Lewis
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Moe pushes Larry, fully clothed, into a bathtub full of water.
"Hey, what's the big idea?" Larry splutters. "It ain't Saturday night."
This punch line mystifies most people today. But during the 1930s, when the Three Stooges began making their comedy shorts, moviegoers could still remember, and laugh about, an era when bathing was something most people did once a week. Saturday night was the cliche time for people to come clean because one wanted to look one's best for church the next morning.
In reality, the once-a-week bath represented a historic step forward in cleanliness for Americans.
As late as 1850, one out of every four of New England's reputedly prim and proper Yankees bathed less than once a year, according to one survey. Nineteenth century visitors from Europe saw Americans as filthy and disgusting.
Not anymore.
Nowadays American tourists look down their squeaky clean noses on Europe's inferior plumbing and cringe at the sight of hairy legs and underarms on the rest of the world's women.
How did we get so obsessive about cleanliness and grooming? It's a complicated story and one only now being pieced together by social historians. But the causes seem to boil down to a combination of war, fear of disease, bacteriology, plumbing, education and, of course, advertising.
In her ground-breaking social history, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford University Press), Suellen Hoy of Notre Dame's history department traces the origins of the cleanliness movement to the early 19th century, when health experts began to understand how diseases spread.
Many people think America got religion for cleanliness from Methodism-founder John Wesley, who in his sermons from the latte 1700s declared cleanliness to be next to godliness. But Hoy has studied those sermons and says Wesley was talking about simplicity of dress and morality, not soap and water.
Certainly the grimy farmers who heard Wesley's words didn't feel any less godly for doing dirty work. From colonial days forward, Hoy explains, most Americans looked kindly on dirt and waste because their crops were nourished by the natural fertilizer of manure. Little concern was shown for the mud and animal droppings tracked into houses -- not to mention one's personal odor -- because little could be done about either condition. By the end of the Civil War, only 5 percent of American houses had running water. As late as 1880, five out of six Americans had no means of washing or bathing other than pails and sponges. The toilet had been invented in 1809 but was rarely used before the 1880s.
The fictitious Cartwrights of TV's Bonanza may have always appeared freshly laundered, but in the real Old West, clothes washing was a chore eagerly avoided. Before cotton fabric became readily available, cowboys wore linen or knitted wool shirts, which simply were hung out to dry when sweaty.
On summer nights, flies bedeviled adults and swarmed over infants in houses devoid of screens. In winter, urban residents navigated around the frozen reminders of the tens of thousands of horses with which they shared the streets.
Progress toward a cleaner America didn't commence in earnest, Hoy says, until the middle of the 1800s, when Americans began to heed the advice of such health reformers as Florence Nightingale; New York's Frederick Olmsted, who designed Central Park; Sylvester Graham of graham-cracker fame; and Catharine Beecher, sister of abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. They pleaded that sanitation was essential not just for good housekeeping, but in combating disease.
Called the "apostle of cleanliness," Nightingale gained worldwide attention by exposing deplorable conditions in British military hospitals during the Crimean War. Her reports included jarring descriptions of wounded men lying on floors in their own excrement and dead dogs rotting under ward windows.
Statistics bore out Nightingale's belief that disease killed far more soldiers than bullets. After the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, a U.S. government study reported that 1,500 American troops had perished in action, but more than six times that number had died of disease.
A decade later, the Civil War promised a repeat performance. Soldiers rarely washed, and they saw no reason to hike to a trench latrine when the ground outside their tent was more convenient. Dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid and malaria flourished in both Union and Confederate camps.
Camp conditions improved somewhat on the Union side as the war wore on, thanks to reforms instituted by Olmsted and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Disease continued to kill troops faster than weapons, but at least the ratio narrowed.
The rebels weren't as fortunate. Perpetually ill-equipped, Confederate troops suffered both from unsanitary conditions and inadequate clothing. In his research for a seminar course on the history of American cleanliness, which Hoy taught for the first time in the spring 1996 semester, history major Michael Tierney recalls the plight of the sore-footed soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. So desperate were they for new footwear that during their invasion of Pennsylvania in 1883 a division was dispatched to find a rumored supply of shoes in a nearby small college town. Unfortunately, they ran into Union cavalry along the way and never found out if there were shoes in Gettysburg.
Hoy says research in the decades immediately following the war brought a greater understanding of how filth related to illness. By the turn of the century, scientists knew for certain that microorganisms were what spread disease, not "miasmas" or noxious atmosphere, as many, including Nightingale, believed.
From that point on, health concerns continued to be a major reason Americans pursued cleaner homes, cities and bodies. Civic pride drove municipalities to extend sanitary sewer lines and muster street cleaning brigades. Cleanliness became a patriotic virtue.
