|
|
|
gallery
GRAPHICS EDITOR'S NOTE
The following Gallery essay by Marguerite Shaffer examines four nudist photographs spanning the twentieth century to the present. We publish these texts because they illustrate an evolution in thinking about the historic relationship between the human body and the natural environment. One of these images, of a postwar nuclear family camping at a nudist resort in the Rocky Mountains, has been cropped to exclude a second young girl, facing the camera and standing near the family's camp stove, from the photograph. The author and several editors of Environmental History, myself included, were uncomfortable modifying this historical document. After much discussion and debate, however, we decided not to include this young girl because of her age and her positioning in the photograph, but instead to acknowledge her presence in the historic record here, in a special Gallery editor's note.
NEIL M. MAHER
Marguerite S. Shaffer On the Environmental Nude
| IN 1934, A SHORT EDITORIAL in The Nudist, a magazine devoted to the practice of nudism in the United States, remarked on the censorship of Maurice Parmelee's Nudism in Modern Life under the provisions of the Tariff Act (1842), which empowered the U.S. Customs Department to ban the importation of obscene materials. Dr. Ilsley Boone, the editor, commented, "As one reads this decision one wonders that the propriety of pictures of all other living things such as animals and flowers of both sexes in close proximity is never questioned. That pictures of human beings are considered from an entirely different point of view is a curious manifestation of psychic twist."1 Boone's comments clearly reflect the nudist philosophy he sought to promote, but they also draw pointed attention to the cultural meaning of the environmental nude. |
1
|
|
Invented in the fifth century by the Greeks, the nude is a form of art—an intentional artistic representation of the naked body—"the body re-formed" according to art historian Sir Kenneth Clark.2 Emerging from Hellenic thought, the classical nude sought to represent the connection "between an organic and a geometric basis of beauty."3 The term environmental nude builds on this tradition and identifies a little-studied subgenre of nude photography that emerged in connection with the philosophy and practice of organized nudism.4 Like its predecessor, the environmental nude seeks to draw attention to the connections between humans and nature. But where the Greek nude raised questions about the ideal of beauty, the environmental nude raises questions about what is natural. |
2
|
|
In the early decades of the twentieth century, nudism, sometimes called "naturism," emerged as the organized practice of ritually exposing the body to the air, sun, water, and the elements (at least in temperate weather), combined with the freedom of body movement in communal exercise, play, and dance.5 Books such as Maurice Parmelee's Nudism in Modern Life and periodicals such as The Nudist, among others, advocated recreational communal nudity in such activities as group games, gymnastics, dance, formalized tableaux or poses, bathing, sun bathing, swimming, hiking, and other forms of exercise. Advocates argued that nudism celebrated the natural physical, aesthetic, and athletic form and function of the human body. As Parmelee's book philosophizes, nudism was about the nude practice of physical activities. Yet as the banning of the book suggests, it was also about the photographing and viewing of the nude. |
3
|
|
In this essay I focus on four environmental nudes and their archetypal qualities to explore the ways in which nudism has sought to challenge and redefine established concepts of human nature. Nudism, a seemingly small, disorganized fringe movement that emerged in the United States in the early 1930s, has much to say about popular conceptions of nature, popular conceptions of the body as natural, and the way in which popular culture imagined, situated, and defined human beings—positioning them as natural—in the context of nature. These images raise questions about what it means for humans to live "naturally." They also represent a more "embodied environmental history." "More than ever," Christopher Sellers argued in his 1999 essay, "our field requires a more searching and historicizing approach to this most paradigmatic site where our humanity entangles with a nature at once 'us' and 'other' from us."6 As historical artifacts, these images shed light on the nudist critique of modern urban industrial culture, emphasize the discord between humans and nature, and raise questions about what exactly is the place of humans in nature. Are we inherently separate and divided from the natural world in some way? Or are we natural beings integrally connected to and a part of nature? Can we come to terms with our human nature? |
4
|
|
The Adam and Eve Nude (see Figure 1) comes from an illustration in William Welby's It's Only Natural: The Philosophy of Nudism (1937), an early treatise on the practice of nudism. The edenic image of man and woman in a nature paradise is a quintessential nudist image that appears again and again in the literature of nudism. Derived from the creation story in Genesis 2, God creates man as a "living creature" and puts him in the Garden of Eden "to till it and care for it." He then creates woman as his partner, and they are to exist together as man and wife "with no feelings of shame towards one another" living in harmony with nature.7 Building on traditions of Renaissance painting, the photograph references classical and romantic imagery drawing attention to the proportion and beauty of the nude forms in the tradition of Greek sculpture while situating them in a picturesque landscape. With its "Adam and Eve" caption the image reads as both romantic tableau and natural ideal, suggesting a more innocent world before the dualistic nature/culture split. Here humans are part of nature; and their nudity signifies both absence of urban artifice and a natural egalitarianism. |
5
|
|
| |
|
Figure 1. Adam and Eve Nude.
