The
twentieth century saw a wholesale transformation in popular hygiene throughout
the Western world. The very concept of cleanliness itself was redefined.
Routine washing and bathing habits replaced older, more intermittent practices,
and customs once shared only by the few were adopted by the many.
At the
fin de siècle frequent bathing had primarily been an upper-class affair; the
rest took a full bath a few times a year at best. Otherwise they merely washed
those parts in greatest need whenever the need arose, and in an age of few
hygienic sensibilities those moments were few as well.
Half a
century later the importance of personal cleanliness had become widely
accepted, a truth beyond questioning. More people than ever bathed regularly
and often, and their numbers continued to grow. The Saturday bath had become a
commonplace ritual and daytime hand washing — before meals and after using the
toilet, after rising and before bedtime — was routine. Those who hadn’t yet
adopted these customs were a vanishing species, soon to disappear. The new
cleanliness had become a mass phenomenon.
The
bathroom left an indelible mark on the spread of these habits for it made
regular washing and bathing simple tasks. Yet those who lacked its benefits
didn’t necessarily neglect their hygiene. Even without permanent fixtures and
private spaces, they made do in kitchens and sculleries with buckets and basins
or whatever else was available. The new concepts of cleanliness were widely
accepted long before everyone could practise them in their own bathroom,
furnished with up-to-date fixtures and hot water at the turn of a tap.
Bathrooms
changed the ease, more than the fact, of washing and bathing. As much as the
bathroom fostered cleanliness, the new hygiene promoted the diffusion of the
bathroom by creating a demand for its advantages.
Still,
changes like these in everyday practices are difficult to document. However
remarkable they may have seemed at the time, such commonplace matters are
scarcely visible in retrospect. One early study, a 1937 survey in North London,
found that 80 per cent of adults took a weekly bath, while another 10 per cent
bathed twice or more; rates were higher still for children and adolescents.
After a wartime inquiry into British housing conditions, the British social
research organization Mass Observation noted that “broadly speaking, the
pattern of washing bodies is a daily washing of the face and neck and a weekly
washing of the whole body.” Informed by a later postwar survey, it reported:
“Among the middle classes, women wash
more frequently than men. In frequency of handwashing they outnumber men by
three to two, in bathing by two to one. The daily bath is more likely to be a
feminine ritual — 12 women in every 100 bathe daily compared with only one man
in 100. In fact, the majority of men have only one bath weekly.”
Men and
women alike wash their faces on average between once and twice daily, but their
hands at least five times during the same period.
Not
knowing how these surveys were conducted, we shouldn’t assume that they
reflected British practices in general, but they do suggest that national
habits had changed markedly since the beginning of the century.
The
French evidence is even more limited. In 1951 the fashion magazine Elle asked a
group of women about their personal care practices. Having recently returned
from New York and been impressed by American ways, its feminist editor
Françoise Giroud was concerned about her countrywomen’s seeming hygienic
neglect.
Unfortunately
the report mentioned nothing at all about how those surveyed were selected, nor
even their numbers, so its findings are little more than straws in the wind.
Half of those interviewed replied that they performed a daily “toilette
complète,” while another third did so at least once a week. Giroud didn’t
specify the elements of a toilette complète and it almost certainly included
some body washing, though given the scarcity of bathrooms in France at the
time, the number of immersion baths must have been small.
This, at
least, was the meaning accepted by Jean Maudit, who revisited the original
survey in 1986 in a review of French womanhood’s hygienic progress during the
intervening 35 years. His methods, alas, were no more clear than Giroud’s, but
by then three-quarters of those asked performed a toilette complète daily and
most of the remainder did so two or three times a week. In a much broader
inquiry, three enterprising journalists mounted an ambitious survey during the
early 1970s, seeking to describe the moeurs [customs] of the entire French
nation at home and at work.
While
their interests were as broad as their survey techniques were unsound, they too
gathered information on French cleanliness, finding that 13 per cent took a
daily bath or shower and 23 per cent (most of them country dwellers) never took
one at all. The latter statistic seemed to confirm long-standing views that the
French paid little heed to their personal care.
