At the time, most women swam in wool dresses over bloomers and stockings,30 along with knitted caps, often with tassels on top, and “bathing coats” to wear over the whole getup. This was a norm mandated from above, but which had mass buy-in. One British official was quoted as saying, around this time, “mixed bathing stops more marriages than any other cause [and] much of the unrest in the country is due to the barbarous license in women’s dress.”31 (Today, there are still rigid norms around women’s bathing outfits. More recently, in Italy, where ten-year-olds roam beaches topless, women in burqinis32 have been banned from swimming pools because, according to critics, they look improper.)

All Annette Kellerman wanted to do was swim freely. Instead, she was arrested. The judge took pity on her and told her she could wear her suit—but only if she wore a cape covering it to the water’s edge.33

Annette later launched her own one-piece swimwear line and wrote about the importance of letting women swim unencumbered. “Not only in matters of swimming but in all forms of activity woman’s [sic] natural development is seriously restricted and impaired by social customs and costumes and all sorts of prudish and Puritanical ideas,” she wrote in How to Swim in 1918.34

But when the bikini was unveiled decades later, she didn’t sound quite so progressive. “The bikini shows too much,” she said, according to the Boston Sunday Globe.35 “Only two women in a million can wear it. And it’s a very big mistake to try.”

Annette Kellerman was willing to create an avant-garde new rule, one saying people should be, in some contexts, free to escape the confines of culture. But social norms are as strong as they are arbitrary. The female navel was too much, even for a radical like her.

Daniel, Part I

In 2007, Daniel, a young man living in Ottawa, had recently dropped out of college after a long illness. He was bumming around, unsure what to do with himself. His family was urging him to pick a career. Any career.

He considered teaching high school history, but he found Canada’s bureaucratic teacher-certification program daunting. He figured getting an early-childhood education certificate would be easier than becoming a licensed teacher, so he took early-childhood development classes at night through a local college. He had always loved working with little kids, and he was awed by how important the first five years of life are, in terms of human development. At worst, he thought, it would be a fast track into teaching elementary school.

His family was relieved Daniel had finally settled on a path toward adulthood, but privately, they hoped preschool was just a starting point to a proper teaching job. Daniel’s father was especially unimpressed, calling early-childhood education Daniel’s “Mickey Mouse” degree.