some sense of what it was like for her to be tossed about the Channel for so long. I've also been a runner for thirty years and have some empathy for individual athletic challenges. On the research side, I read accounts of other Channel swimmers, scoured old newspaper stories about Trudy, looked at photographs and film footage of her swim and others, spoke with swimmers, and read every interview with her I could find. Eventually, I collected more than six thousand clippings.
In that way I was, in a sense, able to “inhabit” her experience and--I hope--present it with authenticity. I created not only a timetable for the actual swim, so I knew where she was at each moment, but also a detailed list of every impression or sensation she ever mentioned experiencing while in the water. As I re-created her crossing, I used press bulletins as checkpoints for her journey, and thus re-created not only the facts of her journey, but, as much as possible, the experience itself.
And I think I did. I recently received an unsolicited e-mail from a reviewer, an experienced Channel swimmer. She wrote, “You really were able to capture open-water swimming and what it is all about.” That’s the best review I could ever ask for.
Q: Is this book just for swimmers or athletes?
A: Oh, my gosh, no, although I think anyone who swims or competes in anything will obviously find Trudy's story personally meaningful. But really, I think Young Woman and the Sea is a universal story, one that naturally will be particularly appealing to girls and women, as well as to students of history and readers drawn to stories of inspiration, adventure, and perseverance against the odds. It is also thoroughly modern--swimming the Channel was probably the first “extreme” sport. And the story takes place in the 1920s, which is a particularly rich time period to write about. In many ways Trudy was emblematic of the age, of the transition from the Victorian era to the Roaring Twenties. She was a girl of her time. She wore her hair in a bob and liked to dance, drive fast, and listen to what she called “hot American jazz.” In fact, while she swam the Channel, the boat played recordings of popular songs on a gramophone to help her fight boredom and keep pace. It was her version of an iPod.
As much as any suffragette, Trudy was a true pioneer. When Trudy tried to swim the Channel she was going headlong against the conventions of the day. She had failed in her first attempt to cross, and near the end of her second, successful attempt, much of which took place in a gale that kept most of the Channel's boats in port that day, her trainer tried to convince her to quit. Trudy asked, “What for?” and no one had an answer to that. She was determined to succeed, no matter what; it was that simple. In that sense her story is inspirational for anyone who has ever been told her or she could not do something--the whole world was telling Trudy she could not swim the Channel, yet this nineteen-year-old girl believed in herself and swam the Channel anyway. While she was keenly aware that she would become the first woman to do so, it was also personal to her. She was partially deaf and felt a bit out of place in the world, but in the water she felt completely at home. There, she wasn’t disabled. For her, swimming the Channel was like staking a claim to her own identity, a way to find her true self. She had a spiritual connection to the sea, once saying, “To me, the sea is like a person--like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there.”
Q: What happened to Trudy after she conquered the Channel?
A: That just makes her story even richer. In an instant she became the best known woman in the entire world. Everyone wanted a piece of her and in a sense she became the world's first celebrity. When she returned to New York she was given the city's first big ticket tape parade--only Charles Lindbergh's was bigger. Close to a half million people turned out to see her, and she received offers for endorsements and other commercial opportunities worth nearly a million dollars.
But that wasn't Trudy. She was shy and somewhat private. She soon became overwhelmed by the attention, exactly what we sometimes see today when someone suddenly becomes a public figure. All too often they lose sense of themselves and crash and burn. But not Trudy. Although she went on to a successful vaudeville tour in which she would demonstrate her swim in a glass tank and speak about her experience, and costarred in a movie with Bebe Daniels, she withdrew from the limelight rather quickly and within a few years had faded from public memory. For most of the rest of her life she lived quietly, secure in her accomplishment, yet without regrets. She knew what she had done and how important it was.
Q: Others have since swum the Channel much faster than Trudy. What do you think is her lasting significance?
A: I think anytime and anywhere you see girls and young woman playing sports, or being physically active, or doing anything that society once thought women could not or should not do, we are seeing the impact of Trudy's crossing of the Channel: her courage, her pioneering spirit, and her inspirational example. I dedicated the book to my own daughter and young women everywhere who might one day ask, as Trudy did, “What for?”
Her legacy is all around us.
(Photo © Saorla Stout)
Review
"You need not care one whit about swimming...to be gripped by sportswriter Glenn Stout's fast-paced account of how, in 1926, a partially deaf, 19-year-old New Yorker became the first woman to swim the English Channel"
--The Washington Times
"Stout adeptly traces the history of swimming and Ederle's significance in it...saturated with thrills and melodrama [a] compelling account of a woman who, though long forgotten, changed the way the world viewed swimming."
--Kirkus Reviews
"A great summer read...is "Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World," by Glenn Stout." --The New Yorker.com
"Glenn Stout does a masterly job...Ederle's story mirrors a churning surf with its unpredictable rises and falls in athletic achievement."