The Elle
inquiries, like those in England, seem to have relied largely on urban
middle-class informants. But whatever their shortcomings and our methodological
misgivings, they point to an obvious fact: some daily routines of personal
cleanliness were already widely practised in France by the 1950s and their
acceptance continued to grow during the second half of the century.
What
Giroud overlooked in her concern for French hygienic standards was the fact
that, though her countrywomen fell well short of the postwar New York example,
they took greater care of their bodies than their mothers and grandmothers ever
had. Like the British, the French were changing their hygienic ways. The range
of habits varied in both countries and, especially in France, rural people
still clung to older customs. But new hygiene routines were on the ascendant
and in time would conquer all.
Despite
their long-standing reputation for cleanliness, Americans have been strangely
uncurious about their own bathing behaviour. One of the very few exceptions is
a 1960 study of personal hygiene in California, the state with the highest
proportion of homes with full bathrooms (95 per cent) in the nation at the
time. This survey of 1,000 middle-class households in Los Angeles and district
found that three-quarters of family members bathed daily while almost all the
remainder did so two or three times a week. Slightly more than half of them
took baths rather than showers.
But
urban California was not the nation and middle-class California’s habits were
not those of all Americans. This study surely reflected America at its
cleanest.
Elsewhere
routine bathing made further progress over time. Yet another study of hygiene
habits, this one in Germany during the later 1960s, revealed bathing rates higher
than those in France and England but well below those in California. Half the
German respondents then took a weekly bath while another third did so at least
two or three times a week. The great majority also washed their hands, faces
and necks every morning. Yet one in 10 never bathed at all, though most of them
must have scrubbed themselves regularly, for virtually all those surveyed
washed their bodies, partly or fully, every day.
Over the
next two decades, German habits changed still more dramatically. By the later
1980s more than half now showered daily and over 10 per cent did so more than
once a day, all this in addition to a weekly bath. Small surveys done in France
and Spain at the same time revealed an even more intense devotion to clean
bodies. Three-quarters of French respondents took a bath at least once a week
as well as a shower once daily — at minimum. The Spanish took to the tub less
often but made up the difference in their commitment to a daily shower, taken
by seven in eight of them.
Apart
from a few surveys, we have little more than anecdotes to tell us about the
changing customs of cleanliness, and they usually offer mere glimpses of
personal experience. Overall they paint a picture much like the one we’ve just
seen, of growing concern for personal hygiene, and of gradually spreading bathing
and washing routines. The United States led the change but there, too,
standards and practices varied across the continent.
Western
European communities soon followed the American example, with France and Italy
at the far end of the queue. Slower to adopt the bathroom and the new sanitary
technologies, they were slower to embrace the new culture of cleanliness as
well.
But by
the end of the twentieth century the very concept of bodily cleanliness had
been transformed everywhere in the transatlantic world. A survey by the French
newspaper Le Figaro in 1998 made the point abundantly clear. It found that
fewer than half of French adults took a daily bath or shower at a time when 70
to 80 per cent of northern Europeans already did so.
Leaving
aside the discrepancies between this and earlier studies, the importance of the
comment lay in how the newspaper defined cleanliness. When condemning its
countrymen as hygienic laggards it used a late-twentieth-century measure. In a
climate of ever more exacting standards, the only truly clean body had become
one that was fully washed once a day.
Excerpted from The Clean Body : A Modern History. Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.
Cleaning
Up the Masses: When Cleanliness Became a Phenomenon. By Peter Ward . The Star, December 1, 2019.
A
publishing tradition as old as the printed word, advice literature flourished
from the later 18th century onward, spurred by the spread of literacy, the
declining cost of book publishing, an expanding middle class seeking guidance
on right conduct, and the increasing numbers of self-declared experts keen to
profit from the market for advice.
Self-help
books circulated, and at the same time reflected, a wide variety of views about
appropriate behavior. Before the mid-18th century they had little to say about
how to accentuate feminine beauty and preserve it from time’s certainties.
Rather, they viewed a woman’s attractions in relation to her conduct, placing
them in a moral sphere rather than a physical setting.
