The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [74]
In the decades before the Civil War, when few Americans had hot-water pipes above the first floor, a stay in a hotel (and Americans, by European standards, were keen travellers) introduced many of them to the comfort of a hot bath in convenient proximity to their bedroom. By the end of the century, various hotels were vying to be the first that could boast “every room with bath.” The probable winner was the Hotel Statler in Buffalo, the first in the chain founded by Ellsworth Statler. In 1908, the new hotel advertised “A Room and a Bath for a Dollar and a Half.”
Where hotels led, private houses followed, although more slowly. Thousands of homeowners and builders looked for inspiration in the pattern books, complete with floor plans, written by the influential American architect Andrew Jackson Downing. In 1842, in a design for a cottage “in the Old English style,” Downing positioned an eight-by ten—foot room with a bathtub on the second floor, directly above the kitchen so that its pipes connected to the kitchen boiler. At the end of the passage, separate from this early “bath-room,” as Downing spelled it, was a compartment with a toilet. In general, English architects preferred to divorce bathtubs and water closets, but by mid—century Americans were tending to put all the plumbing in the same room. Many people continued to use wash basins in their bedrooms until the final decades of the century, so the sink came last to the usual trinity of modern bathroom fixtures.
In the mid—nineteenth century, only the wealthiest Americans had a fixed bathtub in its own room, but Downing and another popular author of pattern books, Clement Vaux, inserted these novel rooms into fairly modest houses as well as more expensive ones. Their authority, and the wide dissemination of their pattern books, inclined many Americans to think that owning a bathroom someday would be a fine thing. Another champion of the bathtub was Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of America’s foremost women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, who is credited with the spread of the Saturday night bath. Of twelve model houses she presented in the magazine in 1861, seven had second—floor bathrooms with piped—in water. (The ones without had been constructed in the 1850s or were cheaper houses.)
If hotels had convinced Americans that cleanliness could be delightful, and hydropathy that it was healthy, the Civil War persuaded them that it was moral and socially enlightened. Although it would probably not have been decisive in isolation, combined with the other elements at work in mid—century, the war was pivotal when it came to American thinking about cleanliness. Even before Fort Sumter was attacked in 1861, Americans were mulling over the lessons of the Crimean War, particularly Florence Nightingale’s success in limiting deaths through sanitation. As her biographer, Lytton Strachey, wrote, she had based her work “upon the wash-tub, and all the wash-tub stood for.” By scouring hospital walls and floors, laundering bed and personal linen and washing patients, Nightingale revolutionized hospital conditions and became an international cult figure, particularly among American women. One of her American disciples was the same Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell who had championed hydropathy. After visiting Nightingale in London, she declared that “sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine.”
Nightingale had focused attention on the fact that deaths from disease and infection in wartime outnumbered those from gunshot wounds and that cleanliness could reduce those deaths. Inspired