The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [79]
Compared with 10 years ago, “rags and dirt are now the exception… Perhaps the statement is a trifle strong as to the dirt… Soap and water have worked a visible cure already that goes more than skin-deep. They are moral agents of the first value in the slum.”
—Jacob Riis, The Battle with the Slum, 1902
Even for the middle classes, the cleansing of America continued for decades. Since 1841, when she published her Treatise on Domestic Economy, Catharine Beecher had been the country’s reigning expert in the blossoming fields of household science and hygiene. In 1869, with her younger sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe-famous since the Civil War as, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”—she wrote The American Woman’s Home. Their model house had running water that came from an attic reservoir, a forcing pump in the basement and a second-floor bathroom conveniently close to the bedrooms. It was not quite the ratio Harriet had called for in the Water-Cure Journal of one bathroom for every two or three inhabitants, but it was headed in the right direction.
The chapter on cleanliness in The American Woman’s Home begins with a lengthy scientific discussion of the skin, supplemented with detailed drawings of perspiration tubes and lymphatic vessels. When the pores are blocked, according to the Beechers, the waste is carried to the lungs, liver and other organs, and this results in disease and “the gradual decay of vital powers.” To prevent this, the entire body needs to be washed every day. For the same reason, clothes (which can press the noxious matter into the pores and reintroduce it into the body) need to be changed frequently, and the Beechers recommend against sleeping in the garment that was next to the body during the day.
“The popular maxim, that ‘dirt is healthy,’ has probably arisen from the fact, that playing in the open air is very beneficial to the health of children, who thus get dirt on their persons and clothes. But, it is the fresh air and exercise, and not the dirt, which promotes the health.”
—Catharine Beecher, 1841
For those with a full-size tub, a tepid bath should last no more than thirty minutes. Afterward, the body should be rubbed with a brush or rough towel, “to remove the light scales of scarf-skin, which adhere to it, and also to promote a healthful excitement.” In spite of the bathroom in their model house, the authors dispute the growing idea that a full-size bathtub is necessary for a thorough cleansing. Nor do they mention soap. The important thing is friction: “A wet towel, applied every morning, to the skin, followed by friction in pure air, is all that is absolutely needed.”
Nineteenth-century sanitary reformers frequently compared human health and cleanliness with that of animals, usually to the humans’ disadvantage. To illustrate what friction can achieve, the Beechers describe an experiment done on pigs, whose skin, they say, resembles that of humans. Six pigs were curry-combed regularly for six weeks, while other pigs were untouched. Because friction encourages all the organs to work more efficiently, the curried pigs gained thirty-three more pounds than the un-curried pigs, while eating five fewer bushels of feed. A man who took care of his skin in this way, the authors conclude, would save over thirty-one dollars in food annually.
In fact, the people who were best placed to heed the Beechers’ progressive ideas lived in cities and towns. In 1877, according to a study of bathing habits done by the Michigan Board of Health, most people in that rural state “were very little accustomed to the general ablution of the body—in other words, not clean.” Almost by definition, hygiene was most difficult on the frontier, where conditions remained primitive throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. In the 1830s, an Englishwoman, Susanna Moodie, and her family homesteaded in southern Ontario. When their farmhand would not sit down to eat after a day in the fields without