--The Christian Science Monitor
"Glenn Stout's account of the development of the sport in America, especially among women, is a revelation...Stout's book is much more than a biography. It's also a social history of America during the transformative 1920s" --Parade.com
About the Author
GLENN STOUT is the author of Young Woman and the Sea, The Selling of the Babe, Fenway 1912, Red Sox Century, Yankees Century, The Dodgers, and The Cubs. He has been the editor of The Best American Sports Writing since its inception and is author of the Good Sports juvenile series - "Yes She Can: Women's Sports Pioneers" includes a profile of Trudy Ederle for the juvenile audience.Young Woman and the Sea is currently set up and under development as a major motion picture by Paramount Pictures.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PrologueThe English Channel, 51°09' N, 1°26' E, approximately 2.5 miles SSE of Kingsdown Beach, Great Britain. 17:30 French Summer Time, August 6, 1926.
She has been in the water for nearly twelve hours, tossed up and down, forward and back, upside down and sideways in the froth and spray of the channel between France and England. The white cliffs of Dover loom over the horizon in the fading light only a few miles ahead, and Cape Gris-Nez, the headland where she entered the water in France, is now nearly twenty miles and half a day behind her. The water temperature hovers just above sixty degrees, cold, no warmer than the surrounding air. It is raining and the white-capped waves are running nearly six feet, tossing her up and down and up again with each surge. A stiff wind blows the spray from atop the waves back into her face.
But Trudy Ederle doesn’t really notice, not anymore. Every moment, every breath, every stroke of her arms and kick of her legs is the same. She is nineteen years old and she is wearing a nearly scandalous two-piece, silk swimming suit. She is covered in sheep grease and petroleum jelly and wears a tight rubber bathing cap over her close-cropped auburn hair. Amber-tinted goggles shield her eyes from the salt water. To her, the sea is not the slate gray it appears from above, or blue, or green. Through the goggles it is a delicious golden ochre.
She has been swimming since dawn, first at twenty-eight strokes per minute, and now, after almost twelve hours, a slightly slower twenty-two or twenty-four, swimming a new stroke known as the American crawl, a stroke no one has ever used to cross the English Channel.
In all of human history, only five men have ever made such a crossing. No woman has ever swum the Channel before, and only a handful have ever tried. For more than a year, however, the world has followed Trudy’s quest, first tracking her failure and now, on this day, hoping for her success. If she makes it across she will be the most recognized and famous woman in the world. Everywhere, from the Ederles’ summer home in Highlands, New Jersey, to the White House in Washington, D.C., and Lloyd’s of London, where oddsmakers give her only a slim chance of succeeding, everyone is listening to the radio and reading newspaper bulletins and rooting for her to succeed. She has captured their imaginations. And if she succeeds, she will win their hearts as well.
Trudy does not think of this, any of it, for such thoughts left her consciousness hours ago, and now there is only this moment, broken into breaths. Every fourth stroke she tilts her head, takes a mouthful of air, then slowly exhales from her nose, watching the bubbles dance before her face as if they belong to some other creature swimming below her, just out sight, and she is somehow riding on its crest.
It is quiet but it is not completely silent. The sea makes its own muffled sound, and she cannot discern the splash that comes from her arms pinwheeling into the water from the slap of the sea itself against her body, or that of the waves colliding and collapsing and rising again. She is half in, half out of the water, testing the surface beneath the stray gull that sounds overhead, pulling herself and being pulled by the tides and the currents at the same time.
There are two boats, motorized tugs, one several yards behind her to the starboard side, and another, farther off to the stern, both straining to keep her in sight as she lifts and falls and slips between the waves. The faint hum of the engines spreads like velvet in the water, as natural and soundless as the beating of her own heart.
One boat holds her father, her sister Meg, her ghostwriter, Julia, and her trainer and coach, Bill Burgess, one of those five men who have swum the Channel before. The second boat holds the press, reporters wrapped in rain gear scratching notes on pads of paper and typing out dispatches in the pilothouse to be sent ashore by wireless. They are waiting for the final moment: the instant she makes it across, is pulled from the water short of her goal, or, as some fear, slips from consciousness and disappears forever beneath the waves. Whatever happens success, failure, or tragedy will be a headline the next morning. Trudy Ederle will be either a heroine or a figure of pity known to nearly every man, woman, and child who can read a newspaper.
She does not think of this. Her thoughts have slowed, and she is all sense touch and taste, sight and sound.
She feels these things from afar, notes the sensations, and continues as if she is a kind of artist taking stock of the features of a model, working on a still life, oblivious to time. She does not, really, feel them herself, for her consciousness has closed her off from her own body. She is only a spectator peering out from far inside, focused only on this next stroke, this next breath.
