hygiene The word
hygiene derives from the name of the ancient Greek goddess of healthful living,
Hygeia. Initially worshipped in her own right, by the fifth century
bce in Athens Hygeia was instead depicted as a demi-god, the daughter or wife of the god of healing,
Asclepius. While worship of Asclepius aimed at curing disease through divine intercession, worship of Hygeia emphasized obtaining health by living wisely in accordance with her laws. In contemporary Western society the concept of hygiene has become associated with standards of personal grooming which often have little effect on individual health.
Historical background
Hygiene in the earliest sense was not connected to
cleanliness or personal grooming. Indeed popular attitudes in Western Europe and the US held that frequent bathing was dangerous to individual health. It upset the physical system, robbed the body of precious natural oils, and led to debilitating illness. Though individuals such as Benjamin Franklin urged cleanliness as a necessary component of healthful living, the plumbing technology required to make this easy was underdeveloped and expensive. Travellers in Europe and the US during the early nineteenth century frequently commented on the filthy conditions both of persons and households. One historian has suggested that, in a largely agricultural community, the dirt of honest labour was associated with both economic and physical well-being, an outlook that applied to both peasant cultures in Europe and yeoman farm life in the US.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the repeated onslaught of diseases such as cholera began to alter people's understanding of personal hygiene. Since orthodox medicine seemed powerless in response to these
pandemics, a variety of alternative medicines gained popularity. Many of these alternatives emphasized disease prevention through healthful living, which included diet and clothing reform, daily cold water bathing, exercise, regulation of bowel movements, and abstinence from coffee, tea, alcohol, and sex. In their attack on heroic medicine, reformers emphasized personal and domestic responses to health crises.
For these reformers, living hygienically was essential both because it led to physical well-being, and because it revealed proper moral character. Catherine Beecher, the most prominent domestic advice author of the mid-nineteenth-century US, propounded this view of hygiene. In
Letters to the People on Health and Happiness she called her hygiene precepts, ‘…
laws of health and happiness, because our Creator has connected the reward of enjoyment with obedience to these rules, and the penalty of suffering with disobedience to them’.
Florence Nightingale, in her efforts to reform English hospital care, provided the most cogent arguments linking personal and public hygiene with good health and morals. Like many of her contemporaries, Nightingale believed that unhealthy living made individuals susceptible to contagion. She rejected germs as a specific causal agent, however, asserting that dirt, sewer gases, and other environmental contagion produced illness. Nightingale's system for training nurses reflects this belief, and Nightingale nurses cleaned the patient and created order in the hospital. Nightingale is, therefore, a transitional figure linking the idea that the individual has a moral responsibility to live healthfully with a desire to control external threats to individual health.
As Western society became more urban and industrial, the disorderliness of city life seemed to threaten the health of even the most dedicated follower of Beecher's ‘laws of health and happiness’. Gradual acceptance of the germ theory compounded the fear that right living alone could not prevent illness. The eleventh edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica reflects this attitude by asserting that hygiene embraces ‘all the agencies which affect the physical and mental well-being of man.’ Hygiene as a system included not only personal hygiene related to food, clothing, exercise, cleanliness, and sexual control, but also sciences such as engineering, meteorology, bacteriology, and public sanitation and waterworks.
Since social health required both environmental cleanliness and hygienic behaviour on the part of the masses, reformers sought to extend private middle-class standards of hygiene into the public arena by reforming garbage collection, water delivery, and sewage disposal. They also sought to change the behaviours of the lower classes. In the US the effort to transmit hygienic practices to the masses was inextricably linked to Americanization. The goal was to lift so-called ‘dirty foreigners’ to middle-class American standards. The lessons of hygienic living were first taught to women through ‘settlement houses’ and visiting nurses, but the most effective pedagogy of hygiene targeted children in schools. Hygiene instruction prodded children to swat flies, refrain from spitting, brush their teeth and hair, clean their clothing, wash all of their body and not just the parts that showed, eat balanced meals, and abstain from alcohol, tobacco, and sex. Humiliation of children who did not meet the teacher's standards was frequently used to reinforce these lessons, and students were expected to carry the lessons home. African– Americans and immigrants readily embraced hygienic living as a means of uplift. Booker T. Washington, prominent leader of the African– American community and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, emphasized the ‘gospel of the toothbrush’. Ironically, African–Americans, many of whom worked as janitors, maids, and laundresses, were viewed as indelibly dirty and diseased regardless of their adherence to the hygienic standards of the white middle classes.
