The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [90]
Most odours are unwelcome in Hadida’s world. She cautions women not to appear for job interviews wearing a fragrant powder or perfume, because the prospective employer will probably believe she is trying to disguise a bad odour of her own: “The one who smells of clean unperfumed soap indicates that she has no odor to conceal.” In addition to the usual causes of halitosis, a cold may cause unpleasant breath, but the remedy—antiseptic mouth wash or sprays—is also offensive to many, so Hadida’s solution is “KEEP YOUR DISTANCE.” That applies also to the person who eats the most apparently innocuous foods, such as bread and butter. “All food odors are offensive,” so when eating, don’t come near anyone who is not also eating.
Because cleanliness and freedom from bad smells are essential social assets, parents owe it to their children to make sure they form the proper habits early. In particular, the boy or girl who bathes daily makes a powerful appeal to the teacher.
Of course there are some teachers who love their charges whether they are clean or dirty, but your child may have an instructor who is partial to the privileged classes. In such case, no matter how modest your means may be, no matter how poor are the facilities for bathing in your little home, you are wise if you make an appeal to her, for the child’s sake, through his cleanliness.
Dirty boys and girls of any age will “repel desirable friends,” but adolescents are particularly smelly. Even for the girl who is menstruating (when bathing was not usually recommended), the daily bath is a must. Hadida suggests lathering completely while standing at the sink, then jumping in and immediately out of a tub filled with warm water for rinsing.
She sums up her chapter with the admonition “Odors are unnecessary and those who have them are violating rules of courtesy.” It’s tempting to conclude that when she says “odors,” Hadida doesn’t mean only obviously bad smells. She means odour, period. The most courteous person, who intrudes least on other people, is as odourless as humanly possible.
Judging from the deluge of etiquette and self-help books, magazine articles and advertisements that urged Americans to wash themselves with as much soap and water as possible, the 1920s should have been a fine time for soap makers. Instead, they anticipated a drop in sales. A buyer’s market of goods was overwhelming and distracting the consumer. At the same time, Americans were getting less and less dirty. Paved streets and roads, the automobile and electricity all made for people who were cleaner than those who lived with dirt roads, horses, coal stoves and kerosene lamps. More efficient central heating made the wearing of heavy woollen clothes unnecessary. Thanks to more mechanized factories and labour-saving devices, workers and housewives did not get as dirty as before. What concerned soap makers most, however, was the Roaring Twenties’ booming cosmetics industry. The most successful advertising campaigns for soap had promised that cleanliness would bring beauty. Unfortunately for them, lipstick, rouge and mascara produced the illusion of beauty more effectively than the most luxurious soap.
In 1927 the soap makers retaliated by founding the Cleanliness Institute, a trade organization devoted to inculcating in Americans a belief in the supreme value of hygiene. Eighty per cent of soap manufacturers supported the new organization, and the New York Times welcomed its initiative. Happy that “the slovenly folk, who have been going on the theory that they can take a bath or leave it, are to be brought to their senses,” the Times saw the Institute as meeting a genuine social need. Using magazine advertisements, radio ads and “public service announcements,” and a battery of classroom teaching aids, the Institute aimed at making Americans feel that there was no such thing as “clean enough.” To do that, they were willing to play the germ card, in publications such as Hitchhikers: Patrolling the Traffic Routes to the Mouth and Nose, a deliberately worrying book addressed to