BackStory; Rinse and Repeat: Cleanliness in America

This is backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. In the 1920s, the makers of ivory soap were worried. Cosmetics were suddenly all the rage. My people started spending their money on looking clean and smelling clean instead of actually being clean. So the company came up with a novel way to push their product, a contest for the best sculpture carved from white soap. It just so happened that the only real white soap in any kind of mass circulation was ivory soap. Today on the show, cleanliness in America will consider what it meant for New Yorkers in the 1860s. They were moved over 160,000 tons of manure from vacant lots. They cleaned over 6,000 privies and were looking at an even uglier scenario relating to cleanliness. Perhaps the most sinister form of cleanliness in the in the text, which is a form of racial cleansing? A history of clean today on the show. Major funding for backstory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities,

the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and an anonymous donor. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guide. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot here with Peter Onif. Hey Brian. And Ed Ayers is with us. Hey. A few years ago, a woman named Charlotte Sutteth conducted a bunch of oral histories. She was interviewing African American women who had worked as maids in the Jim Crow South. One of those women was named Vanilla Bird. Maybe I'll just read a little piece of it like her little introduction and I'll just start here. Says Vanilla Bird from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, born 1922. I worked for two families where I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. We lived in the country. The men were farmers. Some of them worked off the farm uptown. For the two families I cooked and did housework. I cooked a lot of vegetables and stuff,

interviewer. What kind of rules did they have? They didn't have a sink. They had a washpan where you washed your hands. The man didn't want me to wash my hands in the washpan. After that, I didn't wash my hands at all. I would just go in and start cooking. He didn't want me to use the same one that he was using. Can you explain to me why the head of the household wouldn't let Miss Bird wash your hands in his washpan? Well, you know, in those days there were a lot of unspoken rules and norms. One of them was the notion of, I believe, blacks being somewhat unclean. I don't know if they thought the black would wash off, but the man felt so strongly that he didn't want her to use the same wash basin as he did. Hey, just come right in from the field or wherever you're coming from and prepare our food purely because of her color. Purely. You would think that you would

want someone to wash their hands before they prepped your food, anyone. You know, if I was going to allow you to cook for me, I definitely would want you to wash your hands. You know, as strange as this seems to us, Brian and Peter, this is the entire pattern of the segregated south. This idea that black people, white people integrate the most intimate parts of their lives and yet segregated because of the white belief, maybe based on germ theory and some perverted form, that black people were just dirty, even if they were cooking your food and taking care of your children. Well, in a way, Ed, it's as if race were a vector, a means by which disease is transmitted. So, this uncleanness is a public health threat. I think it's more than a vector, Peter. I think it's saying blackness is, by definition, unclean, more powerful than germs, even in the age of science.

And what's hard for us to wrap our minds around is that this was a relatively new idea. This isn't just old-fashioned ideas about race. In the second half of the 19th century, white south basically invented a whole system of social organization based on the idea of preventing contagion. And that's one reason that you see so much focus on water fountains, restrooms, waiting rooms, any place where there might be a contagion based on this new theory of germ theory. Yeah. And, you know, the labels were things like white and colored, but behind that colored label was these people are dirty. Well, today on the show, we have for you an hour we're calling rinse and repeat. We're going to explore some of the other strange twists and turns American thinking about cleanliness as taken over the course of our history. As always, I, Peter, will be holding down the 18th century. While I, Ed, will be speaking for the 19th century. And I, Brian, will be covering

the 20th century. In a little bit, we're going to look at how it was that Americans started washing up in the first place. But first, we're going to step back from personal cleanliness and take a look at cleanliness on the broader social level. This next story takes place in the 1860s. It was then that people were starting to think about urban sanitation and ways that seemed familiar to us today. But they were doing so for reasons that would strike us as completely alien. In February 1866, residents of New York City received some terrible news. Coloura was showing up in several European cities. The upshot was clear. It would only be a matter of months before the disease made landfall in New York. And it wouldn't be the first time. In the 1830s and 1840s, New York had suffered through two other cholera epidemics. More than 15,000 people had died, some in a matter of hours and all in ways that would leave a profound impression on survivors. Victims were stricken with endless diarrhea, bluish skin, and voices that were reduced

