Talk:Nude swimming in US indoor pools

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Nude swimming in US indoor pools was nominated as a Social sciences and society good article, but it did not meet the good article criteria at the time (March 26, 2024, reviewed version). There are suggestions on the review page for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.

Nudity Mid‑importance

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United States: History Mid‑importance

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Swimming Mid‑importance

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Split

Sometimes a section outgrows its article; in this case, there were more sources for the subtopic than for the main topic of nude swimming. My intention is simply to present four types of information:

At the beginning of the 20th century, swimming pools had a social function in providing an alternative to men and boys swimming and bathing in lakes and rivers. They did so because often they had no other place to wash, and they were naked because few could afford "bathing suits" which had been recently invented. There are a few academic historical referenced to cite for this content. One is a book, "Contested Waters" which I will cite more fully when I find it in a library.
National and local public health organizations set out the justification for nudity in indoor pools in terms of hygiene. Most specify that their recommendations only apply to male swimmers for both medical and social reasons. Some note that female swimmers should be included in the swimsuit ban, but modesty prevents this.
There are many newspaper citations to show that public health recommendations, which did not have the force of law, were implemented by the YMCA and public schools for at least 6 decades. Most merely stated nudity for boys as a fact. There was no discussion until the 60s, when sensibilities changed. I think the content avoids drawing conclusions beyond what the sources support.
I am aware that there are a few blogs on the topic. I have not ignored them, but everything here is based upon independent research based upon reliable sources.

WriterArtistDC (talk) 23:42, 1 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Rename

I was editing the short description and came up with "Nude swimming in US indoor pools". Being more concise and shorter than the original title (which I created) and there being little traffic (views or edits), a discussion did not seem needed to rename (move) the article. WriterArtistDC (talk) 13:45, 4 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How about the title Nude indoor swimming in the United States? Or, if "pools" must be included, Nude swimming in indoor pools in the United States? ---Another Believer _(Talk) 22:21, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GA nomination

After submitting the nomination, I reviewed one of the sources, Contested Waters by Jeff Wiltse, and found that it was more relevant to this article than I had assumed. The book is mainly about outdoor pools, but provides an historical context for swimming pools generally. This has resulted in a rewrite which combines the early history into one section with subsections on race and health issues. WriterArtistDC (talk) 22:01, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Removed image

Since new images have been added, the one of the exterior of a bath building was not needed. WriterArtistDC (talk) 17:44, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

Unsuccessful. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 17:12, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

