| Title | : | Young Woman And The Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 352 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2009 |
By age twenty, at the height of the Jazz Age, Trudy Ederle was the most accomplished swimmer in the world. She’d won Olympic gold and set a host of world records. But the greatest challenge the English Channel. Only a few swimmers, none of them women, had ever made the treacherous twenty-one mile crossing. Trudy’s failed first attempt seemed to confirm what many naysayers No woman could possibly accomplish such a thing.
In 1926, Ederle proved them wrong. As her German immigrant parents cheered her, and her sister and fellow swimmer Meg helped fashion both her scandalous two-piece swimsuit and leak-proof goggles, Trudy was determined to succeed. “England or drown is my motto,” she said, plunging into the frigid Channel for her second attempt at the crossing. Fourteen hours later, two hours faster than any man, and after weathering a gale and waves that approached six-feet, she stepped onto Kingsdowne Beach as the most famous woman in the world.
Based on years of archival research that unearthed Ederle’s memory from obscurity, Young Woman and the Sea brings to life the real Trudy Ederle, the challenges that came with her fame, and the historic mark her achievement made for all women athletes who followed.
Young Woman And The Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World Reviews
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This book was amazing. Interesting history, woman's lib, robbed childhoods, this book has it all. Did you know that Trudy Ederle invented the bikini 20 years before French engineer Louis Réard did it in 1946? She actually swam the Channel in one because she found that it had less drag than any other suits she tried.
Also, did you know that Native Americans invented the crawl, or freestyle stroke? For years the breaststroke or sidestroke was thought to be superior to any other swim stroke until the Americans showed up at the Olympics and blew everyone out of the water. But this book talks about how it was discovered by an artist and displayed to the world at the world's fair (If I'm remembering correctly)
And while all that is awesome and interesting, this book is about Trudy. A New York native of German descent who fell in love with the water on the Jersey shore. About the struggle of women to be treated as equals. About this history of swimming. About the fear of water. About the geological makeup of the Channel itself. About the rights of athletes. This book honestly is so amazing and will suck you in within the first few pages. I'm not kidding. If that story about the fire in the ship off Long Island doesn't get you, I don't know what will.
I really want some of to read this so we can talk about it! You will not believe what happens at the Olympics in 1924. And you will NOT believe what happened the first time she tried to swim the channel. But ultimately this is a story about one woman's triumph and how she succeeded when everyone tried to tell her to get out of the water. LITERALLY. Oh, not only did she succeed, she SMASHED the record. A woman. An American Woman. Oh, and did I mention she was 19? Yeah, she was a teenager.
This is the Seabiscuit of 2009. I'll go on record as stating that right now. Makes me happy to be a swimmer. And by the way, it's ok to be chubby if you are a channel swimmer. Maybe I should look into it? -
Trudy Ederle's place in history is often overlooked.
I come from a family of open-water swimmers. I have friends who have done solo crossings, and I myself participated in a successful relay swim across the Channel in 2007. And yet, I only vaguely knew about Trudy Ederle. My dad has long asserted that Lynne Cox (who, in 1972, finally displaced Trudy as the youngest female swimmer to make the crossing) was the one who revolutionized open-water swimming by using the Australian Crawl rather than the Trudgeon. My mom regularly confuses Ederle with Florence Chadwick, who set a speed record in 1953. In many ways, the post-Crossing section of this book reads like a tragedy -- explaining how the recipient of America's first ticker-tape parade quickly lost any chance to capitalize on her hard work, and died mostly-forgotten.
But most of this book is a celebration. A celebration of an era where women started to come into their own, a sport came into its own, and the promise of possibility was so thick in the air that you could taste it. The author has adopted in Ederle not just a hero, but a symbol -- a girl who swam the Channel freestyle, and revolutionized a sport (prevailing wisdom at the time was that "Australian Crawl" was too taxing of a stroke for more than a few hundred yards; these days, the only reason someone would complete an open-water swim by some other method is for the publicity possibilities). Her pluck, strength, and talent shine in those passages, and the excitement that drives the writing is quite intoxicating.