to dry, ghostly whales. The official response to these epidemics had been meager to say the least, which was to be expected after all the prevailing understanding of color at the time is that it particularly afflicted the disorderly, even morally dubious segments of the population. And on the occasions when city workers had tried to act, they'd been hamstrung by the cronyism and corruption that plagued Manhattan at that time. And so in 1866, with Coloura looming on the horizon again, state lawmakers decided they needed to get involved. We need to create an independent, permanent board of health, one that's not connected or tied to local city politics. This is Owen Hooley, author of a new book about cholera in the 19th century. He points out that although germ theory hadn't come along yet, this board did embrace a new theory about cholera's causes. They thought that it had something to do with filth. Now the exact

relationship between cholera and filth is kind of up for grabs. Is cholera just filth? Does filth cause cholera? Does filth provide an environment for cholera? Or does filth somehow undermine individuals predisposition towards the disease? Whatever that relationship was, one thing was clear. New York was a filthy place. We're talking cesspools in the street. We're talking pigs and goats roaming around. We're talking tons and tons of manure baking in the sun. No proper sewage, water is dirty, overcrowding. You name it. It was pretty, pretty horrible. And so armed with unprecedented police powers from the state, the board went to work. Because cholera could have come from anything in their view, they cleaned up everything. They removed over 160,000 tons of manure from vacant lots. They cleaned over 6,000 privies.

They removed inhabitants of dank sellers and relocated them. They closed down offending businesses like bone boiling, fat rendering businesses. They condemned tenement houses, apartment buildings that would have been deemed too filthy. They picked up the garbage. They removed wandering pigs and goats. This is a broad-scale program that naturally offended many of the people living in Lower Manhattan. In April of 1866, just over a month after the formation of the Board of Health, cholera did hit New York. And when it came, the unthinkable happened. It was contained at the ports. Mortality members, which people feared would be in the thousands, rose no higher than 600.

And in the eyes of New Yorkers, the New Board of Health had defeated cholera. So what do we think today? Were they doing the right thing? Yes, but they didn't know it. Today, we know that cholera is a water-borne disease. And so the most effective way to prevent cholera epidemics is to provide basic clean water infrastructure. Now, when these reformers go down to Lower Manhattan in 1866, that's part of their program, is to drain cesspools, clean up privies, to do all these things with water, but it's a small part of a more general program. So even though they didn't know that it was spread by water, they unintentionally, in cleaning up the whole area, are credited with having prevented a severe outbreak of cholera during that epidemic. And subsequently, other municipalities,

other cities, other states look upon New York as this kind of shining example of what could happen if you have an independent Board of Health taking care of the sanitation in the city. It's hard to imagine any of this would have happened if the doctors on the Board of Health had known how cholera was actually transmitted. More than a decade earlier in London, the epidemiologist John Snow helped stem the tide of cholera, not by cleaning up every single sign of filth in the city, or by stamping out government corruption, but by removing the handle from a single water pump. But American doctors, famously and even defiantly behind the curve on European medical developments, continue to operate under an older idea that disease was caused by noxious air or miasma. And the result, a city widely regarded as the filthiest place in America, got a little bit cleaner, both in the streets and in the halls of government. It's not the story

about knowledge and progress we might expect. But Owen Huley says it offers an important lesson nevertheless. The popular medical histories, especially around medical discoveries, do us a bit of disservice in that they tend to suggest that once these discoveries are made, you move from kind of ignorance to enlightenment, problems get solved. But when you go back and look at it, you really see a much more messy picture. In medicine, there's no certainty in knowledge. I mean, even the best doctors will tell you this. So what do you do in absence of having complete certain knowledge? Well, you kind of muddle along. And so the idea that there's kind of this linear progress and kind of medical knowledge, it's a bit misleading in that what you really need to start to look at is kind of how these things play out in practice. In the case of cholera, maybe the false beliefs that inspired these practices were just as powerful and bringing about positive change,

as the true beliefs about germ theory would eventually be years later. Maybe they were even more so. Helping us tell that story was Owen Huley, he's a sociologist at the University of New Mexico and the author of Knowledge in the Time of cholera, the struggle over American medicine in the 19th century. It's time for a short break. When we get back, how Americans learn to stop worrying and love soap and water. You're listening to backstory. We'll be back in a minute.