William Welby, "Adam and Eve," illustration in It's Only Natural: The Philosophy of Nudism (London: Thorson's, 1937), 17.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Nudism in the United States was an imported version of the German Nacktkultur (Nude Culture) movement, which was part of a larger movement known as Lebensreformer (Life Reform). German historian John Alexander Williams argues that Lebensreformer "practiced and promoted a variety of self-consciously more 'natural' ways of life" that included "such 'natural' activities as homeopathic medicine, vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and nicotine, dress reform, nudism, and the building of rural communes and green suburbs know as 'garden cities.'" First articulated in the 1870s by a homeopathic doctor named Thedor Hahn, Lebensreformer emerged by 1900 as a full-blown movement to promote a purer lifestyle among middle-class Germans. By the early twentieth century, nudism or Nacktkultur had become one of the central tenets of Lebensreformer.8 |
6
|
|
A group of German Americans established the first official organization in the United States to promote the practice of nudism. The American Physical Culture League (not connected to Bernarr MacFadden's more dubious Physical Culture Movement) was organized in December of 1929. Based in New York City, the group met three times a week during the winter months at a gymnasium in midtown Manhattan for group exercise, games, and swimming. During the summer months, members retreated to their farm in northern New Jersey to practice nudism in a more bucolic setting. Slowly, the practice of nudism began to spread. In 1931, a group of friends and advocates of nudism organized a closed corporation on a twelve-hundred-acre estate in Connecticut, nicknamed "the Hill," which functioned as a private resort serving both nudist and non-nudist members. Sometime in 1930, the Olympian League, although of questionable repute, began publication of the first American nudist magazine. These organizations mark the earliest institutionalization of nudism. By the summer of 1932, nudist advocate William W. Newcomb notes that the movement boasted a number of recognized nudist camps and organizations, including The American Gymnosophical Association, The Rochester Gymnosophy League, The Northern Ohio League of Naturists, Sea Island Sanctuary, and the Bund fur Korper-Kultur, in addition to the above-mentioned clubs. In his 1934 book, The Story of Nudism, Newcomb lists more than fifty organizations in eighteen states promoting nudist ideas and sponsoring nudist activities.9 |
7
|
|
The individuals most responsible for introducing modern nudism to the United States were Maurice Parmelee and Frances and Mason Merrill. Parmelee, a professor of sociology at the University of Missouri and later an economic analyst in the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, lived in Germany intermittently during the 1920s, where he practiced Nacktkultur and began writing about nudism in 1927.10 Advocating what he called the new gymnosophy, "a theory of a life in accord with the practice of nudity" derived from ancient Hindu philosophers known as gymnosophists, Parmelee argued, "Mankind has become largely cut off from nature and life is too artificial, much to the detriment of its health and happiness.11 The new gymnosophy endeavored "to regain what mankind has lost through civilization without rejecting anything of human social and cultural value."12 Frances and Mason Merrill, a husband and wife journalist team, picked up where Parmelee left off. In 1931 they published Among the Nudists, which recounted their experience at the Klingberg Frelichtpark, a German "air and light" park near Hamburg, as well as their visits with other nudist groups in France and England. Their first book was quickly followed by a second in 1932, Nudism Comes to America, which detailed the status of nudism in the United States and the various attitudes and official responses to the practice of recreational nudity in the United States. Thus by the mid 1930s, not only had fledgling nudists organizations been formed, but a pre-scriptive literature defining the philosophy and practice of nudism had begun to circulate. |
8
|
|