This is an extremely well-researched work; appreciation of historical context aside, I loved the interesting tidbits that Stout peppered throughout -- for example, Johnny Weissmuller was one of the few swimmers during the early 20s who was perhaps more unbeatable than Ederle (the two never went head to head because of prevailing social mores at the time, but they often headlined at the same swim meets)...a few chapters later, while detailing their trip to the 1924 Paris Olympics, you discover that the reason that name sounds so familiar is that Weissmuller later starred as Tarzan in the classic films. Who'd have known? The reader encounters historical context, social commentary, and interesting trivia page after page after page. Even when the tale veers away from Ederle herself (as it often does, in the earlier, context-setting, chapters) the information being shared is so intriguing that you want to keep reading.
As a participant in the sport that Ederle revolutionized, I really appreciated this book. But I also enjoyed it as a feminist, a history buff, and a person who just likes a tightly-plotted, fast-paced read. It was all of these things, and worth a look. -
Trudy Ederle changed the world’s perspective on women in athletics, yet she lived in obscurity for most of her life. In Young Woman And the Sea, she is finally celebrated. This recounting of Ederle’s life is one of the best sports biographies I have read, weaving the histories of humanity’s quest to learn to swim, the perils of crossing the English Channel and Trudy’s innocent and pure love of the sport. Would highly recommend to all, but most especially those who feel the pull to master their own thrills and terrors in open waters.
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i so so so enjoyed this!! such a powerful and inspiring swim story (my fave kind) and it was told in such an interesting way! also great audiobook narrator- anyway would 100% recommend both this and the movie but reading this gave me good context and more to the story that the movie didn’t focus on- 4.5⭐️
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Book read in conjunction with Book Discussion Group and Skype with the author
I had never heard of Trudy Ederle before reading this biography; after finishing it, I feel like I really know who she was. This biography was so well-written and well researched that Trudy came to life for me. Trudy Ederle was truly a pioneer in women's sports.
I appreciated the history given in women swimming at all. I had never heard of the steamship, "General Slocum" which burned in the East River. Most of the victims were women who simply did not know how to swim. That disaster took the largest amount of lives in New York until September 11. Because of that disaster, women would finally begin to learn to swim.
Trudy, however, loved the water. She spent hours in the ocean with her sisters learning to swim. She joined the Women's Swimming Association in New York and trained for the Olympics. When that didn't go as she had hoped, she set her sights on the English Channel.
Mr. Stout certainly brought Trudy Ederly into the daylight. I can see her swimming and smiling in my mind's eye. When told she should stop swimming, her answer was, "What for?" Many women who came after her asked their detractors the same question--Why should I stop? -
Glenn Stout's 2009 work Young Woman and the Sea, Stout writes a biography of American female swimmer Gertrude "Trudy" Ederle (1905-2003), who was the first female swimmer, sixth person overall, and, for her era, the fastest person to swim across the English channel in a time of 14 hours and 39 minutes on August 6, 1926. Despite her accomplishment, Ederle didn't manage to cross over into a lasting mainstream celebrity status, instead enjoying the proverbial "15 minutes of fame" before re-entering obscurity for the rest of her 98-year life. Stout wanted to raise awareness of Ederle's accomplishments and makes bold, hard-to-prove claims in the book about how Ederle changed public perceptions of female athletes, as well as various speculations about why Ederle's fame didn't last. I listened to the audiobook version of this work which, per usual, didn't include footnotes; the stories of Ederle's unsuccessful Channel crossing attempt in 1925 and successful Channel crossing in 1926 stand out as particularly well-researched (Ederle never published a biography in her lifetime, but had a writer present during her 1926 crossing to document her actions, thoughts and feelings), whereas in earlier chapters Stout seems to veer into fictionalizations of what Ederle and her family members did, said and felt during mundane events (a huge nonfiction pet peeve of mine).
Ederle's story has since been rediscovered through this book as well as Disney film of the same name released in May 2024.
Further reading:
The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters - a counterpoint-of-sorts to this book, which is a lot less rosy in its take on the acceptance of women in athletics in the 1920s and 1930s |
my review
Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias by Don Van Natta Jr - about another female athlete of Ederle's era
My statistics:
Book 238 for 2024
Book 1841 cumulatively -
As a lover of swimming, I found the history of swimming, the different strokes, and women swimming to be fascinating. I first learned about Trudy from watching the Disney movie recently released and was excited to hear it was a book. I admire Trudy and am awed by her tenacity, grit and courage. I am grateful for women like her which made swimming more accessible and competitive sports a reality for women.