Hello there listeners. This is Tony Field, Senior Producer of the show. Remember that if you like what you've been hearing on our podcast, there are a few ways you can help support our show. We gratefully accept financial contributions of any size on our website, backstoryradio.org. You can even set up a recurring monthly payment there. You can also help us out by spreading the word about backstory. All of our show segments are available on our website as individual MP3s, which makes it super easy to share specific parts of our show with anyone you think might be interested. And finally, leaving a review on our page in the iTunes store is one of the best ways to make backstory visible to people who may not yet know about the show. You'll find a direct

link to that page at backstoryradio.org. Thanks for listening. Now, back to the show. We're back with backstory. I'm Brian Bellow, the 20th century guy. I'm Ed Ayers, the 19th century guy. And I'm Peter on off the 18th century guy. We're talking today about notions of cleanliness in America, trying to figure out how and why standards of hygiene have changed over all three of our centuries. Hey, Peter, I know everyone in your century was dirty and they smelled, but what I did not know was they had this real aversion to bathing. I have a passage here. It's from the diary of a well-to-do Pennsylvania woman named Elizabeth Drinker, and the passage is dated 1799. For a year, Drinker had been nervously eyeing this new contraption in her backyard, her husband had installed. What was it? A shower. Here's what she writes. Nancy came here this evening. She and I went into the shower bath. I bore it better than I expected. Not having been wet all

over at once for 28 years. Okay, I agree. Just take a few minutes and explain to me why this woman was so terrified of water. Didn't these people want to be clean? Yeah, Elizabeth Drinker wants to be clean. She's an upright Quaker woman, but here's the deal. None of the things that we associate with getting clean on a shower existed at this time. I mean, she doesn't have soap. They don't use soap. So she's standing there in her gown wondering why is it good for me to get wet all over? She associates immersion all that water with disease. There's a good reason for this because water tends to be filthy. It's the great medium for the vectors in all the great contagions. Because of the disease environment that Europeans encountered in their own world and in their own world, create and help create. That's right. They were intensely aware of the dangers of

disease and that was reinforced by urbanization. She's a city woman. So this is the big challenge. How do you keep clean? And in the 18th century, it's not associated with bathing. Instead, it's clothes, linen, that layer of clothing that's like a second skin that absorbs the filth, absorbs the bad things. And yes, there's stench all over people, but the way you relieve the stench is to wash the clothes. Okay. I got it. But Peter, when is her next shower the next day? Well, you have to understand the resistance to this Brian. So it took about a year before she would do it. Yeah. And Ed, there's a lot of things that have to happen before we get to our daily showers. I would tell you this. It takes the whole 19th century before we get there. But there's a steady drip, drip, drip progress on the earth. And so what happens is that the elite people like drinker, other elite people say, I'm going to the springs this summer at Saratoga or at the warm

springs of Virginia, right? And that's really good for you. So it's a drink of water, but also bathed in it. We're still in gowns. So these are elite folks. And we have, as you describe it, a kind of trickle down theory. And it's also trickling over from Europe. And so that sanctions this idea. Yeah. And then you start having popularizers like Catherine Beecher, who's the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who's sort of the Martha Stewart at the time. And she says, you know, folks, look what the elites are doing. It's good for them. It would be good for you to stay clean if you could find ways to do this. But the Americans say, okay, this is good. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to find ways to do this in your home and in your hotel. And that's actually where it starts in the group home that is a hotel, a luxury hotel. They start saying, you can come to an American hotel here in New York City and get a hot bath in your room. And the English have to admit, God, they're better at that than we are. And from then on, Americans become famous world over for our plumbing. That's nice. But what kicks it off is the American Civil War in which the

ideal of cleanliness really becomes institutionalized. The United States sanitary commission says, dirt seems to be killing as many soldiers as the bullets. And so they make a great effort to establish cleanliness as a crucial element of the Union War effort. And studies show that it's remarkably successful. So you have these tributaries, strangely enough, sort of flowing together from the elite experience of ideals that Peter was telling us about. If you want to be in the top ranks of the society, you're clean. But you're now having it sort of from the engineers and from the sort of social reformers and the idea coming out of the Civil War. If you want to be healthy, you want to be clean. You got these two things working together across the second half of the 19th century. They experiment with public bass. We don't really like those so much. No, it kind of goes back to drinker, Peter, that the idea in America is privacy, individualism, being on our own, being somewhat prudish about our bodies seems to be the American way. And of course, it also

requires a public water supply. Right. And so it's massive engineering that the can-do Americans can produce these great infrastructure. What we call sanitation engineers to deliver the clean water that enables you to have this private space and to be clean. Right. And then the last thing we have to do is to get these technologies into the hands of common people. Sears Robuck is great for that. You can be a remote farmstead and buy a bathtub and increasingly buy the turn of the century, Brian, as we hand the baton of cleanliness to you. That is what begins to happen. You give us the bathtub. We'll give you the toiletries, Ed. And speaking of toiletries, that brings us to soap. One of our producers, Jess Angabritson, has been looking into the early days of soap in America. Here she is to tell us what she found. Back in the early 19th century, soap didn't have quite the aura it has today. Sure, people used it for laundry, but it wasn't something you wanted on your skin. It was, well, kind of gross. See, soap was made