Eden is a potent and recurring theme in early prescriptive nudist literature. In the forward to Among the Nudists, Frances and Mason Merrill write that, much to their surprise, after their initial fears about visiting a German nudist resort, they were "frolicking in sunny glades with a crowd of men, women, and children, playing games, doing gymnastics, swimming, or basking in the sun upon the sand—all in the costume and innocence of Eden before the serpent." Describing themselves as "modern-day Adam and Eves," they link the practices of modern nudism to preordained ideas about human nature.13 |
9
|
|
The Adam and Eve Nude is important as much for what is in the picture as for what is not. Behind this photograph rests a scathing critique of modern urban industrial culture that was central to nudist philosophy. "Civilized man is living in the most artificial environment of any non-parasitic animal. With steam-heated houses, closed cars, fur coats, and other such luxuries, the human body is put at no strain to keep the temperature regulated," explain the Merrills. "As a consequence, man becomes physiologically like a slow-flowing stream meandering through placid meadows." To counteract such lethargy, the body needs invigorating stimulation. "Lack of garments affords greater freedom of movement and more exposure to the needed elements, producing a rejuvenating psychic effect on the individual," conclude the Merrills. "Man has spent most of his existence as an undraped creature, and it is in this condition that he is nearer to his natural environment."14 |
10
|
|
As a palliative to the ills of modern culture, nudism sought literally and figuratively to situate the body in nature and consequently to heal a culture alienated by modernization from nature and the natural. By referencing biblical imagery and tradition, the Adam and Eve Nude graphically challenges the nature/culture split, refutes the dualistic thinking that has separated human beings from the natural world, and directly critiques modern urban industrial culture. |
11
|
|
In addition to the promotion of physical health, the philosophy of nudism also promised more egalitarian rela-tions between the sexes and a more rational attitude toward sexual matters. Proponents of communal nudity ar-gued that nudism provided a more modern approach to sex edu-cation, destroying the secrecy and mystery of sex, elevating women to equal status with men, and thus abolishing sexual shame, perver-sion, and repression. Beyond this, nudism promoted a heightened appreciation of the beauty of the natural form, encouraging the development and main-tenance of a toned and healthy physique. In this vein, the Aesthetic/Porn-ographic Nude (see Figure 2) represents a class-ic nudist image found throughout early prescriptive nudist literature. Although nudist photographs featured men and women alike, many images, like this one, portrayed nude women alone, or with female companions, in various poses—reclining on the beach, walking through the woods, picking flowers, surveying the view—both enjoying and enhancing the natural scene, as its caption, "The Charm of Nature," implies. |
12
|
|
| |
|
Figure 2. The Aesthetic/ Pornographic Nude.
"The Charm of Nature," illustration in William Welby, It's Only Natural: A Philosophy of Nudism (London: Thorson's, 1937), opposite title page.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reaching back to the classical nude, while simultaneously prefiguring the pinup and the centerfold, the image waivered between art and obscenity. In doing so, it joined an array of visual images that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century, which sought to promote "a post-Victorian rejection of bodily shame and a healthy respect for female beauty."15 Published in 1937, at a time when middle-class magazines such as Life and Ladies Home Journal regularly published advertising images of women posing in various stages of undress while "Girlie calendars" and erotic post cards of nude women circulated on the seamier fringes of acceptable culture, this image walked a fine line between public nudity and indecent exposure, open sexuality and pornography, natural beauty and exhibitionism. It positioned nudism on the brink between "the uplifting qualities of health, beauty, and art" and the degeneracy of social deviance—between the beneficent effects of nature and the vagaries of culture.16 What is significant about environmental nudes like this is the ideal of natural beauty, health, and sexuality they sought to define and promote. |
13
|
|