It did have an ugly side. The freshly scrubbed, if only recently enlightened, citizenry came to regard the millions of people they saw coming off the boats as "the great unwashed."
For their part, the new Americans eagerly tried to live up to their adopted country's spick-and-span standards. So did many members of the country's earlier, forced immigrant group -- African Americans. Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, taught fellow blacks that if they ever hoped to gain equality in society they would have to keep themselves as clean as the cleanest Caucasians.
"For African Americans, however," Hoy says, "integration proved to be only a mirage. Once they removed their dirt, whites found it nearly impossible to forgive them their color."
The world itself was gradually becoming more aware of the new clean American. One British writer took note of the appearance of U.S. soldiers arriving in Europe for World War I. As Hoy's student Tierney mentions in his seminar paper, the Army shipped millions of toothbrushes and razor blades to Europe so its soldiers could maintain the personal hygiene required of them back home. The British writer was particularly impressed by the G.I.'s fine teeth: "It is a distinctive mark of an American," he wrote. "They shame the ordinary Tommy."
Keeping clean became easier and more customary in the early to mid-20th century as plumbing and electrical lines wove together urban neighborhoods. But rural areas lagged behind. As late as 1935, only 11 percent of the country's 6.28 million farms had electricity.
To their dismay, farm women were among the last to reap the cleaning benefits of modernization. A 1945 survey found that 12 percent of homes in a well-to-do farming community still did not have running water in the kitchen. While many farm husbands were out buying milking machines and other labor-saving devices, wives were expected to make do the old-fashioned way.
In 1948 a government worker wrote of having more than once seen a pipe that ran from a farm's well to the barn but not the house. The homemaker inside still had to lug water in by hand.
"It makes me wonder a little," the official wrote, "whether the farmer loves his cows more than he loves his wife."
The lack of utilities only made hard times worse in rural areas. In the Plains states, overcultivation of grasslands and drought produced the disastrous Dust Bowl years of the mid-1930s. Millions of tons of vital topsoil went up in wind; crop failure was automatic. Photographs of the lifeless fields serve as grim postcards from Depression-era rural America.
Less well known are the effects the dust storms had on farm homes. As part of her research for Hoy's class, history major and Kansan Diana Shepard interviewed a great-aunt who lived through the Dust Bowl. The woman recalled how farm wives would stuff rags and old clothing under doors and around windows to keep the fine dust out of the houses. But it proved impossible. Families had to eat meals with damp sheets hung like a tent over the table, and laundry was hung indoors to dry. If a dust storm came up while wet sheets hung outside, Shepard says, "the housewife would have nothing but balls of mud."
While farm families struggled to survive the Dust Bowl, other consumers were discovering new cleaning products on their store shelves. Edward Breck, whose father had been concocting shampoos for three decades hoping to cure his own hair loss, introduced the first pH-balanced shampoo in 1930, according to American studies major Courtenay Collins. Kimberley-Clark Company learned of the novel use World War I nurses had found for the company's celluocotton bandaging material and developed Kotex sanitary pads. The product offered an alternative to the washable flannel diapers many women wore to absorb menstrual flows. According to Anne Spurgeon, author of Marketing the Unmentionable, Kotex pads started out as a luxury item, each costing about as much as a loaf of bread.
It was the job of adverting copy writers not only to explain what these new products could do but, in some cases, to overcome misperceptions. Some in conservative circles, for instance, perceived Tampax tampons, patented in 1931, as a threat to virginity and morality, reports history and business major Jennifer Cobb in her paper, "Forget the Rags and Rigmarole: An Analysis of the Change in the Marketing of Feminine Hygiene Products, 1920s-1950s."
As Cobb and others in Hoy's class discovered, ads for cleaning and personal-care products promised more than mere protection from disease--and more than they could deliver. Then, as now, the goal was to associate mundane goods like soap, floor wax and cleanser with desirables like beauty, sexiness, popularity, status and intelligence.
Taking careful aim at women, who did most of the shopping, ads suggested that using a certain deodorant could help land a handsome husband, whereas an inferior hand soap might leave a mommy with skin like a mummy's.
Lacking government regulation, advertisers also tested the bounds of reason. In researching the early years of dental hygiene products, American studies major Shannon Marie Leonard came across Sanitol toothpaste's 1910 assertion that its product made children "feel better, think clearer and learn lessons easier."