A
curious novel by a Parisian doctor published in 1754, however, departed from
the usual offerings of the loveliness literature. Abdeker ou l’art de conserver
la beauté, by Antoine Le Camus, purported to be the translation of an Arabic
manuscript from the time of Mahomet II, the Ottoman Sultan who conquered
Constantinople in 1453. It was a tale of illicit love between Abdeker, a young
physician to the women of the Sultan’s harem, and Fatmé, an odalisque in his
seraglio and a woman of unequaled sweetness and beauty. Time and again Abdeker
gained access to the darkest mysteries
of the harem, to say nothing of the forbidden charms of the lovely Fatmé, by
teaching her the means of preserving her beauty while instructing her in the
arts of love.
Le Camus
wrote in the Orientalist tradition of the erotic exotic. He was one among many
Western observers of the Ottoman world fascinated by the image of the harem,
with its imagined air of perfumed sensuality and sexual licence. His book was
republished at least four times over the coming decades, was translated into
English and Italian, and was still in circulation when Mozart’s Die Entführung
aus dem Serail and Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia and L’Italiana in Algeri used
the harem to comic effect. In the visual arts, Western painters—famously Ingres
in his Grande Odalisque—returned time and again to the theme of the seraglio
from the late 18th century onward.
The
curiosity of the book, however, came neither from its romantic plot nor from
its erotic overtones but from the fact that it offered feminine beauty tips on
a broad range of subjects, bathing among them. Le Camus dotted his text with
bits of practical wisdom about women’s health, offering handy summaries of his major
points at the end of each of the book’s two parts. Here was a
healthcare catechism with a difference!
His
advice on bathing was set in the context of Abdekar’s visit to a bath in the
harem, a luxurious setting rich with the promise of voluptuous delights. But
the author’s suggestions about bathing were quite prosaic. One bathed to
preserve a white skin and to cleanse it of dirt, for pleasure and politeness as
well as for health. Bathing offered a host of natural benefits, Le Camus
declared, yet one should proceed with caution because inconsiderate use could
be the cause of major ills.
With its
emphasis on a suggestive world of exquisite sensuality, Le Camus’s advice left
the idea of such a bath in the realm of his reader’s imagination. For all but
the most privileged Europeans of the time, even the remote possibility of actually bathing in this
manner was utterly out of reach. In this respect the author’s views on how to
display and preserve feminine attractiveness were out of step with those
offered by most other advisers of the later 18th century. The beauty counselors
of the period had little to say about washing the body and much to say about a
host of other matters: cosmetics, perfumes, hair care, and dress, to name a
few.
But soon
after the turn of the century, some of these self-appointed advisers—most of
them male—began to pay more
attention to the role of bathing in women’s personal care. One of the
first was Auguste Caron, whose Toilette
des dames ou Encyclopédie de la beauté, published in 1806 and later translated
into English and Italian, hymned the
importance of cleanliness to women’s beauty. As the English edition explained,
“there is in the toilette of women one very
essential requisite, and which constitutes
its greatest merit in the eyes of the delicate man; I mean cleanliness.
Cleanliness alone, unaccompanied by any other recommendation, has a right to
please, to attract the eye, to gratify the taste, to excite desire; the
toilette, without cleanliness, fails in its object; it displays only idle
pretentions, bad taste and low sentiments. . . .Cleanliness is that precious
quality which nearly transforms a woman into a divinity, by removing from her
every thing that might betray the imperfections of human nature.”
In
Caron’s view, careful attention to her personal
hygiene, of her body and its clothing, was the primary means a woman
had to display and preserve
her beauty. He advocated frequent
bathing in warm water—never cold, which injured feminine loveliness—and even
suggested that scented soaps might be used to cleanse the skin more perfectly.
The face, hands, and feet should be washed regularly if bathing was not
possible. Hair, however, was quite another matter. While Caron advised the same
high standards for its cleanliness, he strongly criticized washing the head
with water, which produced aches of the head, ears, and teeth, as well as eye
complaints. Regular combing and the occasional application of hair powders or
bran would keep it clean.
The
19th-century woman addressed by these authors could only be a lady of leisure.