The underlying premise of nudism was that modern society was diseased, and as a result modern human beings had become alienated, neurotic, repressed—in other words completely out of balance with nature. As William Newcomb explained, "Nudism has come to us sex tormented, neurotic and erotic people of the western world to help us to a finer, nobler, conception of the body and of human life."17 Nudism offered a means to regain that balance, and images like this Aesthetic/Pornographic Nude sought to illustrate that new equilibrium. |
14
|
|
Nudist advocate Maurice Parmelee perhaps best articulated these ideas. Parmelee believed that concealment of the body gave rise to "unhealthy mental complexes" and created "abnormal relations between the sexes."18 "Mankind," he argued, "has been cut off from nature to a large extent. Our manner of life is not only unnatural, but harmful to a very high degree, and is rapidly developing a degenerate and degraded human breed."19 Advocating the practice of recreational nudity, he explained, "Man is an air and light animal par excellence."20 Parmelee proceeded to provide an elaborate scientific rationale for the benefits of nudism. Specifically, he argued that the science of Heliotherapy (sun therapy) had proven conclusively that exposure to the full spectrum of the sun's rays through sunbathing was "essential for the protection of the skin" and a "great value both as a cure for and as a preventive of various diseases."21 Nude exercise and sunbathing toned and tanned the body, providing the necessary circulation of air and perspiration and the prerequisite amounts of ultraviolet rays and vitamin D. In addition, nudism offered mental and emotional benefits, "soothing the nerves" and furnishing relief "from the strain of office work and the other trying aspects of urban work," while simultaneously promoting a more rational and healthy attitude about sex.22 |
15
|
|
But gymnosophy offered more than just mental and physical health. It also promised a more egalitarian culture that focused less attention on the accoutrements of social status and distinctions of race and gender and more attention on the true nature of the individual. When gymnosophy becomes widespread "pretty faces and pearly-white skin can no longer be the predominant factors in mating. Women will not hesitate to become brown in the sun, because they think a white skin is more seductive," wrote Parmalee. "Men and women ... will choose each other, according to the beauty of the body as a whole, and not merely of a small portion. They will then be genuine comrades and mates, and fit parents for the more beautiful mankind of the future."23 Nudism, according to Parmelee, was as much a rational conception of human nature and health as it was a utopian vision of a new world order. |
16
|
|
Images such as this and the philosophy it reflected sought to redefine the body in natural and normative terms. At its core, nudism was seen as a potential cure for a modern culture diseased by excessive pollution, urban crowding, stress, and overwork along with a range of sexual inhibitions and social inequities. As such it defined nature and human nature in modern, rational, and therapeutic terms. Although Parmelee espoused a more egalitarian culture, at heart he was a Social Darwinist who believed that both the human body and human society could be perfected through a more scientific and rational definition of natural living. Ultimately, he believed nudism should function as a kind of eugenics where the healthy, the beautiful, and the sexually liberated would come to dominate. Human nature could be socially engineered. The ideal of the healthy body became the desired norm. The ambiguity in the image between art and pornography reflects a larger ambiguity surrounding the cultural construction of the natural implicit in these therapeutic ideas. |
17
|
|
Although a full-fledged nudist movement never emerged in the United States, the acceptance of nudism grew and morphed in the post-World War II era as traditional sexual mores and standards of morality relaxed and public nudity, whether in mass media, film and theater, or on the beach, became more acceptable. The focus of organized nudism during this period shifted from health and fitness toward outdoor recreation. The Back-to-Nature Nude (see Figure 3), unlike the previous illustrations, presents a less stylized image of nudism reflective of this post-World War II turn toward outdoor recreation. |
18
|
|
| |
|
Figure 3. The Back-to-Nature Nude.
