Gertrude Ederle had her goggles sealed with paraffin to render them water tight. Gertrude possessed a contract from both the "New York Daily News" and "Chicago Tribune" when she attempted the Channel swim a second time. The money she received paid her expenses and provided her with a modest salary. It also gave her a bonus in exchange for exclusive rights to her personal story. The "Daily News" and the "Chicago Tribune" got the jump on every other newspaper in America. Another American swimmer in France in 1926 to try and swim the Channel was Lillian Cannon from Baltimore. She was also
History of women in the United States and dating. Women achieved many groundbreaking firsts in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1921, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for her novel "The Age of Innocence". In 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first woman elected as a governor in the United States, for the state of Wyoming. Also in 1925, the World Exposition of Women's Progress (the first women's world's fair) opened in Chicago. In 1926, Gertrude Ederle, born in New York, became the first woman to swim across the English channel, arriving in almost two hours less time than any