The frequent baths proposed by an anonymous Italian author in 1827—at least once weekly and more
often in the hot season—should take
at least one and
a half hours, an opinion shared
by Mme Celnart, another mentor generous
with her advice about matters feminine. A generation later Auguste Debay,
the prolific and widely published French author of guides to hygiene (clothes,
diet, beards, vocal organs, marriage, hands and feet, to name only some),
suggested that baths should probably
last longer still. Obviously the woman imagined by these authors had time on her
hands.
But of
far greater significance, by the early decades of the 19th century the virtues
of the bath had become indisputable, and from this point on it occupied a
central place in the advice directed to women. As Debay claimed in 1846, the
warm bath is essential to the cleanliness of the body, to the maintenance of
its flexibility and freshness; one can consider it necessary for the general
health of the individual.
But whatever support bathing could muster from the health and beauty guides, it also
had to contend with misgivings and restrictions, for modesty challenged the
spread of the bath throughout much of its long history. The Greco-Roman myth of
the huntress Artemis (or Diana) and Actaeon was one of its early expressions,
most widely known from the Renaissance onward through Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Tired from her day’s hunt, the chaste goddess Diana was surprised while bathing
in a limpid forest pool, together with her attending nymphs. The male intruder
was the mortal Actaeon, a hunter like herself, who blundered alone into her
sacred grove at the end of his day’s pursuits. The nymphs tried, but failed, to
cover Diana’s nakedness with their own and Actaeon saw her unclothed. In shame
and anger she took revenge by depriving him of speech and turning him into a
stag. Transformed, he took flight, but soon his hunting dogs took up the chase
and, unable to cry out, he met his death at their jaws, avenging Diana’s
wronged modesty.
The myth
was a recurring theme in European painting from the 16th to the 18th centuries,
with Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt among the many artists drawn to various
moments in the story. Some depicted Diana quietly bathing alone, others the
goddess in her grotto surrounded by her attendants. Still others—notably
Titian—portrayed the dramatic moment of Actaeon’s fatal glimpse and Diana is
chilling response. But the thread running through them all was a sense of
diffidence and reserve that surrounded the bathing female.
Excerpted
from The Clean Body : A Modern History.
Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.
How
Cleanliness and Beauty Became Intertwined in the 18th Century. By Peter Ward.
LitHub, December 11, 2019.
You
explain in the book that what first attracted you to the subject matter was an
interview you had with your grandfather in the 1970s. Why did you find now was
the right time to write and publish this particular book?
The Clean Body is a synthesis. It draws
together a literature in several languages from the past 3 centuries on many
aspects of the history of personal hygiene across the western world. The synthesis is a form of writing that sums
up the major findings of research on a subject and explores its primary
structures or patterns, commenting on its controversies and suggesting new pathways
for inquiry. By creating benchmarks and
signposts, syntheses fulfill an important function in historical writing,
particularly helpful because the field has become increasingly specialized
since the mid 20th century. Syntheses
thus provide an opportunity to sum up and distil the understandings we have
arrived at over time.
They also encourage academic historians to
address wider, non-specialist audiences.
Though we tend to think of our scholarly colleagues as our most
attentive readers, we also have a larger potential following among the book
reading public, and it’s more easily reached through syntheses than through
specialized works. Historians are
members of a shrinking minority within the university community that still has
the capacity to communicate with the general reader, and I think we have a
responsibility to do so. A broadly
shared sense of the past is an important feature of civil society. In addition, through publishing for a more
general audience we can help to link the reading public with our universities
and colleges, where much historical research occurs.
But
writing a synthesis isn’t for everyone.
It’s an activity best suited to those who’ve laboured long in the
vineyards of the past. Many years ago one of my colleagues, a fine economist
whose late career interests drew him to economic history, remarked to me: “the
trouble with history, Peter, is you have to know so much!” And it’s true. Historical knowledge and understanding are
cumulative; it takes a long time to master a subject to the extent needed to
write a mature synthesis.
For
these several reasons, this was the right time to write The Clean Body. Publishing a synthesis was an attractive
possibility because no one had previously attempted to do so on such a broad
scale, because the subject emerged from some of my long-standing academic
interests and because, approaching retirement as I was, turning a longstanding
a curiosity into a book seemed more important than ever.