Even tobacco companies found ways to put the ideal of cleanliness to work for them. As cigarettes increasingly found their way into the painted mouths of rebellious flappers in the 1920s, some companies began describing smokes with terms like "delicately scented." History major Emily Wilkinson discovered arguably the ultimate co-opting of clean-mindedness for unclean ends in a 1931 ad in Vanity Fair magazine. It promoted a new women's cigarette made by mouthwash bottler Listerine.
Nine out of 11 student historians in Hoy's seminar were women, and many of the research reports emphasize the sexist way cleaning and grooming products were marketed. Some also condemn advertising for reinforcing the notion that women should worry only about their looks and taking care of a home and children.
Whether it was the ads that shaped society's values or the other way around is open to debate. But enough evidence exists to conclude that America's interest in keeping clean has depended more on how much time women have had to put into it than men.
A significant, but often overlooked, advance in cleaning convenience occurred in the 1940s with the opening of the first laundromats. Until then most housewives either washed clothes by hand -- a miserable job -- or paid a commercial laundry, a costly alternative. According to research by American studies major Betsy Parker, consumers found the first in-home washing machines too unreliable and costly to operate. Then came World War II, and shortages of labor and soap soiled the commercial laundries' reputation for service.
According to news reports, when the first "Launderette" opened in New York City's Parkchester development in 1944, women formed a line three blocks long and police were called in to keep order. Three years later, self-service laundries had spread to more than 700 cities, Parker found.
Hoy believes America's standard of cleanliness peaked in the booming 1950s, when the stay-at-home mom was still the norm and home ownership became a reality for many more people. Prosperity has always been a key to cleanliness as people who can't afford bread don't purchase much Windex.
Hoy thinks things began to slip in 1960s, first as the counterculture movement raised questions about the importance of having dazzling counter tops. Then came the environmental movement and concerns about the overuse of pesticides and harsh cleaning products.
America now appears to be at a cleanliness crossroads. Hoy sees people becoming more tolerant of messes as more women have begun working outside the home. At the same time, domestic cleaning services like Molly Maids and Merry Maids are increasingly in demand, a trend detailed by another of Hoy's students, Meghan O'Brien.
Although our floors may not sparkle like they once did, our search for such maid service suggests we aren't yet comfortable coming home to a pigsty.
Review of: Hoy, S. Chasing dirt: the American pursuit of cleanliness. Oxford University Press, 1995; Williams, M.T. Washing "the great unwashed": public baths in urban America, 1840-1920. Ohio State University Press, 1991.]
"Hey, what's the big idea?" Larry splutters. "It ain't Saturday night."
This punch line mystifies most people today. But during the 1930s, when the Three Stooges began making their comedy shorts, moviegoers could still remember, and laugh about, an era when bathing was something most people did once a week. Saturday night was the cliche time for people to come clean because one wanted to look one's best for church the next morning.
In reality, the once-a-week bath represented a historic step forward in cleanliness for Americans.
As late as 1850, one out of every four of New England's reputedly prim and proper Yankees bathed less than once a year, according to one survey. Nineteenth century visitors from Europe saw Americans as filthy and disgusting.
Not anymore.
Nowadays American tourists look down their squeaky clean noses on Europe's inferior plumbing and cringe at the sight of hairy legs and underarms on the rest of the world's women.
How did we get so obsessive about cleanliness and grooming? It's a complicated story and one only now being pieced together by social historians. But the causes seem to boil down to a combination of war, fear of disease, bacteriology, plumbing, education and, of course, advertising.
In her ground-breaking social history, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford University Press), Suellen Hoy of Notre Dame's history department traces the origins of the cleanliness movement to the early 19th century, when health experts began to understand how diseases spread.
Many people think America got religion for cleanliness from Methodism-founder John Wesley, who in his sermons from the latte 1700s declared cleanliness to be next to godliness. But Hoy has studied those sermons and says Wesley was talking about simplicity of dress and morality, not soap and water.
Certainly the grimy farmers who heard Wesley's words didn't feel any less godly for doing dirty work. From colonial days forward, Hoy explains, most Americans looked kindly on dirt and waste because their crops were nourished by the natural fertilizer of manure. Little concern was shown for the mud and animal droppings tracked into houses -- not to mention one's personal odor -- because little could be done about either condition. By the end of the Civil War, only 5 percent of American houses had running water. As late as 1880, five out of six Americans had no means of washing or bathing other than pails and sponges. The toilet had been invented in 1809 but was rarely used before the 1880s.
The fictitious Cartwrights of TV's Bonanza may have always appeared freshly laundered, but in the real Old West, clothes washing was a chore eagerly avoided. Before cotton fabric became readily available, cowboys wore linen or knitted wool shirts, which simply were hung out to dry when sweaty.