She is exhausted but not tired. She is cold but does not feel cold. How strange is that? Her lips are chapped and cracking, her thighs and armpits chaffed and stinging, her ears inflamed, her tongue swollen by salt water. Her limbs are numb, and her feet and legs kick on of their own accord. But her center is warm, even glowing, the embers protected deep within.
And there is no place in the world she would rather be. She has hours still to go, and she is deliriously, hopelessly happy. On the rare clear day when fog and clouds do not obscure the view, at the English Channel’s narrowest point, when one gazes toward England from Cape Gris-Nez in France, the English coastline looks tantalizingly close. The gleaming cliffs of Dover stretch along the horizon in a horizontal stream like a landscape in an oil painting, a smear of titanium white touched with cadmium yellow, daubed above an azure sea. From the heights at Cape Gris-Nez, where wildflowers dance in the offshore breezes, the waters in mid-Channel, filled with boats of all shapes and sizes, can look deceptively calm, even placid. Swimming from one coast to the other seems more a matter of willpower and stamina than anything else, a difficult task, to be sure, and one that requires significant discipline and great athletic ability, but not an impossible one.
Yet those clear days that make the Channel swim seem so feasible are not just uncommon, but, in fact, a cruel illusion. There are reasons far, far fewer human beings have swum the English Channel than have climbed Mount Everest. More than three thousand people have stood on top of the world since Tensing Norgay and Sir Ed- mund Hillary first accomplished the feat in 1953, yet only nine hundred or so swimmers one out of every ten who make the attempt have succeeded in swimming English Channel. The fine weather that makes the journey appear so attainable rarely lasts for long. Conditions in the English Channel can and do change in minutes. A day that begins with gentle breezes and bright sunshine can end in a full-blown gale that even today regularly drives huge ships up onto the shore and sends even the most experienced sailors to their deaths. The waters of the Channel, even in midsummer, in bright sunshine, are bone-chillingly cold, rarely warming much above sixty degrees. Bad weather, not good, is the norm. On most days both the French and the English coasts are obscured behind banks of fog and thick clouds. Each shore is invisible not only from the other, but also to most ships that ply the passage in between. The proximity of either shore provides little comfort.
The waters of the Channel are rarely quiet. The surf claws at each coast with ferocity, relentlessly wearing it down and occasionally and inexorably causing portions of the cliffs and headlands along the shore to collapse and slip into the sea. In this way the Channel grows ever wider each day as the tides and currents funneled through the narrow passage between the northern Atlantic and the North Sea cause the waters of the Channel to lift and heave as if trying to rip the fabric of what the French refer to as La Manche, the sleeve.”
To fully understand the achievement of Trudy Ederle, one must also understand the Channel itself, which is unlike any other body of water on the planet. The waters of the North Sea and those of the Atlantic, brought together in a vicious collision that first created the Channel, have yet to rest. They grasp and pull at everyone and everything that breach their waters. One does not cross the Channel as much as one learns its intricacies and then tries to sneak across before they turn violent and deadly.
Today, those swimmers who choose to test the waters of the Channel do so for the same reasons that Sir Edmund Hillary chose to climb Mount Everest because it is there,” a well-defined challenge and a way to test oneself. If the weather cooperates and the swimmer is in adequate physical condition, psychologically prepared to swim for upward of half a day, and can avoid hypothermia, the path across the Channel is well known. Over time the captains of escort boats and swimmers have managed to decode the complicated tides and currents, and modern sports medicine is adept at preparing swimmers for the challenge through diet and exercise and assisting them along the way with proper nutrition and fluids.
None of this was the case in 1926. A true pioneer, Trudy Ederle enjoyed none of these advantages. She did not choose to swim the Channel as some kind of complicated existential test, but for reasons that were both larger than herself and intensely personal. She wanted to swim the Channel, but at least at the beginning she did not need to do so.
She knew, of course, that no woman had ever swum the Channel before. From 1922 through 1925 she had been the greatest female swimmer the world had ever seen, winning Olympic medals and setting more than a dozen world records, leaving the English Channel as her only remaining challenge. While she wanted to prove to those who believed a woman could not swim the Channel that, in fact, a woman could, and that she was that woman, Trudy Ederle was no feminist swimming for a cause. Although she was fully aware of the significance of doing what no woman had ever done before, she first decided to try to swim the Channel in 1925 simply because she had nothing left to accomplish in her sport and because others her coaches and her family believed she could.
She failed in that attempt, pulled from the water only halfway across, and afterward members of the crowd nodded knowingly, certain that if Trudy Ederle could not swim the English Channel, then in all likelihood no woman could. And even if a woman ever did swim the Channel, she would not do so using the American crawl. And, most assuredly, her name would not be Trudy Ederle.
The only way for Trudy to prove everyone wrong was to try again and succeed. Swimming the English Channel became a challenge to her imagination. Crossing that divide would prove to be the ultimate test of man’s and a woman’s endurance
