The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [88]
In 1919, James Webb Young, a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, wrote one of the century’s most sensational ads, for the doctor’s formula. Under a picture of an attractive, well-dressed couple, the woman with her arm in a thin short sleeve gracefully extended not too far from the man’s nose, the headline reads, “Within the Curve of a Woman’s Arm.” In the “frank discussion of a subject too often avoided,” as the subtitle promises, the word “underarm” never appears. It begins lyrically, “A woman’s arm! Poets have sung of its grace: artists have painted its beauty.” But it proceeds to plainspoken truths about the active perspiration glands under the arm, accompanied with the ominous warning that the resulting odour may be “unnoticed by ourselves, but distinctly noticeable to others.” Deftly handled as it was, the ad disgusted several women of Young’s acquaintance, who threatened never to speak to him again. Two hundred readers of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which carried the ad, cancelled their subscriptions in protest. But sales for Odorono rose 112 per cent within a year of the ad’s appearance.
The success of the Odorono ad and the deluge of deodorant advertisements that followed say much about the decade’s willingness to broach taboo subjects and its growing intolerance of secretions and smells. Advertising promised that the body and its embarrassments could be held at arm’s length, disciplined and made acceptable. For the consumers of the day, devoted to “scientific” or at least systematic methods of getting ahead in life, that was essential.
In 1923, William M. Handy published a four-volume book called The Science of Culture. In spite of its high-toned title, Handy’s book is a detailed and practical guide to gentility. His cultivated man or woman understands that cleanliness is the first requirement for “the attractive bodily expression of innate Culture.” For those still on the road to Culture (always capitalized), Handy devotes about fifteen pages to advice about hygiene. Without a daily bath, “no one can be really clean, nor either feel or express Culture.” (So much for Michelangelo, Beethoven and Jane Austen.) Actually, two baths a day are ideal, Handy writes: a warm, cleansing one in the evening and a stimulating, cold one in the morning. “Scented soaps, unless the most delicate, are taboo to persons of Culture,” and they rarely clean as well as the unscented variety. Without warm water and lots of soap, Handy writes, it’s impossible to remove “the evaporated remnants of the pint and a half of perspiration, virtually the same as urine, that exudes through the pores of your skin each day.”
The Science of Culture is really about worldly success, and cleanliness is a crucial step toward it. “It costs a little time and perhaps a little money to keep fresh and clean,” Handy writes, “but from a purely mercenary standpoint of increasing your business and social efficiency, it is a good investment.” A man who wants to make a good impression needs a clear, healthy skin, shaved at least once a day. Successful men, we read, are quick to note the condition of other people’s hands. He who neglects them will not be tolerated, “except for the strongest business reasons.”
Handy writes forthrightly about underarm hair and other delicate matters, but he is reserved compared with Sophie Hadida, also American and the author of Manners for Millions: A Correct Code of Pleasing Personal Habits for Everyday Men and Women.