Undressed Toronto
Undressed Toronto
Cover of “Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside, How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850-1935”, 2022 Heritage Toronto Book Award nominee. Archival Image courtesy of the Archives of
Author: Dale Barbour
Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
In Undressed Toronto, Dale Barbour immerses readers into the vibrant social life of Toronto’s public bathers, focusing on the city’s central waterfront, Toronto Island, the Don River, the Humber River, and Sunnyside Beach from 1850-1935. Through an insightful analysis of class, gender, politics, and environmental development, Undressed Toronto explores how Toronto’s rivers and waterfronts were dramatically transformed into regulated recreational spaces. These spaces gave nineteenth-century women a new leisure activity and men novel ways of expressing and enforcing masculinity.
The book celebrates and engenders an appreciation for the work of historians and civic officials alike to preserve and promote public Torontonian places and to support the diverse community that has grown from and thrived in these locations.
Dale Barbour grew up on a farm in Manitoba, and worked in journalism and communications before getting hooked on history. He completed his PhD in history at the University of Toronto in 2018 and is currently the University of Winnipeg’s H. Sanford Riley Postdoctoral Fellow. He is the author of Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967.