Bathing in History?

Question

Is it true that historically people bathed 1 time a year? I find this difficult to believe because the smell would be so awful that I believe society would grind to a halt. I mean especially for women and our monthly cycle. Does anyone have any actual proof of this? I think it has achieved mythic proportions and that it could be an urban legend.

Answer 1

Among the variations across cultures and epochs are the comments recorded by Chinese and Japanese observers on their first encounters with Western barbarians. One of the most common observations was "they smell bad."

Answer 2

Seamen in the Navy of Nelson's time were generally held to be cleaner than most working class people, although not all their washing was voluntary - working on spray-swept decks, boat work, and scrubbing decks that were being hosed down at the same time meant that they were often soaked.

Some of the more enlightened officers and surgeons insisted on the men keeping themselves and their clothes clean.

But despite this, it was said that the smell of a warship was like a physical blow on passing through the entry port.  So where this left the hospital and the workhouse does not bear thinking about.

By contrast, fashionable members of the upper classes at this time kept themselves and their clothes clean - after all, there were servants to bring clean clothes and hot water, and a lady's maid would ensure that her mistress had a supply of clean cloths or sponges during her period.

It's generally thought that the idea of 'cleanliness being next to godliness' filtered down from the upper and middle classes over the Victorian age, and that the new ideas of cleanliness were often carried by servants, soldiers and sailors into their family lives.

However, there were some corners where this took a long time to permeate...

Answer 3

I think it has to be broken down to cultures. Romans built and huge baths and I don't believe they would create such elaborate sructures for once a year use. There have been letters found written by soldiers and explorers to their wives that read don't bathe- i am coming home. it is said that the men appreciated the natural scent of a woman. Soldiers during WW1 would be lucky to get some form of a bath once a month.

Very interesting question!

Answer 4

Good question.  Certainly in the Middle Ages heading up to the Renaissance in Europe bathing was a rare thing.  You have to remember this was at a time when people were happy to throw the contents of their chamber pots into the street.  Later, there was a famous quote by Queen Victoria: "One takes a bath once a month, whether one needs it or not".  William Dalrymple in The White Mughals describes how the Indian habit of bathing once a day and using shampoo was taken up by the British stationed there, and they were considered effeminate for doing so when they went home.

Answer 5

Bathing has been more popular at some times than at others.  the Romans for instance had public baths which were visited by both men and women.  In medieval times, people certainly bathed, there are pictures in medieval art of people bathing, and some palaces and great houses had privat bathrooms, with some with indoor plumbing (some monasteries also had indoor plumbing).   Steam baths were very popular during the medieval period, especially in London, where they became notorious as places where people could meet prostitutes (they were eventually closed down for this reason by order of Henry VIII).

Wealthy people continued to have private bathrooms in their homes, Queen elizabeth I had bathrooms in her palaces for instance, and would certainly have used them more frequently than once a year.  however, most people did not have indoor plumbing, and having a bath would have been much harder work then than it is now.  Bathing would entail filling a tub by hand, with buckets of water which would have to be filled froma well or a pump.  the water would also have to be heated if you wanted a hot bath.  And of course the tub would have to be emptied afterwards.  Quite an undertaking.

Therefore, it is likely that the common people did not bathe very often, if at all.  Likewise, although people did wash their clothes, they would wash them less frequently than we would now, as washing by hand is very hard work.  They probably lacked our abonormal sensitivity to body odour.  People would wash from a basin, probably not washing themselves all over at once.

In the early history of America, for instance, bathing does not seem to have been a very frequent occurence. In 1798, a Quaker lady called Elizabeth Drinker, aged sixty-five, bathed in a shower box that her husband set up in the backyard of their house. "I bore it better than I expected, not having been wett all over att once, for 28 years past" she wrote in her diary.  The occasion 28 years earlier when she had bathed had been on a visit to a spa, which seem to have been quite popular.

In the early 19th century, people were washing despite adverse conditions. In 'America's Women' Gail Collins writes:

' Lucy Larcom, the mill girl turned author, remembered watching her sister in 1835 taking a full bath before going to work, "even though the water was chiefly broken ice...It required both nerve and will to do this at five o'clock on a zero morning in a room without a fire."

Cleanliness, like msot of the transformations of the pre-Civil War period, was mainly a phenomenon of the larger towns and cities.  Willima Alcott, the health reformer, estimated in 1850 that a quarter of new england's population bathed their whole bodies less than once a year, and the numbers of unwashed Americans in the south and western states must have been staggering (the girls at the Euphradian Academy in Rockingham, North Carolina, had to get special permission from their paretns to take a full bath.)  But the people setting the pace - the prosperous urban families - had decided that cleanliness wasi, if not next to godliness, at least a sign of gentility.  By midcentury, every middle-class bedroom had a water pitcher and washbasin.

Still the concept of real head-to-toe bathing was slow to catch on.  by 1860 there were only about 4,000 bathtubs in Boston, which had a population of 178,000.  Washing generally didn't icnlude soap: people stood in tubs and rubbed themsleves with a wet sponge, followed by a brisk towelling.  Some women boasted that  they could take a complete bath in a carpeted room without spilling a drop.  The idea of washing one's body was still so novel that people believed in waiting two hours after eating for even a sponge bath.'

Writing about the post-Civil War period, Gail Collins goes on:

'Wealthier families slowly acquired complete plumbing systems.  Real bathtubs, a rarity before the Civil War, became more common, and in the 1870s the nation embarked on a long debate about the benefits of baths as opposed to standing on an oilcloth mat in front of a basin of water.  Some experts derided the idea of bodily immersion in "zinc coffins" but once Americans had the chance to actually experience a hot bath, their cause was lost.'

Answer 6

Bathing was rare, most people, if they did bathe would be in a cold river and not many people knew how to swim.  When nobody takes a bath you don't even notice the smell.

Our generation has been bathed to the point they get all sorts of allergies and skin problems from removing the oils from the skin that used to protect us.  

Bathing is a relevent new idea.. when they started setting up bathrooms in the home the bath water would have to be carried by servants into the tub or heated on the stove most people bathed once a week especially if they had a dirty job like coal mining.  The water was used and reused since nobody wanted to haul all that water again and again.  The water would get really dirty its where the adage "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" came from!

Until there was real indoor plumbing and flush toilets in the house then people took baths more frequently.