Chlorine, Concrete, and Coquette: Women at the Pool in Egypt, 1930–69

In Egypt, the swimming pool offered a new bourgeois social space for modern young people to mingle. Women and men walked around in revealing swimwear and socialized in and around the water. These new social spaces provided opportunities to both challenge and reinforce traditional patriarchal social norms that emphasized propriety and control of women’s behaviour. I examine popular culture representations of pools and pool architecture from their emergence around 1930 through the 1960s. Diverse representations of pools intersected with commentary on women’s participation in new social spaces, and the rise of female movie stars. In the magazine al-Kawakib , movie stars were interviewed and photographed in front of their private pools. Special summer issues of al-Musawwar discussed events at sporting clubs, including swimming lessons and competitions. Pools appear in films as important sites for romances to develop and comic relief to occur. With this in mind, what can popular culture sources reveal about the physical setting and social context of pool construction, usage, and meaning in the middle of the twentieth century? Was the pool represented as a private or a public space for women, and what was the significance of this distinction?