The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [80]
The women in Upper Canada were “cleanly in everything that [related] to their houses, but negligent of their persons unless when dizened out for visiting.”
—John Howison, an English traveller in 1822
Eighty years later, in 1911, another Englishwoman, Ella Sykes, spent six months working as a “home—help” in the western Canadian provinces. If it was not quite a case of “we’ve no time in the woods to be clane,” it was not far from it. Sykes sometimes wondered “whether the farmer class ever ‘washed’ at all, as I understood the word.” They made do with an enamel basin in the kitchen, where they cleaned their hands and faces and dried them on a grimy towel. Sykes saw no other evidence of washing. She alone insisted on a jug and basin in her room, which she supplemented with a folding india—rubber bath. But even the Canadian farmers were cleaner than the European immigrants, as Sykes discovered when she met a schoolteacher in Alberta. Proposing to sew a top button onto a Galician child’s shirt—it was fastened with a nail—the teacher discovered that the child’s mother had sewn him into it for the winter.
Five out of six Americans were still washing with a pail and a sponge in 1880. Before the bathtub could spread beyond the most prosperous urban circles, it had to get better and cheaper. In mid-century, the craftsman-built tub of tin or copper encased in a wooden surround was a luxury, for which its owners paid a surcharge on top of their normal municipal water bill. Cast iron tubs, plain, galvanized or enamelled, and without cabinetry, began to be made in factories in the 1870S, followed by vitreous china and solid porcelain models in the 1890S. Better production techniques meant that in 1900 the average worker produced ten tubs a day, compared with 1870, when an enterprise that might involve several workers usually turned out one tub a day. The Sears catalogue is a good index of the spread of bathtubs and indoor plumbing. In 1897, wash basins, sinks and urinals fitted for plumbing could be bought from Sears, but not bathtubs or toilets. By 1908, the consumer had a choice of three complete “bathrooms”—tub, sink and toilet-ready to be connected to plumbing. Depending on the style and finish, either enamelled sheet steel or the more expensive enamelled cast iron, the prices for the set ranged from $33.90 to $51.10.
FOR THOSE WHO HAVE SMELLY FEET
“In very hot weather they should be washed both morning and evening, and the stockings should be changed twice a week in winter, and three times in summer”
—The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility, 1859
Along with the plumbing and fixtures came changing expectations and perceptions. Unwashed, odoriferous people, who had been an unremarkable part of the landscape for as long as anyone could remember, were increasingly seen as obnoxious. Emily Thornwell sounds this note surprisingly early, in The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility, which was published in 1859. “Now what must we think of those genteel people who never use the bath, or only once or twice a year wash themselves all over, though they change their linen daily?” she asks. “Why, that, in plain English, they are nothing more or less than very filthy gentry.”
THE STORY OF SOAP, PART 2
During the sixteenth, seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, when people avoided water and believed that a clean linen shirt extracted dirt, there was little or no demand for toilet soap. The rich women who used it, mostly on face and hands, thought of it as more a cosmetic or perfume than a cleanser. In the nineteenth century, as people groped their way back to the lost practice