from tallow, the rendered fat of sheep or cows. So the soap-making tray tended to operate in your slaughterhouses. The work was hot and exhausting, and it smelled foul. The final product was a big slab, like an enormous piece of cheese. If you wanted to buy some, you just asked the grocer to slice off a hunk for you. And forget about dove or Irish spring. These soaps had bland names, like number one, and extra number one. But by the mid 19th century, all that began to change. New magazines targeted at women were taking off. Some of them offered novel hygiene tips, like wash your face with soap and water to help remove oil. American soap makers began looking to their Parisian counterparts, who had long produced delicate facial washes made with ingredients like almonds and adder of rose. Those soaps had been seen as cosmetics, not cleaning agents. American entrepreneurs like Proctor and Gamble saw an opening. What if they could make a soap

that was both cosmetic and cleansing? It would be delicate enough for the face, but strong enough for the laundry. That soap was ivory. When it first came out in 1879, it was a revolutionary idea, and required some explaining. A Proctor and Gamble booklet of Frequently Asked Questions posed the conundrum, is the ivory a toilet or a laundry soap? The answer was marvellously, both. Laundry soaps have an unpleasant odor and are too strong to use on the skin. And toilet soaps are too expensive to use in the laundry, but ivory soap is so perfectly made that there's no better for the toilet and bath, and it's sold at such a reasonable price that it can be used economically in the laundry. Soap was no longer just for the elegant Parisian lady or the laundry made. It was for the modern middle class American woman. Other soap makers jumped on the bandwagon, and soap production doubled between 1870 and 1890. Even men were using it. For the next few decades, soap looked like an unequivocal success story. Then, in the 1920s,

another fad grabbed hold of America, cosmetics. Suddenly, American women had new ways to make their faces fresh and lovely. Soap manufacturers worry that powders and face creams might usurp soap's dominant place at the bathroom sink. At the same time, fewer men were working as farmers or laborers, the kind of jobs that really made you sweat. And the streets were cleaner too, thanks to city sanitation campaigns. What if people just weren't dirty enough to keep buying soap? The soap makers began to worry that their product might just be a fad whose time had passed. That's Jess Angerbretson, one of our producers. In hindsight, it's clear that soap was infatically not a fad. And part of the reason why is that the soap industry exerted some serious marketing muscle to make sure soap stuck around. It even created something called the Cleanliness Institute that pushed public schools to make cleaning up part of the curriculum. Jen Marshall is an art historian at the University of Minnesota. She told me about a particularly

innovative soap campaign that was launched by Procter & Gamble in 1924. It was a nationwide competition for the best soap sculpture. Supposedly, the idea comes from Edward Bernays, Edward Bernays, who's behind so many sort of mass marketing campaigns in this period. Really, the father of public relations? Yes, very well known as such. We worked for Procter & Gamble for several decades. I think it was 30 years. Bernays talks about getting the idea from a professional sculptor. In fact, a woman named Brenda Putnam, who was an elected member of the National Academy of Design, and she supposedly wrote to PNG and asked for just a gigantic uncut block of ivory. So she could work that in her studio, maybe an apocryphal story, but a good one. So Bernays thinks that's genius and thinks that this could really sort of be a contest that PNG could run, that could really sort of spark the curiosity and the artistry

of, again, the household wife and mother, but also her children and even perhaps her puttering husband. Within a year's time, children in the public schools were sculpting in ivory soap and loving it as not only a creative medium, but also as a medium for planliness. The year of the first annual contest in 1924, they received 500 entries and all of these would be assigned to numbers and looked over carefully by judges. The academic and much beloved sculptor Bessie Potter-Vano, Wade-in, Gatson Borglum, who carved Mount Rushmore during the same period. He was a judge. So these were big names in the art world? And it legitimizes the contest. I'll bet. It turns out then that by 1931, they're getting over 5,000 entries.

