• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 723 0

One of the successes in France was the laundry side of the bathhouse, which was always more patronized than the baths—a priority given to clean clothes rather than bodies that recalls the France of Louis XIV. When it came to the washing of bodies, the situation improved with the importation of the German shower around the beginning of the twentieth century. Traditional reservations persisted—a newspaper cartoon showed a maid helping her mistress into her portable home bath, while asking if it was true that she, the maid, would have to wash in public. Her friend had read that in the paper: “But that would be indecent!” In spite of those qualms, municipal showers were popular almost immediately and they attracted many more women than in Britain. In 1908, half of the municipal showers’ 150,000 customers were women. One of the traditional features of working-class districts, public showers continued to be built in poor French neighbourhoods and in villages until the late 1930s. The French, especially those in cities and towns, had taken some long strides toward cleanliness in the course of the nineteenth century. But at the same time they, and Europeans in general, were being far outdistanced by a country they thought of as a rough pioneer upstart—America.

WET ALL OVER AT ONCE

AMERICA, 1815–1900

At the end of the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Drinker did something brave. The Drinkers were prosperous Philadelphia Quakers, and Henry Drinker had installed a primitive shower in their backyard in 1798. For the first summer his wife hesitated, watching her daughters and women servants entering the upright box and pulling a chain that released the water stored in an overhead container. The women showered in gowns and oilcloth caps. Elizabeth did not submit herself to the new contraption until 1 July 1799. “I bore it better than I expected,” she reported in her diary, “not having been wett all over at once, for 28 years past.”

Before the Civil War, Americans were as dirty as Europeans. As in Europe, the odd wealthy maverick nourished a craving for cleanliness, but at the beginning of the century, most Americans, like their British cousins, regarded unwashed bodies as inevitable and unworrying if not positively healthful. By the 1880s, however, something happened that no one could have predicted. The United States-rising, pushing and still raw in many ways—had become the Western country that most embraced the gospel of hygiene. And by the end of the century, urban Americans, at least, routinely distinguished between filthy Europeans and their own “clean” ways.

Charles Dickens, in Philadelphia in 1842, wrote admiringly that the city “is most bountifully provided with fresh water, which is showered and jerked about, and turned on, and poured off, everywhere.”

Why did Americans take the lead? One answer is, because they could. Water mains and sewers were installed in new cities more easily than in ancient ones. With abundant, cheap land, houses with ample space for bathrooms became the domestic norm, in contrast to Europe’s old, crowded apartments. Because servants were always in short supply in democratic America, labour-saving devices were prized. High on the list was plumbing, and from the 1870s American plumbing outstripped that of every other country.

But to say “because they could” only pushes the question further back. America’s physical and technological advantages were important but not definitive. More widespread cleanliness, although difficult, would have been possible in Europe sooner if people had wanted it more, since plumbing technology existed long before there was a popular demand for it. Why did Americans, apparently more than Germans, Spaniards, French and English people, want to be clean? They feared disease, and had repeated outbreaks of typhoid and cholera, but no more so than the Europeans. They were influenced by the same scientific theories—from the mistaken belief in the dangers of miasma to Pasteur’s germ theory, which became widely accepted only at the beginning of the twentieth century.

There