Racial hygiene
The racism inherent in this evaluation of blacks and immigrants was at the root of the international
eugenics movement, also known as the
racial hygiene movement. Proponents of eugenics in the US, Great Britain, Australia, France, Germany, and Scandinavia maintained that social health and progress would arise from increased childbearing among presumably superior people and limitation of reproduction for genetically inferior people. The US led the way in passing legislation which allowed forced
sterilization of ‘undesirables’ in custodial care, such as the mentally ill, criminals, and racial minorities. By the 1930s, 2000–4000 operations per year were performed in 23 states, with nearly half of all sterilizations occurring in California.
In 1933 Germany followed the American lead with the passage of two sterilization laws patterned primarily on California's model. The chief difference was that the law in Germany standardized procedures for determining eligibility for sterilization and applied these rules to the entire nation, an ‘advantage’ much admired by many American genetic scientists and eugenicists. The Nazi use of showers as a façade for the gassing of millions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and communists ironically underscores this perversion of hygienic practices.
Advertising cleanliness
The 1920s saw the introduction of a new corporate understanding of hygiene that wedded the educational approach of the social reformers to the methods of mass communication. Good hygiene became associated with good business. Metropolitan Insurance of New York and the Henry Street Visiting Nurses Association reached an agreement whereby the nurses taught Metropolitan clients to live hygienically. The Cleanliness Institute, founded by the Association of American Soap and Glycerine Producers, created lessons for teachers on personal hygiene. They also hired a popular children's author to create a series of five books with churlish characters called
goops, including the unhygienic characters of Hatesope and Rodirtygus who refused to bathe. The lesson of each of the tales was that no good child would behave like a goop. Since corporate promoters of hygiene had two aims, to draw new users into the market for their products and to encourage greater consumption of their products by current users, they added new diseases, such as
halitosis (bad breath) and
body odour, to the list that good hygiene supposedly prevented. The introduction of these ‘disease states’ indicated a shift in the understanding of hygiene, which now emphasized a well-groomed personal image and social acceptability as important outcomes of what was once extolled as the harbinger of health. In the US this meant that hygiene now included removal of ‘unsightly hair’ from women's underarms (beginning in the nineteen-teens) and legs (after the 1940s).
Sexual hygiene
Attitudes on hygienic sexual practice paralleled the evolution of general understanding of hygiene. When healthful living and moral character were equated, good sexual hygiene meant abstaining from all sexual activities. William Andross Alcott, a prominent health reformer in the nineteenth century, warned that sexual activity, including frequent heterosexual intercourse and ‘self abuse’ or masturbation, led to poor mental and physical health, because it exhausted the body's vital energies. When proper hygiene was seen as a bulwark of social order and civilization, the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis and the American Social Hygiene Association promoted control of erotic impulses through publication of ‘scientific’ information on sex, and sex education in schools, which emphasized negative consequences of intercourse and was intended to prevent sexual experimentation among teenagers. In addition to supporting forced sterilization of ‘undesirable elements’, the early-twentieth-century sexual hygiene movement also aimed at eliminating prostitution and inculcating a single sexual standard for both males and females. The corporate approach to hygiene created an interesting paradox concerning sex. Consumers, particularly girls, were urged to engage in hygienic practices that would make them sexually desirable, while health educators warned that nice boys and girls did not engage in sexual activities outside of marriage. None the less, heterosexual relations within the bonds of marriage were seen as natural and healthy. In the youth rebellion of the 1960s hygienic teachings about grooming and abstinence became associated with the corrupt ways of bourgeois society. Ironically, the counterculture embraced both dirt and unrestrained sexual relations as a means of breaking from this corruption and creating a ‘purer’, more ‘natural’, and ‘healthier’ way of life.
Contemporary understanding of hygiene reflects the tensions inherent in its history. Hygiene has partially become a byword for the quaint sexual mores promoted in high school classrooms of the 1950s. Yet in a era of teenage pregnancy and epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, schools and public health agencies are returning to the message that abstinence and sexual self-control are essential to continued good health. We also face the paradox that advertising and mass communication, which successfully used sex and social acceptability to sell hygienic practices to our grandparents and great grandparents, are now promoting images of health and beauty linked to epidemic levels of
eating disorders.
Jacqueline S. Wilkie
Bibliography
Hoy, S. (1995). Chasing dirt: the American pursuit of cleanliness. Oxford University Press, New York.
Kühl, S. (1994) The Nazi connection: eugenics, American racism and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press, New York.
See also
eugenics.