On summer nights, flies bedeviled adults and swarmed over infants in houses devoid of screens. In winter, urban residents navigated around the frozen reminders of the tens of thousands of horses with which they shared the streets.
Progress toward a cleaner America didn't commence in earnest, Hoy says, until the middle of the 1800s, when Americans began to heed the advice of such health reformers as Florence Nightingale; New York's Frederick Olmsted, who designed Central Park; Sylvester Graham of graham-cracker fame; and Catharine Beecher, sister of abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. They pleaded that sanitation was essential not just for good housekeeping, but in combating disease.
Called the "apostle of cleanliness," Nightingale gained worldwide attention by exposing deplorable conditions in British military hospitals during the Crimean War. Her reports included jarring descriptions of wounded men lying on floors in their own excrement and dead dogs rotting under ward windows.
Statistics bore out Nightingale's belief that disease killed far more soldiers than bullets. After the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, a U.S. government study reported that 1,500 American troops had perished in action, but more than six times that number had died of disease.
A decade later, the Civil War promised a repeat performance. Soldiers rarely washed, and they saw no reason to hike to a trench latrine when the ground outside their tent was more convenient. Dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid and malaria flourished in both Union and Confederate camps.
Camp conditions improved somewhat on the Union side as the war wore on, thanks to reforms instituted by Olmsted and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Disease continued to kill troops faster than weapons, but at least the ratio narrowed.
The rebels weren't as fortunate. Perpetually ill-equipped, Confederate troops suffered both from unsanitary conditions and inadequate clothing. In his research for a seminar course on the history of American cleanliness, which Hoy taught for the first time in the spring 1996 semester, history major Michael Tierney recalls the plight of the sore-footed soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. So desperate were they for new footwear that during their invasion of Pennsylvania in 1883 a division was dispatched to find a rumored supply of shoes in a nearby small college town. Unfortunately, they ran into Union cavalry along the way and never found out if there were shoes in Gettysburg.
Hoy says research in the decades immediately following the war brought a greater understanding of how filth related to illness. By the turn of the century, scientists knew for certain that microorganisms were what spread disease, not "miasmas" or noxious atmosphere, as many, including Nightingale, believed.
From that point on, health concerns continued to be a major reason Americans pursued cleaner homes, cities and bodies. Civic pride drove municipalities to extend sanitary sewer lines and muster street cleaning brigades. Cleanliness became a patriotic virtue.
It did have an ugly side. The freshly scrubbed, if only recently enlightened, citizenry came to regard the millions of people they saw coming off the boats as "the great unwashed."
For their part, the new Americans eagerly tried to live up to their adopted country's spick-and-span standards. So did many members of the country's earlier, forced immigrant group -- African Americans. Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, taught fellow blacks that if they ever hoped to gain equality in society they would have to keep themselves as clean as the cleanest Caucasians.
"For African Americans, however," Hoy says, "integration proved to be only a mirage. Once they removed their dirt, whites found it nearly impossible to forgive them their color."
The world itself was gradually becoming more aware of the new clean American. One British writer took note of the appearance of U.S. soldiers arriving in Europe for World War I. As Hoy's student Tierney mentions in his seminar paper, the Army shipped millions of toothbrushes and razor blades to Europe so its soldiers could maintain the personal hygiene required of them back home. The British writer was particularly impressed by the G.I.'s fine teeth: "It is a distinctive mark of an American," he wrote. "They shame the ordinary Tommy."
Keeping clean became easier and more customary in the early to mid-20th century as plumbing and electrical lines wove together urban neighborhoods. But rural areas lagged behind. As late as 1935, only 11 percent of the country's 6.28 million farms had electricity.
To their dismay, farm women were among the last to reap the cleaning benefits of modernization. A 1945 survey found that 12 percent of homes in a well-to-do farming community still did not have running water in the kitchen. While many farm husbands were out buying milking machines and other labor-saving devices, wives were expected to make do the old-fashioned way.
In 1948 a government worker wrote of having more than once seen a pipe that ran from a farm's well to the barn but not the house. The homemaker inside still had to lug water in by hand.
"It makes me wonder a little," the official wrote, "whether the farmer loves his cows more than he loves his wife."
The lack of utilities only made hard times worse in rural areas. In the Plains states, overcultivation of grasslands and drought produced the disastrous Dust Bowl years of the mid-1930s. Millions of tons of vital topsoil went up in wind; crop failure was automatic. Photographs of the lifeless fields serve as grim postcards from Depression-era rural America.