This review is transcluded from Talk:Nude swimming in US indoor pools/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: AryKun (talk · contribs) 19:22, 2 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for doing this. It is not a topic I chose, but one that emerged along with others in applying summary style (splitting sub-topics) to the Nudity article. WriterArtistDC (talk) 15:53, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Since the review has not yet started, I have added two additional examples that I had been working on. WriterArtistDC (talk) 15:03, 19 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for the delay, been pushing this off since it's a somewhat weird topic and I couldn't think of how to review this.
"but rare for women and girls from the late 1880s until the early 1970s" Makes it seem like it was rare during that time period and otherwise common for women.
- I have reworded this sentence.--WriterArtistDC (talk) 03:24, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This article is extremely well-written and cited, but I'm struggling to see how it is a tertiary encyclopedia article. There's almost no secondary analysis of nude swimming in American schools (the only articles I would see as secondary are the WaPo piece and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle article) and the majority of the article is taking local news stories and individual events and extrapolating them to signal trends. The entire Questioning and decline of nudity section is cited to primary news sources; how can you talk about a decline in national levels of usage when you're using sources that all talk about a single town in Wisconsin or Michigan?
I honestly think this article might be better as a subsection of Nude swimming because the requisite secondary sourcing just doesn't exist. This is a very nice article, but it's more akin to an essay than a encyclopedia article and in my view violates the spirit of SYNTH.
I'm inclined to fail this article in light of the above points. AryKun (talk) 11:56, 24 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Secondary sources establish the practice as necessary for public health, while primary sources describe how this practice was implemented. I do not think the latter fits the definition of synth, since I am only stating facts, not drawing conclusions that go beyond the public health justifications.--WriterArtistDC (talk) 03:24, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  Without secondary sources, there's no real way to determine DUE imo. The entire latter half of the article is cited to contemporary news sources and uses those to illustrate a broader trend, even though no secondary sources make the same inferences. This isn't against the letter of SYNTH, but it does seem to me to be against the spirit. I suppose this may be a subjective interpretation, but I wouldn't feel comfortable promoting this to GA because it feels more like a secondary source than a tertiary one. I'll qf with no objection to you immediately renominating or ask for a second opinion, whatever you want. AryKun (talk) 09:55, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  Knowing that articles are not likely to improve without collaboration, I submit articles for GA review in order to get useful input. A subjective interpretation is of no use, particularly after a month's delay between initiating and starting the review. I have set the status of the GAN template to "2ndopinion" per WP:Reviewing good articles#Get a second opinion WriterArtistDC (talk) 16:43, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Looking this over as a second opinion, I am really inclined to agree with AryKun on this; the current sourcing is so localized it falls into OR and synth territory. You cannot make claims about the country generally from a local newspaper talking about how a nude pool worked in one area; this would be totally fine analysis if you were submitting this to an academic publication, but not on Wikipedia. If a source is talking about something local, it has to be an academic source which is connecting this to trends nationally. For this to hit GA, I would say
1. Throw out all sources cited to a local US newspaper
2. Use secondary sources to pick up the pace there. Contested Waters: A History of Swimming Pools in America seems like a great source, but you only cite it a few times. Those early 20th century era analysies of swimming pool programs on a national level (like Safety and Hygiene in the School Swimming Pool or "Negro Youth and the Educational Program of the Y.M.C.A.) are useable, but be careful about relying to heavily on them, since they obviously don't have the benefit of hindsight.
3. Just look for more secondary sources; if you have access to the Wikipedia Library, plenty of high quality sourcing you can find there. I found some more sources about US swimming pool history.
  1. Wiltse, Jeff. "Swimming pools, civic life, and social capital." A companion to sport (2013): 287-304.
  2. Weiss, Harry B. and Howard R. Kemble. The Great American Water-Cure Craze: A History of Hydropathy in the United States. Trenton, NJ: The Past Times Press, 1967.
  3. White, Anthony G. Swimming Centers: A Selected Bibliography. Monticello, IL: Vance Bibliographies, 1983.
  4. Hunt-Hurst, Patricia, and Amy Scarborough. "Exaggerated Modesty: The Evolution and Acceptance of Showing the Navel in Swimwear and Other Clothing." In Trending Now: New Developments in Fashion Studies, pp. 45-57. Brill, 2013.
  5. Kentner, Kallen Dewey. "Healthy Diversions: Swimming Venues as Working-Class Institutions of Health and Entertainment, 1890–1925." PhD diss., Southern New Hampshire University, 2022.
  6. Schrank, Sarah. Free and natural: Nudity and the American cult of the body. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
  7. Hoffman, Brian. Naked: a cultural history of American Nudism. NYU Press, 2015.
  8. Arrizabalaga, Nerea Feliz. "Adolph Sutro’s Interior Ocean: A Social Snapshot of 19th-Century Bathing in the United States." Architectural Histories 9, no. 1 (2021).
  9. Gutman, Marta. "Race, place, and play: Robert Moses and the WPA swimming pools in New York City." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67, no. 4 (2008): 532-561.
  10. Hoffman, Brian Scott. Making private parts public: American nudism and the politics of nakedness, 1929-1963. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.
  11. Wright, Ellen. "Spectacular Bodies: The Swimsuit, Sexuality and Hollywood." In Sport’s Relationship with Other Leisure Industries, pp. 301-323. Routledge, 2017.
  12. Bier, Lisa. Fighting the current: The rise of American women's swimming, 1870-1926. McFarland, 2011.
  13. Adiv, Naomi. "Paidia meets ludus: New York City municipal pools and the infrastructure of play." Social Science History 39, no. 3 (2015): 431-452.
  14. Smith, P. Caleb. "Reflections in the Water: Society and Recreational Facilities, a Case Study of Public Swimming Pools in Mississippi." Southeastern Geographer 52, no. 1 (2012): 39-54. https://doi.org/10.1353/sgo.2012.0000.
Now, not all of these will ultimately end up useful, but I think it will be a good starting point. All in all; great effort, this is not GA-ready at the moment. I will note that you should definitely keep the current work somewhere, if only because you have essentially written half of an academic paper with these local sources and could probably get it published somewhere. I'll have to fail this. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 17:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.