Peter Ward comes clean on the last 400 years or so of personal cleanliness
Credit to Author: Dana Gee| Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2019 19:06:11 +0000
Why are there so many kinds of body wash?
It’s simple. Thanks to corporate marketing campaigns, indoor plumbing and washing machines we are a spiffy-clean bunch who apparently demand shopping-carts-full of passion fruit and lavender-scented liquid soap. But why?
All this behind-the-ears scrubbing is chronicled in Vancouverite Peter Ward’s new book: The Clean Body: A Modern History.
As Ward points out, a discussion of bathing can easily begin with a look at the Roman baths and the history that followed. But, according to the University of B.C. professor emeritus, some very interesting, nuanced history ends up getting thrown out with the bathwater if you take that broad of an approach. With that in mind, Ward decided to narrow his purview and focus his research on the last 400 years or so.
Author Peter Ward’s new book looks at how we got so squeaky clean. Photo: McGill-Queen’s University Press
“Trying to be clear and specific about the patterns of change and the causes of change wouldn’t be possible if I tried to look at the past 3,000 years unless I was to write a 2,000-page book, and no one wants to read a 2,000-page book,” said Ward.
Coming in at 230-plus pages, with over 60 pages of notes, The Clean Body picks up the story in the mid-17th century and travels to what Ward calls the, “recent past,” meaning his own lifetime. Drawing on sources in English, French, German and Italian, the book focuses on the hygienic history that took place in North America and Europe.
On the pages are plenty of stories and historical threads that have led to our current-day cleanliness habits.
The Clean Body: A Modern History, by Peter Ward. Photo: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Ward, however, lists a handful of umbrella topics that he feels truly drive the over-all squeaky clean story.
“There are lots of factors, but three that really stand out. One of them is the intense commercialization of the process of cleaning and it’s not just the commerce of it, but advertising, the messaging of the commerce which was so powerfully important,” said Ward, who retired from UBC’s faculty of history in 2012 after 40 years of teaching. “The development of the soap and detergent industry really lies at the heart of that. They became the primary educators in my view of the modern hygiene revolution.”
The economy of cleanliness is huge and complicated, and full of multinational corporations. The bottom line on cleaning bottoms became something very tangible for the captains of industry who jumped on the soap bandwagon a couple of centuries ago. Marketing plans were hatched and here we are now well-past just being intermittently clean at best, to being scrupulously clean with bathrooms full of fruity body wash.
Ward’s second big point is that the privy was picked up and moved indoors, which led to big cleanliness changes.
“It’s all about privacy. At the heart of this is the rearrangement of spaces within the household. The bathroom in the later part of the 19th century was beginning to appear in the homes of the wealthy and the well-to-do. But most people did not have a bathroom, a separate place where they could wash. The bathroom only made gentle progress in the first half of the 20th century,” said Ward. “In Canada, in 1941, not too long before I was born, about half of homes had a bathroom. That’s not to say people on the other half didn’t bathe, it’s just they had a lot more difficulty bathing.”
Ward’s third point involves the invention of the washing machine. The mechanization of the arduous chore was a total game-changer on many levels. Ward points out that during the early part of the 20th century a week of laundry for a family of five in England took 10 hours of labour. And we all know who was doing that labour.
“Mechanization proceeded in stages with hand-driven machines in the late-19th and early 20th century and then electrification, then the automatic washer came along and in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s the washer appeared, and all was better,” said Ward. “Women were free for the first time from the drudgery they had lived with for ages.”
Freeing women meant they could do other things. Like protest and demand the vote.
Ward got into this story after carrying around something his grandfather had told him decades ago.
As a student in the 1970s, Ward, now 76, was interviewing his grandfather for an oral history project he was working on. It’s then that his granddad said the following about his own “youthful bathing habits.”
“Facilities such as we know today,” the grandfather told Ward, “were unknown at that time. You had a bath maybe once in six months. We must have smelled to high-heaven although I never noticed it.”
Ward admittedly let the comment slide during the interview and then it slid to a spot in the back of his head until “40 years later that tease had become a curiosity” and he began to look into the history of personal cleanliness.
Ward, an author of several social-history books, says he likes a challenge when researching and this topic certainly posed a challenge for a lot of reasons — but one really big one stands out. Personal records are scarce. Nobody was writing: Dear journal, today I had a bath and washed my hair and behind my ears.
“History is written from the written record from documents people have created in earlier times, the diaries, the letters and public documents and so on. But people don’t document their habits very often,” said Ward.
He, admittedly, has never documented his own habits either.
“I’ll take whatever is available,” said Ward. “Whatever shows up? Lately it has been a nice bar of olive soap from Italy. It’s been everything over the years.”
Like the rest of us he has contributed his fair share to the economy of cleanliness.
“How important is cleanliness to the national economy of any advanced society today? About four and five per cent of GDP,” said Ward.
As for the future of cleanliness, well, Ward thinks we may have scrubbed the story clean.
“I don’t think the future lies in more,” said Ward. “I think we are getting to the upper limits of how clean we can be.”