Less well known are the effects the dust storms had on farm homes. As part of her research for Hoy's class, history major and Kansan Diana Shepard interviewed a great-aunt who lived through the Dust Bowl. The woman recalled how farm wives would stuff rags and old clothing under doors and around windows to keep the fine dust out of the houses. But it proved impossible. Families had to eat meals with damp sheets hung like a tent over the table, and laundry was hung indoors to dry. If a dust storm came up while wet sheets hung outside, Shepard says, "the housewife would have nothing but balls of mud."
While farm families struggled to survive the Dust Bowl, other consumers were discovering new cleaning products on their store shelves. Edward Breck, whose father had been concocting shampoos for three decades hoping to cure his own hair loss, introduced the first pH-balanced shampoo in 1930, according to American studies major Courtenay Collins. Kimberley-Clark Company learned of the novel use World War I nurses had found for the company's celluocotton bandaging material and developed Kotex sanitary pads. The product offered an alternative to the washable flannel diapers many women wore to absorb menstrual flows. According to Anne Spurgeon, author of Marketing the Unmentionable, Kotex pads started out as a luxury item, each costing about as much as a loaf of bread.
It was the job of adverting copy writers not only to explain what these new products could do but, in some cases, to overcome misperceptions. Some in conservative circles, for instance, perceived Tampax tampons, patented in 1931, as a threat to virginity and morality, reports history and business major Jennifer Cobb in her paper, "Forget the Rags and Rigmarole: An Analysis of the Change in the Marketing of Feminine Hygiene Products, 1920s-1950s."
As Cobb and others in Hoy's class discovered, ads for cleaning and personal-care products promised more than mere protection from disease--and more than they could deliver. Then, as now, the goal was to associate mundane goods like soap, floor wax and cleanser with desirables like beauty, sexiness, popularity, status and intelligence.
Taking careful aim at women, who did most of the shopping, ads suggested that using a certain deodorant could help land a handsome husband, whereas an inferior hand soap might leave a mommy with skin like a mummy's.
Lacking government regulation, advertisers also tested the bounds of reason. In researching the early years of dental hygiene products, American studies major Shannon Marie Leonard came across Sanitol toothpaste's 1910 assertion that its product made children "feel better, think clearer and learn lessons easier."
Even tobacco companies found ways to put the ideal of cleanliness to work for them. As cigarettes increasingly found their way into the painted mouths of rebellious flappers in the 1920s, some companies began describing smokes with terms like "delicately scented." History major Emily Wilkinson discovered arguably the ultimate co-opting of clean-mindedness for unclean ends in a 1931 ad in Vanity Fair magazine. It promoted a new women's cigarette made by mouthwash bottler Listerine.
Nine out of 11 student historians in Hoy's seminar were women, and many of the research reports emphasize the sexist way cleaning and grooming products were marketed. Some also condemn advertising for reinforcing the notion that women should worry only about their looks and taking care of a home and children.
Whether it was the ads that shaped society's values or the other way around is open to debate. But enough evidence exists to conclude that America's interest in keeping clean has depended more on how much time women have had to put into it than men.
A significant, but often overlooked, advance in cleaning convenience occurred in the 1940s with the opening of the first laundromats. Until then most housewives either washed clothes by hand -- a miserable job -- or paid a commercial laundry, a costly alternative. According to research by American studies major Betsy Parker, consumers found the first in-home washing machines too unreliable and costly to operate. Then came World War II, and shortages of labor and soap soiled the commercial laundries' reputation for service.
According to news reports, when the first "Launderette" opened in New York City's Parkchester development in 1944, women formed a line three blocks long and police were called in to keep order. Three years later, self-service laundries had spread to more than 700 cities, Parker found.
Hoy believes America's standard of cleanliness peaked in the booming 1950s, when the stay-at-home mom was still the norm and home ownership became a reality for many more people. Prosperity has always been a key to cleanliness as people who can't afford bread don't purchase much Windex.
Hoy thinks things began to slip in 1960s, first as the counterculture movement raised questions about the importance of having dazzling counter tops. Then came the environmental movement and concerns about the overuse of pesticides and harsh cleaning products.
America now appears to be at a cleanliness crossroads. Hoy sees people becoming more tolerant of messes as more women have begun working outside the home. At the same time, domestic cleaning services like Molly Maids and Merry Maids are increasingly in demand, a trend detailed by another of Hoy's students, Meghan O'Brien.
Although our floors may not sparkle like they once did, our search for such maid service suggests we aren't yet comfortable coming home to a pigsty.
Review of: Hoy, S. Chasing dirt: the American pursuit of cleanliness. Oxford University Press, 1995; Williams, M.T. Washing "the great unwashed": public baths in urban America, 1840-1920. Ohio State University Press, 1991.]