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Trudy Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel, and this is her story. However, it is much more than that. It is also the story, to a lesser degree, of the English Channel, of the acceptance of women athletes, of the acceptance of swimming in general and especially for women. The story opens with a tragedy on the East River. A pleasure boat carrying families caught fire and many died because they didn't know how to swim. I didn't realize that even in the early 20th century, swimming for women was taboo, considered immoral. This tragedy started a movement to teach swimming, if only for safety.
Trudy must have been a remarkable young lady. She was strong and athletic, accomplishing what most other swimmers would never be able to do, but she was also very close to her family and a little naive. She was sometimes taken advantage of. She was somewhat shy and also had a hearing impairment that made her uncomfortable in crowds, detrimental to her when she became well known. The story even includes a mystery about her first attempt at crossing the channel. The book was, for the most part, well written, and includes some great photographs. For my taste, there was occasionally a little too much detail, especially about individual swimming events and times. And I think that the title, Young Woman and the Sea, doesn't really do justice to the story even though it is probably a take on
Ernest Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea. Overall, the book was both informative and entertaining.
(The copy I reviewed was an ARC sent to me by a friend, and as such had quite a few typos and editing mistakes that I am assuming were corrected before the final edition was published.) -
Very entertaining, well-researched and a great story that most people are unfamiliar with. It begins with a great mini-history of swimming and the Channel itself to set some context. It later identifies the major role Ederle played in developing audiences for women's sports and her place among other sports giants of her era such as Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. Stout's treatment of the crossing is suspenseful and riveting.
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Fabulously written account of Trudy Ederle’s life, swimming career, unparalleled swimming accomplishments, and tearing down the wall of underestimating women in sport and endurance. As a swimmer and triathlete I am stunned that I knew nothing of her story and am grateful for this book. The author, Glenn Stout, is a great story teller; in addition to Ederle’s captivating story, he even chronicles the history of the innovation of swim strokes in a way that keeps the reader interested.
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This is such a good read. A true story about a badass woman that has so much grit and determination. A great role model for young women and especially for female swimmers. I wanted to read this book after I saw a trailer for the movie and can’t wait to see this with my 4 daughters that swim. I loved Trudy’s response of “what for?” When told she needed to give up and get out of the water. So resilient and to think this was nearly 100 years ago. Swimming across the English Channel is no small feat, but Trudy persevered even when things were rough. A true testament to what setting a goal and being focused can do. I also enjoyed the small bits of swimming history added in regarding strokes and techniques.
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This may be my favorite book of 2024. Maybe as a swimmer, a swim coach, a mom of f female swimmers…she changed and those around her changed the course of females in the swimming world. I am grateful for what she did.
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YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA, an amazing book written by fellow Hilliard High School Class of 76 classmate, Glenn Stout, is a fast paced book that you can't put down. Every page carries you deeper into the life and adventure of Trudy Ederle, leading her to become the first woman in history to successfully swim and navigate the English Channel... and she was an American!!!!
This story takes you through her childhood in the early 1900's experiencing measles at a time when no drugs or vaccines were available to treat this often fatal disease, yet she is strong and rises above the challenge. This seems to become her mantra in life. She faces obstacles from a society that forbids females to swim due to modesty laws, a father determined to be the decision maker for everyone in the family and health issues. Still, she faces these challenges with determination and grit. Many of the challenges she faced were caused by the men who stood in her way, but she was not deterred and at just 20 years of age, she was able to do was only a handful of men had accomplished...she successfully swam the English Channel.
This book is an inspiration to all, especially to the women of the world who are tired of being told by others what they can and cannot do. It's a book that leaves you, whether male or female, feeling empowered and inspired to follow that dream deep inside of you. You will NEVER succeed if you don't try and try often. I have both the electronic book as well as the audiobook. I have also seen the movie produced for DISNEY STUDIOS and is currently available to watch on DISNEY PLUS OR HULU. Please, give yourself a great gift and buy a version of this book, stream and enjoy the movie. Be amazed at one so young who followed her dream, fought every fight with grace and determination and finally succeeded in claiming her reward. She achieved what most thought was impossible. It's the best "feel good" story of 2024! -
This book was inspiring. Trudy always wanted to be a swimmer, but back then swimming for women was improper. When a ship wreak happens Trudy’s mother decided that Trudy and her sisters would learn how to swim. Soon Trudy breaks World Records and becomes the best swimmer in the world. Trudy’s career starts to fall as she becomes out of shape. Trudy decides she wants to swim the English Channel. She trains and trains , but after a few hour in The English Channel Trudy was touched and taken out of the water from being poisoned by her trainer. Trudy’s second try of crossing was when she successfully crossed the English Channel. She became the first woman and sixth person to cross the channel. Trudy beat the men’s record by over two hours while she crossed the channel in fourteen hours and thirty one minutes. Trudy shows that women can do anything, and that our gender or sex is not weak!!!