Describe some of these sculptures for me. There's a fair amount of devotional art, a fair amount of sort of virgin and child, a fair amount even of crucifixes, but the ones that really sort of win these contests and the ones that are reproduced in the art magazines of the time are largely classical revival styles. So a whole lot of headless torsos, you know, bodies with no arms and legs, no heads, but look, especially when they're cropped and reprinted in the pages of Art and Archaeology magazine, they look like they could easily be, you know, just pieces of classical marble. Do we have any idea about the people who were carving these sculptures? Where are these housewives? What was the gender breakdown? Yeah. Who were these people? It is certainly broken down fairly evenly between men and women, I would say. So carving was also heavily promoted as a therapeutic tool for helping at risk youth.

The YMCA is using it in their urban centers. There's an article in 1936 that houts its benefits in keeping kids who were otherwise in gangs, giving them something to do with their hands and their minds so that they might discipline themselves and become sort of saved from the criminal tendencies they were otherwise prone to. And why soap? I mean, why soap? Why couldn't carving a block of wood serve therapeutic purposes for these kids? The official line is that soap is easy and affordable. It doesn't incur the same risks to your fingers as as wood carving does because you don't need such sharp implements. You can do this with a butter knife. This is very a very forgiving medium in that sense. And you can use the mistakes, you know, you can still shower with it. So there's that sort of that's the pragmatic answer. But I think if it's supposed to improve your mind, if it's supposed to improve your sense of sort of discipline and deliberation and moderation, it's cultivating a sort of hand-mind habit

that's elevated and good and therapeutic and a sort of process of self-improvement that you're going through with the carving. Yes, that's true for other media, but soap already promises to do that anyway. It's already a medium that promises self-improvement, that promises, you know, self-purification in the ways we think of from hygiene. So it's it's it's likely metaphorics. Some of the purity and cleanliness of soap might rub off on the people carving it. Right, right, right. Well, Jen, thanks so much. This has been truly illuminating. Yeah, no, it's a great story. Jen Marshall is a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. If you're just joining us, this is backstory. And we're talking about the history of cleanliness in America. As we do each week in our show, we've been fielding your questions and comments

at backstoryradio.org. And today, our producers have invited a few of you to join us on the phone. Hey, history guys. Gather around. We have a call all the way from Charlottesville or hometown. It's Ozan. Ozan, welcome to the show. Hi there. How are you? Well, we're great. And we're happy to have you with us. What do you have for us? Well, I moved to the States when I was seven years old, and I had a hard time making friends for a while because all the kids would generally tease me and say that I was smelly. Oh, no. I was wondering if there was any history of that in the States or is it just a case of kids being awful or you mean smell prejudice? Yeah. They ask not to be too personal when this was and where you came from before then? I came from Turkey and this was in 1981 and it was in Northern Virginia. It was really isolating because I guess I did smell different. I mean, we still ate Turkish food, which is more spicy than standard American fare. I want to

ask the guys to have Americans is one of the ways that they've ostracized immigrants going back to the 19th century by castigating the way they smelled or the smells coming out of immigrant neighborhoods. You know, I would say off the top of my head or the inside of my nose that that was not the language that people were using very much. There was the phrase, the great unwashed. Right? And I think that the idea was that people were just dirty and people were being judged by their clothes the way they looked and if the cleanliness of their clothes. That's the clothes, that's right. Yeah, because it was hard in the days before, you know, mechanized hot water for everybody to assume that they were without odor all the time. And I don't know, Peter, it strikes me that all these European visitors who loved putting down the United States when they visited. They put us down for spitting on the floor. Sure. They put us down for, you know,

eating with our hands and all these kinds of things. But smell just does not seem to have been a prevalent lot of critique back before the 20th century. You don't hear a lot about it. And I think you're exactly right. It's the way people dress. And there's a lot of intimacy that is people have thrown together in ways that we would consider intolerable. We have a much wider body space that we think we have some kind of control or sovereignty over if you get too close to somebody. Except them in half. Well, there are places like this subway where it doesn't happen though by world historical standards. We have so much space around us. The idea that somehow you are a distinct from the rest of humanity is a very late modern idea. It's a fulfillment, you might say, have a notion of selfhood that comes out of the enlightenment and all those great things. But the fact that you could actually mark out some space, be within it and be clean within it, that's absurd. But I think that it's interesting what children say. I think they're like canaries

in the coal mine. They're an especially sensitive culture barometer of what people care about. And the fact they would have internalized so early that a taboo is how you smell. It tells you a lot about the culture as a whole of how it was that it organized things at home to say, oh, don't go out. This way you'll embarrass the family, you'll embarrass yourself. But I just want to ask you, Ozon, have you overcompensated for this? Is smell something that today you think you might be overly sensitive about? You know, actually no, I'm not really a big deodorant user. I probably shower three times a week. I work from home. I have a lot of kids. I'm very busy. It doesn't bother me if I have a particular odor that you like. Smell is natural. I think Ozon's fellow Americans are catching up with her. I agree. Come on. Well, thanks for leading us into the 21st century, Ozon. By the nose. Thanks, Ozon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

