When nineteenth-century British ideas of respectability demanded men and women bathe separately at seaside resorts, nineteenth-century French seaside resorts allowed men and women wearing bathing costumes to bathe together. English tourists therefore referred to this style of mixed bathing as ‘continental bathing’.
By 1912, mixed or ‘continental’ bathing had been recommended and accepted at surf beaches in the Australian state of the New South Wales as a safety measure. As coastal communities with well established ocean pools and traditions of segregated bathing saw no need to implement such a drastic safety measure in the safer environment of their ocean pools, gender-segregated bathing remained normal practice at many of the older New South Wales ocean pools into the 1930s.