A while back, I started to wonder when the tradition of showering every day became common. Theories I read online were that it was advent of indoor plumbing, and particularly showers in the 1950s, that made it common. I also asked my parents what they remembered about bathing from when they were growing up. Their responses, while interesting, are hardly a good sample set. I mostly forgot about the topic until I read an article in the New York Times about how some people forgo a daily bath. The article mentioned a book, “The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History†by Katherine Ashenburg, which I recently finished reading.
The book looks at bathing and standards of cleanliness, starting with the ancient Greeks and Romans, up through modern times. The book mostly focuses on Europe and the U.S., though Japan and India are mentioned at various times. It’s a fascinating book that focuses on what “clean†or “dirty†meant in various times. There were multiple times in Europe’s history when being dirty was considered virtuous and saints were lauded for how infrequently they washed. Contrasted with the dire fear of dirt, germs, or smell in the U.S. today, it’s astonishing how widely cultural standards can vary over time.
Some of the most interesting things I learned:
Public bathing was the norm, until the late 1800 or early 1900s, when indoor plumbing became more common. The ancient Roman bathhouses, and those exported to Europe, were for use by nobles and the poor alike. It was like a fair, with people selling scented oils, food, massages, and more to the bathers. There were hot tubs, cold tubs, showers, steam rooms, and dry saunas. The description struck me as very similar to the spas I’ve been to Las Vegas and Bedford Springs. Indeed Bedford Springs was started as a spa in the medical sense, where the ill or infirm would “take in the waters†and have prescribed baths to cure them.
After a going in and out of popularity a few times, we’re now in an upswing where daily baths are considered the standard of clean. This upswing started in the late 1800s. The United States embraced cleanliness so wholeheartedly probably because our cities were expanding as bathing grew in popularity among the middle and upper classes. (Not everyone was convinced that daily baths were all that important.) Constructing apartments with plumbing from the beginning was easier than retrofitting into old buildings, like most of Europe had to do. Advertising also had a lot to do with our concern over cleanliness. There were books on love or cleanliness in the middle ages that explained how to clean yourself, with admonitions that you won’t be as attractive if you don’t clean as described. Rekindling that concern, and making it clear that you might offend someone with your scent was central to advertisements, starting in the early 1900s.
While the book has a lot of interesting information, some of it was hard to put into context. The author would include quotations or letters from a hundred years earlier or later than the topic at hand, just to make the point. And, almost by necessity, the chapters on older times compressed a lot more years into a single chapter than the later ones. There’s one chapter on the 550 years between 1000 and 1550 and another for the 50 years between 1900 and 1950. While there is more information about those 50 years, it makes it difficult to get a feel for how long it takes to shift public opinion of cleanliness.
After reading this book, I finally have some answers to my questions about daily bathing and its popularity. In short: it’s not new, but it’s probably not necessary either.