We're going to take a short break when we get back a vision of clean, that feminists, environmentalists, and eugenicists will all love. You're listening to Backstory. We'll be back in a minute. We're back with Backstory. I'm Peter Onough. I'm Ed Ayers, and I'm Brian Ballot. Today on the show, what it's meant to be clean through three centuries of American life. We're taking some calls from our listeners. Hey, guys. Rally around. We got a call from my old hometown, Big D. Dallas, Texas, and it's Mary. Mary, welcome to Backstory. Hi, it's Dre guys. Hey, all. Hello to you, and we're doing clean. All right. Well, when I heard that you guys were talking about hygiene, the first word that popped into my head is feminine hygiene. And you thought you'd embarrass us by asking this, right? Absolutely. I've had this conversation with my auntie. She's, I'd say she's in her 70s. And she was absolutely scandalized because a practice known as duchy is no longer in style.

Right. She asked me, and it was a really kind of awkward. Uh, so you thought you'd ask a national radio audience. That's very thoughtful of you, Mary. Yeah. And the 17th century. Right. Did women do that? No. So the interesting question is, when did they begin to do so, right? There is a history this, I believe. All right. Let's give it some perspective. I'm afraid we're going to have to begin with you Ed in the 19th century. Yeah, you're right, Peter. I'll have to, to fess up, uh, duchy is really a 19th century innovation. But it was devoted to a different purpose than we've come to associate with today. It was considered an active contraception. In a day before there were many other widespread contraceptive devices or techniques, duchy seemed a way that a woman might be able to prevent a pregnancy. And so as we handed over to the 20th century, Brian, it strikes me that companies that want to emphasize the other benefits of duchy have to overcome that stigma. Well, Mary, one thing that helped them overcome that were

more modern, if you will, techniques of contraception and specifically the diaphragm, which was introduced widely in the 1910s. And that pretty much ended the practice of duching as a form of birth control. But it really began the life of duching connected with the term you used, feminine hygiene. And certainly by the 1920s, you have major companies that are advertising the duch as a way to deal with women's intimate problems as they put it of hygiene. They prayed upon women's insecurities. They feminine hygiene industrial complex. Yes, no, that's a very good way to put it. So a lot of the ads really focused on you might think

you smell fine. But your husband is actually embarrassed to tell you this. And this kind of problem could destroy marriages according to these advertisements. I'm actually going to turn to a primary source. I just want to read you the first couple of lines. And there is a woman here, by the way, she is pulling at the door and superimposed on the doors are all kinds of locks. And one lock is doubt. Another lock is inhibition. Another lock is ignorance. And this is locking her out of her relationship with her husband. And listen to these first couple of lines. Mary says, a man marries a woman because he loves her. So instead of blaming him, if married love begins to cool, she should question herself. That is the gist of all of these ads. If there's something wrong,

you better question yourself first. And why should women have to question themselves? Why shouldn't we question ourselves? I'll tell you why. It's because of Eve. Let's go back to the beginning. It's the assumption that of course it's women who are drawing us into the filth of carnality are fallen women bring men down to their low level. You know, it's only in the modern period. And this is important that we have a new idealization of female purity that it's the guys who are filthy, which is of course a given because they really are. But in the 19th century, this idolization of female purity, I mean, the idea of the angelic pre-pubescent girl is the epitome of virtue. In a way, it's all downhill. And that is you regress to the Eve image if you're not careful in maintaining a high moral and hygienic level. So basically, it's a 19th century fault

of cooking this up. And then the 20th century's fault for making it possible and profitable and profitable. And to be very specific, Mary, that ad I read to you from is from the 1940s. Just at the time, shall we call her Aunt Kathy would have really been defining her sense of self. So it's an innovation, you know, that sort of defining themselves that I think as we're all appalled once we adopt something to find that the younger generation is turning away from it. So I'm sorry to interrupt, but nowadays, we're pretty much told to not do that. Right. Yeah, that's not exactly cause more trouble. That's right. And I think this tracks the history of many things in the cross the 20th century that the quest for banishing all forms of bacteria. Right. We now see, wait a minute, maybe that's not the best idea in the world. And that there's a reason that all these things have evolved. One day, they will write our history

