What Nudism Exposes offers an original perspective on postwar Canada by situating the nudist movement within the broader social and cultural context and considering how nudist clubs navigated changing times.

As the nudist movement took root in Canada after the Second World War, its members advanced the idea that going nude and looking at the bodies of others satisfied natural curiosity, loosened the hold of social taboos, and encouraged mental health. By the 1970s, nudists increasingly emphasized the pleasurable aspects of their practice. Mary-Ann Shantz contends that throughout the postwar decades, nudists sought social approval as they engaged with contemporary concerns about childrearing, sexuality, public nudity, and the natural environment.

This perceptive, eminently readable book explains the perspectives of the movement while questioning its assumptions. What nudism ultimately exposes is how the body figures at the intersection of nature and culture, the individual and the social, the private and the public.

Mary-Ann Shantz's profile page

Mary-Ann Shantz is a historian, researcher, and project manager who lives in Edmonton, Alberta. She is a contributor to Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History and has been published in Histoire sociale/Social History and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.

... [a] richly researched and insightful book...

Bob Hummelt, BC Studies

"Shantz directly contributes to the scholarship on the history of the body."

Journal of the History of Sexuality

"What Nudism Exposes… is "revealing" and incredibly valuable to historians of postwar North American society and culture."

Pacific Historical Review

"Shantz goes a long way in providing a multi-faceted history not only of recreational nudity in mid-century Canada, but also of the possibilities and limitations of non-conformity in the postwar period."

Network in Canadian History & Environment

"The book makes visible the inner contradictions of [the Nudist] movement, which Shantz explores particularly in relation to gender norms and the sexualization of women’s bodies as well as nudists’ relationships with nature and the environment."

The Canadian Historical Review