You used
a variety of sources in your research, including ones in English, French,
German and Italian. What were a few of the “Crown Jewels” or most valuable
sources that you found?
As a
synthesis The Clean Body is necessarily based on the work of others, in this
case many others. In the historian’s
jargon, it relies principally on secondary rather than primary sources. Of them
I found some of the major work of the French historians Alain Corbin, Georges Vigarello
and Jean-Pierre Goubert foundational.
First published during the mid 1980s, and each in its own way, Corbin’s
The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Vigarello’s
Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages and
Goubert’s The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age
broke conceptual ground by exploring the deeper cultural meanings of popular
ideas and everyday practices.
I also drew heavily on a rich literature
written in Italian that’s not well known outside Italy. In the English-speaking world, historical
understandings of modern western Europe have long been shaped primarily by the
British and French experiences, and in the French instance, often through works
in translation, including those by Corbin, Vigarello and Goubert just
noted. For English speakers and readers
in particular, most other European national histories remain to some extent in
the shadows, in part because of limited
second language skills, in part because translated studies aren’t all that
common. Though I came late to Italian
and I’d like to be more fluent than I am, I now have access to an large body of
scholarship that hasn’t been as effectively integrated into western European
historical narratives as I believe it should be, and I’ve attempted this task
in The Clean Body. I leave it to others
to decide whether or not I’ve succeeded.
Why did
you find it important to focus on both Europe and North America rather than one
or the other?
To put
it simply, I think wholes are more important than their parts. One of the leading features of the making of
modern societies has been a gradual convergence of technologies, systems,
beliefs and understandings. Despite the
many national differences in the rich world today, most nations also hold many
fundamentals in common; in many respects, as well, what they share is more
important than what distinguishes them from each other. To choose an obvious example, urban
transportation systems across the western world have enough similarities that
it’s possible for us to find our way around cities that we’ve never visited
before. Thus, considering western Europe
and North America together was a way for me to focus on the most important
features of the personal hygiene transition.
At the
same time, the panoramic view also highlights important distinctions. The pathways to contemporary body care
practices varied from one country to the next, and within individual countries
as well, just as general conditions of material life among them differed. In turn, these differences influenced the
direction, the shape and the timing of the new hygiene’s progress. Though the ultimate destination was common to
all, the journey varied in important ways from one community to another, and
the contrasts help to highlight some of the major cultural changes experienced
en route.
The
Clean Body spans a vast time range. Why did you choose the time frame of four
centuries? What would you say was the biggest change from then to now?
When
planning this project I faced a choice between a survey that spanned the 2
millennia from the classical era to the present and one that emphasized the
modern era, broadly defined. A lively and highly enjoyable popular history of
bathing from Roman times to the recent past was published in 2007, and in my
view it fulfills the first need very well.
At the same time, it is anecdotal, descriptive more than explanatory,
and has much more to say about clean bodies than clean clothes, limitations
that I’ve tried to overcome.
I chose
the tighter time frame – the past 4 centuries – because it was long enough to
explore the slow diffusion of change in personal hygiene habits, and also
because it let me emphasize contrasts between 19th and 20th century practices
and those of earlier times. It also allowed me to address what I saw as a major
omission in much of what has been published on the subject. To me, most previous works seemed to lose
energy with the arrival of the 20th century, as if the cleanliness revolution
had run its course by the eve of World War I.
But this view misses an important part of the story because the
transformation of body care habits has continued to our own time. In particular, hygiene practices were
democratized during the second half of the century, becoming a mass phenomenon.
Meanwhile, beauty replaced hygiene as the main social imperative behind bathing
and wearing clean clothes.
In the
book you discuss how the idea of cleanliness as a social ideal rose with
consumerism and the influence of advertising. Do you think Western cultures
would have such a high standard for cleanliness today if we did not live in
societies centred around consumerism?
Probably
not – though I know that historians should always be wary when answering
questions about what hasn’t happened.