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Years ago, I read Lynne Cox' memoir
Swimming To Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer, after reading her encounter with a gray whale in
Grayson. She swam the English Channel in record time in 1972. I did not know that Trudy Ederle was the first woman to complete the swim across the English channel in 1926, until I saw the Disney movie adapted from this book. I really enjoyed the movie, but the book was even better. -
I really enjoyed reading this book. 3.5 I loved the movie and was fascinated that I had never heard of Trudy before. This book helped me understand the reasoning behind that, did a great job of covering her amazing feat and outlining what that did for women's sports. There are so many little known inspiring stories throughout history. I love learning about them! The author did a great job with the information available. I was left wishing I had more just about Trudy that she had written herself. After such a feat and learning of the tiring intrusions on her life shortly after her accomplishment, I respect her decision to rest in anonymity and am thankful that Glenn Stout decided to write about her and for the movie so that I could learn about her and her amazing accomplishments.
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3.5 stars. I learned A LOT about swimming and how Trudy's accomplishment was a huge win for women's sports. Six men swam the channel before her, and Trudy's time was TWO HOURS faster than the fastest of them. But primarily, no one believed a woman could do it. It was a long book, so a bit TOO much detail about swimming and the channel. But the writing was so good when the author detailed her actual swim. I didn't remember from the movie that she was almost deaf, which I think added to her mental ability to go into herself and swim like that for hours. I hated how her father and manager tried to use her success to make money but didn't do a very good job of it, and she was just a pawn, doing whatever they told her to do.
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I really like it when the book educates me on the history of a particular topic and also entertains me with the subject matter. This book did both and then some. He covered not only Trudy and her journey to swim across the English Channel, but he also went to great lengths to give us the backdrop of the English Channel itself, those that had tried and conquered the feat previously and the history of the beginning and acceptance of female swimmers on the local and world stage including the Olympics and the battles that had to be won to give women a chance. Very well done by the author.
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Incredibly inspiring. Long, but captivating read. Women all over the world owe so much to Trudy in opportunity, shattering of perceptions of women, and even, the braking of our own barriers that would have us believe we can’t. Written insightfully and throughly to include Trudy’s personal story, a history of women’s sports, world history, in-depth look at the English Channel, and captivating narrative that, at times, had me on the edge of my seat rooting for Trudy who finished her swim a century ago. Looking forward to watching the movie!
“What for?!” -
We watched this movie as a family and it was great so I ventured out for the book. It’s nice to read a book that you actually know quite a bit about (swimming, that’s about it) because it allows the reader a bit more intel. The history was new. And awesome. The way that the story was intertwined with history of the channel was great. This was a perfect story of pushing oneself to the brink and making a dream happen. It’s very inspiring and a huge story about a history that is sometimes pushed behind bigger stories. I love that.
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This true story was very well written. It’s amazing what Trudy Ederle accomplished in swimming the English Channel! Her determination to not give up and keep going was stunning. Great history story!
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3.5-reading this book felt the same as when I would watch the 16 year old athletes in the Olympics while eating a bowl of marshmallow popcorn on my couch
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DNF on audio @ 12% 10/2/24. This book would probably be really great for a swimmer, but I could not get interested. How I felt reading this was probably how other people feel reading books about runners.
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I enjoyed both the movie and the book.
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This book was so enjoyable, especially for a swimmer. The book is not just about the English Channel or Trudy - it has some fascinating swim history, including how certain swim strokes were made. Trudy is so inspiring and I’m shocked her name is not more well known
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A fascinating social history as well as a biography. Stout's work suffered from noticeably poor editing, with repetitions, sometimes on the same page, and omissions that had me rereading to see if I'd missed the first mention of a fairly important explanation.