Detail, "Mountain Air Ranch," ca. 1949. C. Photo Album 291, 9. Western History and Genealogy, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Taken circa 1949 at the Mountain Air Ranch, a family nudist resort in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains west of Denver, Colorado, the picture is part of a photograph album containing fifty-two images documenting the everyday practices of nudism at the ranch.24 The photo stands out as a literal representation of the nudist camp. It is also a classic camping image. Centered on a family settled in front of their tent in the process of preparing a meal, the photograph illustrates the recreational aspects of nudism. Add some T-shirts and shorts, and this could easily be a photograph of a family camping trip from the postwar era. The nudity draws attention to the seeming naturalness of the family living close to nature. But the cook stove, the frying pan, and the tent are jarring reminders of the array of gadgets and gear necessary for the camping experience. At its core nudism was a form of outdoor recreation, and what is significant about this image is the explicit connections it makes between nudism and the leisure-oriented consumer culture that spawned it. Frances and Mason Merrill perhaps best articulated this connection when they wrote, "To live primitively in the heart of nature is the typical vacation of many Americans. Perhaps the distance from nature in khaki and tweed to nature in naked skin is not too great to be traversed."25 |
19
|
|
Recreational interest in nature grew dramatically in the post-World War II era as increasing automobile ownership, rising incomes, and expanding leisure time provided greater access to the out-of-doors. As Samuel Hays has argued, the affluence of the postwar period fueled a shift from the older producer-centered ideas of conservation to newer consumer-driven concerns for environmentalism. Concerns about health and well being were integrally connected to the rise of these environmental values.26 Postwar affluence and leisure facilitated a growing interest in a range of recreational activities from camping and backpacking to canoeing and rafting, to nature study and nature photography. To satisfy rising demand, a new consumer economy began to emerge around outdoor recreation. In 1965, Americans spent almost $27 billion on recreation, up from $6 billion in 1945.27 |
20
|
|
Nudism, like these other recreational pursuits, was part and parcel of this turn to nature to satisfy increasing consumer desires for leisure, health, and well being. "For the purpose of health and recreation and for the conditioning of man to his world we offer a new social practice, based on the known wholesome value of exposure to these elements [sunlight and air] and in the spirit of naturalness, cheerfulness, and cleanness of body and mind they symbolize," explained the statement of principles and standards of the National Nudist Council. "We aim to make the fullest possible use of sun, light and air by a program of exercise and life in the open in such a way as will result in the maximum physical and mental benefit."28 |
21
|
|
The significance of the Back-to-Nature Nude comes from the contradictory impulses it combines and seeks to reconcile. As evidenced above, nudism expressed a strong critique of modern urban industrial culture. Clothing embodied the artifice, inhibitions, and inequities of modern culture, while nudism promised a return to a more natural lifestyle. Yet this natural life in which individuals could be in nature and interact as true equals, unencumbered by social divisions, gender inequities, and sexual shame, was structured around an economy of leisure and centered on therapeutic consumer desires. The striking similarity of this photograph to more mainstream images of family camping is a reminder that these contradictory impulses toward naturalism and consumerism dog other forms of nature recreation that seem more overtly environmentalist in their intent. The question this image raises is whether the concept of the natural manifested in the popular environmental activities of the postwar era stems from the very consumer culture it seeks to escape. |
22
|
|
During the cultural revolution of the 1960s, nudity emerged as a kind of personalized political performance. For example, during the late sixties, public nudity was embraced by countercultural youths who spontaneously shed their clothes at outdoor rock concerts and festivals like Woodstock to express a kind of natural freedom and reverence for the natural body.29 By the early 1970s the Free Beach Movement had begun to advocate for nude sunbathing and skinny-dipping at secluded public beaches in California and Massachusetts.30 Public nudity took a more political turn in 1974 when Robert Opel ran naked across the stage at the 46th Annual Academy Awards Ceremony making a peace sign.31 During the seventies, the era of political cover-ups, streaking emerged as a popular fad and political protest on college campuses and at public events.32 Today all of these various manifestations of nudism still exist in one form or another.33 Dariusz Boron's "Carbon Natural" photograph (see Figure 4), taken at the World Nude Bike Race held in London on June 9, 2007, exemplifies the Environmental(ist) Nude. This image, posted on the photo-sharing Internet site Flickr, represents the most current version of environmental nude and appropriately concludes this gallery of images. |
23
|
|
|
|
|
