Hygiene, Personal

Hygiene, Personal. Early European visitors to the United States frequently commented on the absence of reliable supplies of soap and water and the prevalence of mud and manure, flies and insects, and disgusting tobacco stains (from both spitting and chewing). More than four out of five Antebellum Era Americans lived in hygienically primitive situations on small farms or in country villages. Even in the few big cities, where cholera and typhoid fever epidemics signaled the need for water and sewer systems and stimulated massive public‐works contruction, changes in personal and domestic cleanliness practices came slowly.

American housewives tried to keep their homes tidy and their families clean. But much of what would later be considered essential, such as bathing and frequent washing of clothes, was not thought important. Since indoor plumbing was rare, basic hygiene was extremely laborious. To wash a load of clothes, housewives and hired girls (slaves in the South) had to carry full buckets of water some distance, cut wood to heat it, and then lift and hang heavy wet laundry to dry. Soap was typically homemade from ashes, lye, and rendered animal fat.

Improvements in hygiene habits were rooted in technological innovations and changed attitudes. From the early nineteenth through the mid–twentieth centuries, the gradual spread of municipal water and sewage systems and the growing availability of indoor plumbing, hot water heaters, washing machines, and commercially manufactured soaps—developments that extended outward from urban centers to small towns and rural regions, and down the social scale from the elite to the poor—marked a major transition in hygiene, making possible higher standards of personal cleanliness, less exhausting laundry procedures, and the sanitary disposal of human wastes. Americans also heeded the advice and warnings of early nineteenth‐century reformers and sanitarians such as Catharine Beecher and the New England educator William Alcott (1798–1859). The work of the United States Sanitary Commission and women volunteers during the Civil War proved especially important in stimulating a national campaign for better personal hygiene. Since disease killed more soldiers than guns or cannons, sanitarians effectively demonstrated that sanitation was the war's crucial weapon. By wrapping cleanliness in the mantle of victory and patriotism, they taught army doctors, soldiers, and loved ones on the homefront that poor personal hygiene, which led to rampant camp diseases, was a fearsome enemy.

Nevertheless, hygienic problems continued to threaten vast numbers of Americans and immigrants who flocked to industrializing cities after the war. In congested working‐class neighborhoods, the health of these newcomers was clearly at risk as outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and yellow fever took a heavy toll. Through the combined efforts of public‐health reformers, city officials, settlement houses, public‐works engineers, teachers, and employers, immigrants and native‐born migrants from the countryside learned the significance of personal hygiene—first to their health, then to their opportunities for upward mobility.

By the 1920s, reformers concerned with immigrant assimilation successfully made cleanliness a hallmark of being “American.” But it was the producers of hygiene products and household cleaning appliances, for whom cleanliness meant profits, who persuaded American consumers to accept nothing less than perfection, to look for “the cleanest clean possible.” Incessant advertising appeals in magazines, on radio, and later on television created a culture of cleanliness that by the 1950s set Americans apart. With houses cleaner and bodies better groomed than ever before, cleanliness became an obsession. Dependence on daily showers, sensitivity to body odors, desire for immaculately clean houses, and preoccupation with teeth that gleamed distinguished Americans as a people.

During the mid‐1960s, however, as more married women (traditionally the quintessential agents of cleanliness) entered the workforce, they spent less time at housecleaning, and most husbands chose not to pick up the slack. Environmentalists, feminists, and members of the counterculture for reasons of their own also turned their backs on what had become an obsession. Thus, by the mid‐1990s, Americans were less likely to be swayed by the old rationales for chasing dirt, yet they still took delight in their daily showers, “natural” soaps, and luxurious bathrooms.
See also Consumer Culture; Health and Fitness; Household Technology; Immigration; Mass Marketing; Slums; Technology; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Ruth Schwartz Cowan , More Work for Mother, 1983.
Phyllis Palmer , Domesticity and Dirt, 1989.
John Duffy , The Sanitarians, 1990.
Marilyn Thornton Williams , Washing “The Great Unwashed”, 1991.
Vincent Vinikas , Soft Soap, Hard Sell, 1992.
Suellen Hoy , Chasing Dirt, 1995.

Suellen Hoy