The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [81]
A few technical developments helped make that possible. The invention of processes, beginning in the late eighteenth century, that produced soda ash from salt rather than wood ash also reduced the price of soap and made a product that was harder and milder, unlike the gelatinous and irritating soap made from wood ash. Animal fats, which came from goats, cattle, sheep and—most pungent of all—whales and seals, and produced harsh, unappetizing soap in shades of white, grey and black, had to be replaced. Better transportation made the importation of olive oil soaps more affordable, and soap manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic experimented with various formulas involving cottonseed oil, coconut oil and palm oil. Ivory soap and Palmolive (named for its blend of palm and olive oils) were early successes.
Not only are they dirty, but they smell bad. When their perspiration is stimulated by exercise, “they have a something about them which lavender water and bergamot do not entirely conceal.” There is a range in the strength of the odour, Thornwell admits, but everyone who does not wash frequently will smell unpleasant, as the fluid that leaves the body becomes “rancid” from lack of soap and water. Here, Thornwell is not writing about bathing for the sake of health; rather, she is advising her readers how not to “offend”—a verb that will become ever-present in twentieth—century soap and deodorant advertising. This concern, which Europeans would later see as peculiarly American, probably surfaces only when thorough cleanliness becomes a possibility. Then Thornwell voices her most menacing warning: those who trouble others by their body odour often have no idea that they are doing so. This fact, “above all things, should put ladies on their guard.” The possibility that you could offend without being aware of it produced an anxiety that advertisers would successfully exploit, again and again, in the century to come. The potent marriage of soap and advertising became one of the major hygienic themes of the first half of the twentieth century, a union that raised standards of cleanliness to unheard-of heights.
THE CARE OF BLACKHEADS
“When [the blackhead] is pressed between the points of the fingers, the curdy matter is forced out, in appearance much resembling a small white worm with a black head. In fact, ignorant persons suppose them to be worms, but a magnifying glass shows what they really are.”
—The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility, 1859
SOAP OPERA
1900–1950
Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower seller in George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion, needs a bath. That is not her decision but comes from the man who proposes to teach her to speak English properly. Professor Higgins sends her off to the bathroom with his housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce. Eliza expects to go to the scullery, but to her surprise, she’s taken to the third floor, where she mistakes the bathtub for a clothes-washing copper. When Mrs. Pearce tells her that she’s going to get in the tub and be washed, she reacts with horror: “You expect me to get into that and wet myself all over! Not me. I should catch my death. I knew a woman did it every Saturday night; and she died of it.”
“When we smell another body, it is that body itself that we are breathing in through our mouth and nose, that we possess instantly, as it were in its most secret substance, its very nature.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Not deterred, Mrs. Pearce tells her that Professor Higgins bathes in cold water in the gentlemen’s bathroom every morning. If she is to sit with him and learn to speak English like a lady, she will have to wash herself: “They won’t like the smell of you if you don’t.” Eliza sobs that it isn’t “natural,” that she has never had a proper bath in her life. Mrs. Pearce insists, “You know you can’t be a nice girl inside if you’re a