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© Roger-Viollet; P. 152 bidet, Getty Images, “Woman at her toilette,” Louis-Léopold Boilly; P. 163 shower bath, © The British Library (Design & Work); P. 166 bath cabinet, The British Library, C12112-08, P. 6; P. 180 travelling trunk, The British Library, C12112-07, P. 208; P. 183 man in device, gta Archiv / ETH Zürich; P. 185 bébé learns to wash, author’s collection; P. 188 steam bath, gta Archiv / ETH Zürich; P. 189 bathroom, author’s collection; P. 193 soldiers, author’s collection, P. 202 outdoor shower, gta Archiv / ETH Zürich; P. 210 hospital, Collection of The New-York Historical Society; P. 211 Washington, Cheynes Studio, Hampton, Va, 1903; P. 215 washing up, “Newsboys washing for dinner,” Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection, Riis #167; P. 217 bathtub, “Bath-tub in Airshaft,” c. 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection, Riis #ST5; P. 230 woman in bathroom, gta Archiv / ETH Zürich; P. 234 makeshift shower, author’s collection; P. 242 Pears’ soap, author’s collection; P. 245 Listerine, author’s collection; P. 255 Kotex, Wisconsin Historical Society, WHI-49898; P. 256 Lifebuoy, author’s collection; P. 274 Tolaas, © Matti Hillig; P. 287 Ontario poster, Text and Advertisement © Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2006. Reproduced with permission. Photograph: © Getty Image Library; P. 289 Clean Shopper, photo courtesy of Babe Ease, LLC.

KATHERINE ASHENBURG has worked as the Arts and Books editor of the Globe and Mail and a CBC Radio producer. She has written about travel for the New York Times and architecture for Toronto Life magazine. Her books include Going to Town: Architectural Walking Tours in Southern Ontario and The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die. She lives in Toronto.

Vintage Special Features

THE DIRT ON CLEAN:

AN UNSANITIZED HISTORY

SPECIAL FEATURES*

Author Q&A 2

The Look of the Book 6

Q: You’ve written three books, Going to Town, about architectural walking tours of Ontario towns; The Mourner’s Dance, about mourning customs around the world; and now The Dirt on Clean. Do people ever remark that your subjects are very diverse?

A: Yes, and in a way they are. But behind all three is a fascination with the history of how people lived their everyday lives. Military or diplomatic history doesn’t speak to me, but I want to know why nineteenth-century Ontario bedrooms had slanted walls, or why we wore certain colours in mourning, or—as in The Dirt on Clean—when deodorant was invented or why people in the seventeenth century thought linen shirts would actually clean their bodies.

Q: The book begins with Homer’s characters in The Odyssey and ends with us, in the twenty-first century. How did you research twenty-eight centuries of washing the body?

A: With difficulty, as it turned out! I remember, before I began the book, someone asking me how I would do the research. I answered confidently that I love research and it would be no problem. Well, you know what pride goeth before. My previous book, The Mourner’s Dance, was a big research project, but information about mourning is everywhere—because all cultures except our own have understood that mourning is a central, basic human activity.

The practice of washing our bodies is the very opposite of this. You don’t write about what you’re not doing, so people in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries would not write in their diaries or letters, “Today, for the four-hundredth day in a row, I did not wash my body.” And we don’t write about the mundane, everyday things we do, so we don’t write in our diaries or emails, “This morning I got up, took a shower, washed my body with soap and water, dried it, applied deodorant, etc.” The only time that people did write about washing themselves was in the times of transition, for example, when people suddenly stopped washing in the middle ages because they feared the plague, or when they tentatively began washing again, in the mid-eighteenth century. Those were the times people would write about doing something different.

So I found myself sitting on the