After all, our habits have been exposed to the language of persuasion
for well over a century and it’s been highly influential. But we should also be
careful not to confuse current practices with high standards of
cleanliness. Many of today’s body care
practices have little to do with being clean, even though they’re conducted in
the name of cleanliness. In addition, the meaning of ‘clean’ has changed
substantially over the past 4 centuries, especially after World War II. Since then the concept of cleanliness has
become deeply influenced, even absorbed, by the beauty care industry and the
resulting conflation of beauty with cleanliness clouds the issue.
Were
there any differences in your approach to The Clean Body than your other works
such as White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward
Orientals in British Columbia; Courtship, Love and Marriage in
Nineteenth-Century English Canada and Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women’s
Living Standards in the Industrializing West?
My major
books have differed substantially from one another, both conceptually and
methodologically. The first, White
Canada Forever, was a revision and extension of my doctoral thesis. History
dissertations require the author to demonstrate a mastery of archival and
secondary research on a novel topic and skill in writing a sustained work of
historical analysis. In this respect my thesis, and the book that it led to,
were no different from most that follow this trajectory. I was interested in exploring the Canadian
response to Asian immigration as an expression of popular racial attitudes and
as a set of public policies that formalized racial discrimination. The book was also an example of historical
writing from a national perspective even though it focused primarily on the
westernmost province in the country. I
relied primarily on national and provincial government records and newspaper
sources for this project.
In
contrast, Courtship, Love and Marriage was an attempt to examine the history of
family formation in 19th century Canada.
What interested me most was the interplay between the various
structuralfeatures of the marriage market (religious beliefs, legal
requirements, demographic and economic factors, courting customs) and growth of
romantic intimacy within couples as they moved toward marriage. In this case most of my research was done in
family papers, especially diaries and letters.
In my
third book, Birth Weight and Economic Growth, I went for a walk with the
econometric historians, combining quantitative techniques with the tools and
sources of the social historian. The
book rests on large samples of clinical data drawn from 19th and 20th century
maternity hospital records in 5 European and North American cities. The approach employs the basic statistical
methods of the social sciences and is rigorously comparative. My goal was to use a common biological marker
of maternal and infant wellbeing to assess the impact of industrialization on
women, whose welfare in the past had long been largely ignored.
What
surprised you the most in your research and writing process?
Looking
back over the course of the project, I’m struck by the length of time over
which the personal hygiene revolution unfolded.
It took the better part of 2 centuries for the transformation to reach
its conclusion. There were no great discoveries or sudden turning points in
this process, just a slow evolution of understandings, practices, technologies
and living standards. Initially adopted
by small groups of privileged people, these customs gradually touched the lives
of greater and greater numbers as beliefs about body care evolved and changing
circumstances made it easier to be clean. The central theme of this story has
much less to do with innovation than with diffusion, the spread of habits
across social as much as national boundaries and, in the end, their central
place in fashioning the modern man and woman.
What do
you most want readers to take away from The Clean Body?
Two
things, one historical, one personal.
First the historical. The Clean
Body is a history of habits. It’s a history of the mundane, the everyday, a
history without great events, great ideas and great actors. Its chief importance lies in the fact that it
deals with some of life’s most commonplace activities. But commonplace doesn’t mean trivial. Time use studies from the late 20th century
suggest that, everywhere in the western world, most adults now devote about an
hour every day to grooming themselves.
In these same countries households spend 5% or more of their annual
incomes on personal hygiene. And, at a
national level, keeping clean accounts for roughly the same proportion of
GDP. So the history of the unremarkable
and the ordinary have an importance of their own, one that can easily surpass
the history of greatness in any of its many forms.
As to
the personal, though I suspect the idea is rather passé, I’ve always considered
historical writing a form of literature and good writing an essential part of
the historian’s task. By good I don’t
mean florid or elaborate or preciously obscure.
I value clear, direct and lively writing because it communicates
effectively. And at its best it can also
reveal a play of language that brings the reader an aesthetic pleasure quite
apart from the formal meaning of the text.
I’d be delighted if The Clean Body pleased some readers in this way as
well.
The
History of Personal Hygiene: An Interview with Peter Ward. By Aleisha Smith. History News Network , November 17, 2019.