The World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR) was established in 2004 to coordinate an international bike ride in cities across the world to protest global dependence on fossil fuels. Using public nudity as a form of political protest and street theater, the ride's web site proclaims, "We face automobile traffic with our naked bodies as the best way of defending our dignity and exposing the unique dangers faced by cyclists and pedestrians as well as the negative consequences we all face due to dependence on oil, and other forms of non-renewable energy."34 Between seven hundred and one thousand cyclists took to the streets during the London 2007 ride to highlight "the damage caused by car dependency" and to promote "the environmental benefits of cycling."35 The riders in London were joined by cyclists in over sixty other cities including Montreal, Prague, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo, Brazil to name a few. Participants painted their bodies and decorated their bikes, embracing the carnivalesque in an effort to "protest oil dependency and celebrate the power and individuality of our bodies," according to the WNBR web site. As Duncan Blinkhorn, one of the organizers of the event commented, "Bikes and naked bodies harm nobody. Car fumes ... are driving us all to climate chaos."36 |
24
|
|
Drawing from both the philosophy of organized nudism and the politicized public nudity of streaking, WNBR uses the combination of nudism and cycling to contrast the natural versus the technological—human scale versus global corporate establishment.37 The image, depicting the back of a nude cyclist who has labeled herself "carbon natural" riding with other nude cyclists through a carless London street toward a green patch of trees in the distance, plays on the environmental demand for carbon neutral technologies and the desire for a "greener" world. Her nudity, the bicycle, and the "carbon natural" label challenge the way in which the dominant culture diminishes the place of humans (and by extension all living organisms) in the environment by questioning automobile-centered transportation structures, greenhouse gas emissions, and civil artifice. In juxtaposition to the urban streetscape, her nude body is both natural and vulnerable. The image forces us to think about the human impact on the natural world, and to make connections between human beings and the world we inhabit. It also forces us to reconsider what is natural. But most of all, the image reminds us of the threat we pose to the natural world. In this way the Environmental(ist) Nude leads us full circle back to the Adam and Eve Nude. |
25
|
|
On the most literal level these environmental nudes illustrate the history of organized nudism and the way in which nudists sought to redefine culture in more natural terms. The images reflect the dominant themes of nudism as it evolved from the 1930s through the postwar era. They suggest that nudism, at its core, was a social reform movement that offered a critique of an alienated modern culture and sought to advocate for and establish new norms of health, beauty, and happiness. However, on a broader level, these environmental nudes tell a story of popular environmentalism. As they progress from reconciling the nature/culture split, to ideals of health and beauty, to therapeutic recreation and leisure, to environmental protest, these photographs illustrate the inherent connections between shifting environmental concepts of the natural and the expansion of modern, urban-industrial consumer culture. In revealing how closely tied the modern ideal of the natural is to consumer practices and desires, these images expose the contradictions of the environmental urge to get back to nature. In the process they reflect the ambiguities of human nature. |
26
|
|
Marguerite S. Shaffer is associate professor of American studies and history and director of the American Studies Program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is the author of See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Smithsonian, 2001) and editor of Public Culture: Diversity, Community, and Democracy in the United States (forthcoming from Pennsylvania, 2008). Her current work focuses on popular environmentalism in the United States.
NOTES
I would like to thank Neil Prendergast for his research assistance.
1. Clipping, The Nudist, May 1934, Maurice Parmelee papers, group 1744, series IV, box 7, folder 5, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Hereafter cited as Parmelee papers. For the Tariff Act, see Joseph W. Slade, Pornography in American: a Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, Inc. 2000), 143.
2. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 3.
3. Ibid., 15.
4. Kenneth Clark dismisses nude photography as a form of the nude, arguing that photography focuses on the naked body, not the ideal of beauty sought after by the nude. However, other scholars have challenged this distinction. For example, see Jorge Lewinski, The Naked and the Nude: A History of the Nude in Photographs 1839 to the Present (New York: Harmony Books, 1977). Lewinski notes that a number of photographers who photographed the nude began their careers taking pictures at nudist resorts for nudist publications. He goes on to use the term "outdoor nude" to characterize nude photography in the field (see pp. 121–25). I believe the term "environmental nude" better describes the intent of nude photographs produced in connection with the practice of nudism.
5. There is no scholarly history of the practice of nudism in the United States. However, the early nudist literature provides an overview of the theory and practice of nudism as it emerged in the United States. See Maurice Parmelee, Nudism in American Life: The New Gymnosophy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931); Francis Merrill and Mason Merrill, Among the Nudists (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1931); Francis Merrill and Mason Merrill, Nudism Comes to America (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1932); William W. Newcomb, The Story of Nudism (New York: Greensberg, 1934); and Henry S. Huntington, Defense of Nudism (New York: McBride Co. Inc., 1958).