and they'll see that we too were victims of our own culture. Victims of our own culture. What a great show. If you all need a history gal, let me know. All right. Thanks for the call. Thanks for being on today. Welcome. Thanks for challenging us on that. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. We got another call on its bow from Chicago. Bow. Welcome to backstory. Hi, guys. All right. We're great. What do you got for us today, Bob? Well, sort of apropos to your conversation. I have just returned from Disney World at the height of flu season. So I've been a wash and a sea of chorale for the past seven days. I was intrigued by the conversation, especially thinking about the very fact that we're sort of a melting pot and an alloy of people and places. Do you guys think that our fixation on being clean is this ability to become almost invisible and classless. You can wash away the dirt,

but the labor of the day and become just like everybody else. Yeah. That's brilliant. I think that's exactly the case. I think it has deep roots in our very notion of a democracy. Think of the idea of the citizen who's got the same rights as every other citizen. We consent. We're fully autonomous. We're independent. But you know what the thing about us is that we're all the same at some basic level. Yeah. I always thought that those highfalutin upper class people back in your century kind of held cleanliness over and above. Lots of people. I always thought that it was kind of a class marker sign of distinctiveness. People who couldn't afford to bathe all the time are people who actually are out there working in the soil and we're the most part dirty. Right. But in order to rise up, of course, you have to rise to the level of your social superiors. The big movement in American

history is the movement to the city, whether it's from abroad or whether it's from the hinterland and country. And this is where people, people to fit in, people to arrive, people to rise up to the universal middle class because we're also supposed to be middle class, right? You've got to be clean. Yeah. You're throwing up. You're throwing so many things on the power here, Peter. It's hard to know how to untie. Yeah. So very him in. Yes, the cities, but the cities are dirty before they're clean. Cities are dialectical, dude. Yeah. Right. Back in the 18th century, a city would have been a nasty nasty place. Exactly. Right. But cities have lots of other advantages. And so how do you make them two things? One, clean as a totality. A city where people are just dumping their sewage out the window leaves certain things to be desired on every level of cleanness. But once you start putting in sewers and once you start having cart men, garbage men, carrying things away from where people actually live, then you can begin thinking about having a standard of cleanliness that people

could not have imagined before. Yeah. Then the next big innovation is how can this middle class stay clean? Well, they don't have servants, which have been the old way of staying clean. Somebody to draw the bath. All right. Think about that. Can you please draw a bath for me? It's a concept you don't hear because you start having plumbing and other servant substitutes. So this is all leading to pure landmark. I mean, I just want to let you know that this is we're heading in that direction. And so the idea of the cleanliness is imaginable only when it is achievable. So what you're talking about is a standard of cleanliness that's not imaginable. I don't think Brian before World War II. Well, I think it's imaginable through mechanical. Before we get to the magic of Purell, we have the washing machine. We have the vacuum cleaner. We're beginning to get these machines that can remove dirt from our clothes from our homes. And yes, we get all these products

after World War II that are going to produce a clean slate in every home regardless of the income of that house. You say democratize. Does that mean marketed? Yes. Yeah. What's democracy about? Well, it's mass consumption. And which is takes us to Disney World or Disneyland, right? But which one was that forgotten? How out of this Disney world? Of course. Thank you. There we go. We want a whole hog. I start to say go for the full thing. Your family deserves nothing less. So what we want to think about is how this democratic impulse. And I think there are a few places in our imaginations at least that are more democratic than the world Disney has conjured. And more classless. Yeah, and cleaner. Yeah, exactly. Hey, Bob, thanks for your call. What a great question, thanks. Thank you for your time, guys. Thank you, Bob. To wrap things up today, we're going to spend a few minutes looking at a novel that in a lot of

ways encapsulates how Americans thought about cleanliness at the turn of the 20th century. The novel is called Herland. And it was published in 1915 by an author and social reformer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book may not have been a commercial success, but it did lay out a blueprint for a perfectly clean society, one that would have resonated with a lot of Americans. The story starts with three male explorers who stumble onto an astonishing site. Herland, a nation consisting entirely of women. There are neat towns with sturdy houses, orchards of fruit trees well-built infrastructure. Most of all, it's clean. They comment about how there's no dirt, there's no smoke, and there's no noise. This is Kristen Egan, a professor of English at Mary Baldwin College. And they just can't get over how clean it is, and they even say things like the streets of Herland were as dustless as a well-swept floor. And they'll say that the country itself is as neat as a Dutch kitchen. Egan says the men notice two kinds of cleanliness right away.

