Bio

Vice President of the Swim Club and a member of the College Government, Elizabeth T. Jordan '59 represented Freeman Hall in dorm swim meets during her time at Wellesley. The U.S. Masters Swimming David Yorzyk Award winner in 1997, Jordan was inducted into the International Masters Swimming Hall of Fame in 2005 and has completed multiple open water swims, most notably in 2012 as part of a six-woman over-70 age team, where – at age 75 – she helped set a new Catalina Channel Swimming Federation age group record that still stands today. In all, Jordan has set 38 world records in different five-year age groups for backstroke, butterfly and individual medley.

When I arrived at Wellesley from Indiana in the fall of 1955, I couldn’t continue my considerable national success in pool swimming competition, because there was no Title IX and therefore no intercollegiate swimming for women. I decided I would become a scholar instead.

After receiving my Wellesley B.A. in 1959 and my M.A. from Radcliffe in 1960, I married and had four children before returning to swim competition in my late 30s with U.S. Masters Swimming. Simultaneously, I returned to academics and received my Ph.D. in 1985. I found that a balance between the life of the mind and the life of the body was beneficial and rewarding.

While at Wellesley l did join Swim Club, which performed annual shows in “water ballet,” which evolved eventually into synchronized swimming, a valid and demanding sport requiring strong abdominal muscles. But in the 1950s, the important thing was to smile and point your toes while you performed your somersaults and leg raises. I remember cold winter nights walking back to my dorm from Swim Club rehearsals on the other side of campus, my wet ponytail would freeze into an icicle!

Every year, the Athletics Department would sponsor an inter-dorm swim meet, so of course, I signed up, for a backstroke race, my specialty. The event was 25 yards, and the organizers assigned someone at the end of each lane to hold out their hands to keep anyone from bumping her head on the rim of the pool. I think I won by perhaps half the pool. Someone commented “You must have been in swim meets before!”

As I wrote in my Wellesley application letter in the 1950s, and as I continue to feel and to know, the qualities that I learned from swimming guide my life. I remember thinking that there were three areas in which one might try to excel: sports, academics, and social life. But one couldn’t do all three, so I decided to downplay or omit social life. I benefited from meeting and befriending competitors from around the nation and around the world. I learned how to schedule my time, how to take care of my health by eating well and exercising regularly. I learned how to win gracefully and perhaps even more important, how to lose gracefully.