6. Christopher Sellers, "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History," Environmental History 4 (October 1999): 486.
7. The New English Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2–3.
8. John Alexander Williams, "Giving Nature a Higher Purpose: Back-to-Nature Movements in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933" (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1996), quotations on 12 and 18.
9. Newcomb, The Story of Nudism.
10. Maurice Parmelee originally published Nudism in American Life as The New Gymnosophy: The Philosophy of Nudism as Applied to Modern Life (New York: F.H. Hitchcock, 1927). However, after publication the publisher withdrew support for the book after being threatened by the United States district attorney for the Southern District of New York. Parmelee then copyrighted the book and sold it himself. The book was published in England by William and Norgate in 1929 and translated into German and published by Ernest Oldenburg Verlag of Leipsig in 1931. That same year Alfred A. Knopf contracted to publish the book in the United States as Nudism in American Life. (See Nudism in Modern Life, "Historical Forward," box 6, folder 7, Parmelee Papers.)
11. Parmalee, Nudism in American Life, 13.
12. Ibid., 6.
13. Merrill and Merrill, Among the Nudists. Quotations on xiv and 40.
14. Merrill and Merrill, Nudism Comes to America, 257.
15. Joanne Meyerowitz, "Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material: Responses to Girlie Pictures in the Mid-Twentieth-Century U.S.," Journal of Women's History 8 (Fall 1996): 10.
16. Ibid., 18.
17. Newcomb, The Story of Nudism, xi.
18. Parmelee, Nudism in American Life, 6.
19. Ibid., 241.
20. Ibid., 97.
21. Ibid., 108.
22. Ibid., 110–11.
23. Ibid., 174–75.
24. Established in 1935, the Mountain Air Ranch had a membership of five hundred plus in 1995. See "Keep Those Eyes Peeled; Nudists are Celebrating," Denver Post, July 1, 1995.
25. Merrill and Merrill, Among the Nudists, 244.
26. Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 22.
27. Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition, vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 253–54.
28. Huntington, Defense of Nudism, Appendix 1, 228.
29. See Julie Klemesrud, "Don't Forget to Pack Your Birthday Suit," New York Times, August 29, 1971; and Sheila K. Johnson, "The New Nudism vs. The Old Nudism," New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1972, 18–19+.
30. See Kristi Witker, "The Seaweed Bikini, or My Day at a California Nudist Beach," New York Times, August 29, 1971; and "Bare Beaches," Human Behavior 7 (July 1978): 24–25.
31. Jon Nordheimer, "Oscars for 'Sting' Lemon Miss Jackson," New York Times, April 3, 1974; "But Not too Far; Streaker Makes an Oscar Dash," Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1974.
32. B. E. Aguirre, E. L. Quarantelli, and Jorge L. Mendoza, "The Collective Behavior of Fads: The Characteristics, Effects, and Career of Streaking," American Sociological Review 53 (1988): 569–84. See, also, Robert D. McFadden, "Streaking: A Mad Dash to Where?" New York Times, March 8, 1974.
33. The American Association for Nude Recreation claims almost fifty thousand members and over two hundred and seventy affiliated resorts. (For membership information for the American Association for Nude Recreation, see http://www.aanr.com/faq_about_aanr.html.) Lee Baxandall's World Guide to Nude Beaches and Resorts boasts sales of over three hundred and fifty thousand copies. (For sales of Lee Baxandall's World Guide to Nude Beaches and Resorts, see Editorial Reviews at http://Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/Baxandalls-World-Guide-Beaches-Resorts/dp/0934106207/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195489882&sr=1-1.)
34. The World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR) Web site, http://www.worldnakedbikeride.org/index.html.
35. "Naked Riders Promote Pedal Power," BBC News, June 9, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6736969.stm.
36. Ibid.
37. Note that the WNBR Web site consciously links its history with nudism and streaking. http://www.worldnakedbikeride.org/resources/nakedwheels.html. For WNBR principles see http://nakedwiki.org/index.php?title=About.
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|