There's the domestic side, starched linen and sparkling dishes, but there's also the world outside the home. In addition to the lack of pollution, the women practice composting, they practice sustainable agriculture, they only grow fruit-bearing trees, they don't bury dead bodies, they only cremate people. It just goes on and on. So they're doing everything they can to create an environment that is sustainable. The connection between cleanliness and what we've come to call environmentalism has lasted right on up to the present day. Don't litter, keep America clean. There's slogans we can all get on board with. But in Herland, the idea of cleanliness also pointed in a darker direction, toward policies that didn't wear quite as well. To understand this third take on cleanliness, you need to know a little more about Herland's history. Thousands of years ago, the nation was home to men too. But the men marched off to fight a war and, well, a sudden volcanic eruption killed them all off. The women back home

survived. And you might assume that a nation full of only women would die out at some point, because of some obvious biological limitations. However, this is a utopia. So there's going to be some stretches of the imagination, some miraculous things that have to happen in the plot line in order to have the utopia. And the miraculous thing that happens here is that the women end up suddenly possessing the power to reproduce pathogenically. That is to say they could reproduce without men. Apparently, one of the original women who survived the volcanic eruption was able to become pregnant on her own. She had five daughters, and then each of those daughters was also able to have five daughters of their own. Soon enough, the society was reproducing rapidly and happily without men. And that gets us to the third form of cleanliness, and perhaps the most sinister form of cleanliness, which is a form of racial cleansing. The women are described as being of Aryan heritage.

And they practice eugenics. So we know that they have parthenogenic powers. But some women, if a woman is undesirable in the country, she is asked not to breed. She's essentially asked to abstain from procreating. And if for some reason the undesirable woman decides to procreate anyway, the child will be taken from her. She won't be allowed to raise her own child. And instead, the women at the community that are deemed most fit to raise the child will raise the child. And so in that way, they're performing cleanliness in the sense of racial purity. Now, the prospect of eugenicist utopia of this sort sounds really creepy to us today. But in the novel, the three male explorers didn't bat an eyelash at the idea. And they were probably just like most readers of the book. Eugenics was mainstream. It was clearly a reactionary impulse in response to all the immigrants that were coming into America around the turn of the century

during the progressive era. And there was real fear that we would have a kind of racial contamination that the Anglo-Saxon roots of the race would die out. And in its place, instead, all these immigrants would be taking over and their bloodlines would be taken over, taking over the country, so to speak. Fears of racial contamination were taken seriously, seriously enough that in the early 20th century, 33 US states legalized compulsory sterilization for various so-called undesirables. By the 1960s, more than 60,000 Americans had been sterilized. Supporters saw the programs as a step toward a purer society. There's an interesting ending to the novel. One of the explorers has married a herlander woman and wants to return to the United States with his bride. But the herlanders have heard stories about America, stories of pollution and epidemics. So in the end, they asked the happy couple to keep their location secret. Opening up the nation to dirty outsiders is not a risk

the herlanders want to take. Americans of the era apparently thought along the same lines. In 1917, Congress passed an immigration law that barred, quote, all persons mentally or physically defective, as well as nearly all would be immigrants from the Middle East and Asia. A few years later, another law dramatically restricted Jewish immigration. The law's purpose was to, quote, maintain the racial preponderance in, quote, of Anglo-Saxon blood. In other words, to keep America clean. Helping us tell that story was Kristen Egan, an assistant professor of English at Mary Baldwin College. Well, that's our show for today. But you can find a whole lot more about the history of cleanliness, including 100-year-old instructions on how to wash your hair at backstoryradio.org.

You'll also find all our old shows there as well as descriptions of what we've got in the works. And remember that you can chat with us throughout the week. We're on Facebook and Tumblr and we tweet at backstoryradio. We'll be back next week. Thanks for listening and don't be a stranger. Today's episode of backstory was produced by Jess Engabrettson, Jokia Anson, Eric Mendel and Tony Field. Jamal Milner is our engineer. Our staff also includes Nina Ernest, Andrew Parsons and Emily Charnock. Backstories executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Special thanks today to Elizabeth Royte, Ben Campkin, Kathleen Brown, and Steven H. Corey. Major support for backstory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph Fenn Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, the WL Lyons Brown Junior Charitable Foundation, and anonymous donor. And the history channel history made every day. Brian Ballot is professor of history at the

University of Virginia. Peter Onaf is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond.