Some form of public nudity has been in American life since the early days of the republic. Starting in the late 18th century, young men and boys would strip down to swim in urban lakes and rivers, as the scholar Jeff Wiltse wrote in Contested Waters, a history of swimming in America. This behavior often sat on the margins of social acceptability; commentators described the bathers as lewd and unruly, flaunting their bodies and heckling passersby. Cities soon moved to curtail it. In 1786, Boston passed an ordinance forbidding swimming on the Sabbath, declaring that boys bathing on Sundays were “profaning the Lord’s day.” New York followed with an 1808 ban on daytime swimming in the East River, meant, in the moral logic of the day, to protect innocent women from the supposedly corrupting sight of men’s naked flesh.
These laws did not eliminate public nudity but rather regulated it, prescribing where, when, and around whom one could shed their clothes. They set the pattern for how nudity has been approached in the United States ever since—through a blend of legal restrictions and social norms that draw a line between nudity as nonsexual, condoned, even expected, and nudity coded as sexual and therefore forbidden except in private.
The golden age of everyday, regulated nudity arrived with the Progressive era. At the turn of the 20th century, faith in the state’s capacity to improve lives, new ideas about hygiene, and efforts to uplift the urban poor all combined to create more public spaces where nudity was considered appropriate. Whereas middle- and upper-class homes had bathtubs by the 1890s, most tenements had none. Their residents bathed infrequently, or in tubs shared by several families. Reformers seized on this as both a public-health and a moral crisis; for many Progressives, dirt itself was a sign of degeneracy. Cities started building public bathhouses, mostly formally or de facto segregated by race, and usually divided into men and women—sometimes by separate wings, sometimes by alternating days (though typically more time and space were granted to men). A bather might have a stall or a bit of elbow room, but the experience remained communal. In the Progressive imagination, then, nudity was a civic duty, a path to cleanliness, even a mark of respectability.