Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

When people hear that I’ve written a history of cleanliness, they often assume that I’m a clean-freak. I’m definitely not: on the spectrum from complete-slob to clean-freak, I’m around the mid-point. And my initial interest in The Dirt on Clean didn’t stem from cleanliness as much as my curiosity about the everyday lives of people in past ages. But lately, I’ve been rethinking my connections with hygiene. Strangely, the first book I withdrew with my brand-new library card, at 6, was a book about hygiene, with photographs of 1950s children brushing their teeth and wielding their wash-cloths. I read every word because I was charmed with my new skill, but this earnest tome was not my choice: a friend had taken my card to the library because for some reason I was unable to go. For years, I laughed at that unlikely start to my life as a reader. Little did I imagine that I would ever write a book about cleanliness!

As a dreamy child who spent her time reading novels, I was the exception in a very medical family. My father met my mother when he taught bacteriology to nursing students; later he became a doctor, as did two of my siblings. I was the one who never got above a C in biology. But while writing my book, when I needed to understand how the plagues traveled to medieval Europe or how the 19th century discoveries of Koch and Pasteur transformed our understanding of disease, I realized that biology is fascinating. My parents are dead now, but I like to imagine them in some celestial reading room, where they pass The Dirt on Clean back and forth while discussing their least scientific child. “Did you read her summary of the germ theory?” my father asks fondly, and my mother replies, “And wait until you get to her discussion of the Hygiene Hypothesis!”

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

People sometimes remark how different the subjects of my three books have been—The Dirt on Clean was preceded by The Mourner’s Dance, which was about mourning rituals and practices, and Going to Town, which looked at the 19th century architecture of Ontario towns. It’s true they’re very different on the surface, but when I think about them, I realize that they have something in common.

I’ve always loved the history of everyday things and actions, and it’s the way I connect with the past. Not political history, not economic history, but the stories behind people’s food, clothes, furniture, and the ways they planned their houses, mourned their dead and made themselves “clean” (whatever that meant for them). While writing Going to Town, I learned, among other things, that the second floors of houses often had slanted walls and low ceilings because no one in the 19th century spent any waking hours in the bedroom. The Mourner’s Dance taught me why bereaved people ate special foods and wore certain colours.

As for The Dirt on Clean, it led me into hundreds of fascinating byways and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. I learned how commercial deodorants got invented in the 20th century, what people wiped themselves with in medieval outhouses, why very few people used soap to wash themselves until the mid-19th century, and why peasant cultures feared bathing and glorified dirt. (“The more the ram stinks, the more the ewe loves him,” was a proverbial French expression for the sexiness of body odour.) I loved collecting those pungent, surprising details and, at least for me, it makes history anything but remote.

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

While I worked on The Dirt on Clean, people began taking me aside and confessing. Sometimes the person didn’t use deodorant, just washed with soap and water; some people confided that they didn’t shower or bathe daily. Two writers told me separately that as the end of a project neared, superstitiously they stopped washing their hair and didn’t shampoo until it was finished. One woman reported that her husband of 20 years takes long showers three times a day: she would love, she said wistfully, to know what he “really” smells like, as opposed to deodorant soap.

Something similar happened while I was writing a book about mourning customs. Then, people would tell me privately about an observance that was important for them, even if it seemed superstitious or overly sentimental—how they wore their father’s old undershirts, or had long talks with their dead wife. As people confessed their washing eccentricities, I wondered if a failure to meet the standards of the Clean Police was as bizarre as full-blown mourning in the modern world.

Now that The Dirt on Clean has been published, I’m harvesting even more washing stories. At the end of a talk or interview, people will tell me about their Scottish aunt, who never got into a tub but washed herself “piecemeal” and always seemed perfectly clean. Or about their time in the south of France, when housewives used the kitchen’s pot of warm water to clean themselves quickly, in a few strategic places. Or about their decision to give up deodorant when there seemed to be a link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease (never proved), and they’ve never returned to the practice. As always, I’m interested, and amused at the surreptitious way people reveal their “deviations.” It shows how thoroughly we’ve been conditioned to the one-bath-or-shower-a-day-with-soap-and-deodorant model. But, as our ancestors knew, there’s more than one way to skin a cat—or get clean.

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

Although our ancestors were much more relaxed about body odour than we are, I did find the occasional ancient deodorant recipe—like the 16th-century French one that recommended a compound of roses to counteract “the goat-like stench of armpits.” The first generation of commercial deodorants, at the end of the 19th century, tried to close the pores with wax, but in 1907 a Cincinnati surgeon invented the first modern deodorant. It was called Odorono (“Odor? Oh no!”), and it inhibited perspiration with aluminum chloride. A century later, our choices of deodorants are vast. And so are the problems associated with that choice, as I learned this week from two good sources, Heidi Sopinka’s Footprint column in The Globe and Mail, and Adria Vasil’s book Ecoholic.

Although the link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease remains unproven, many people avoid antiperspirants, which almost always contain aluminum. Lots of antiperspirants and deodorants contain paraben, a preservative that is potentially carcinogenic. So is talc, and its illegal mining endangers Indian tigers. Even so-called natural deodorants contain propylene glycol—better known, in 100% concentrations, as antifreeze. Aside from not wanting to smear antifreeze on your armpits, it’s very harmful to aquatic creatures.

Bewildering as this sounds, Sopinka offers some sensible advice: “Avoid antiperspirants entirely, and if after reading the label you find no mention of parabens, talc or propylene glycol, you’re on the right track.” Even simpler, you could experiment with a regime more and more people are telling me about: do without deodorant and rely on soap and water. When Kermit the Frog complained about how hard it was being green, he must have been thinking about deodorant!

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

Often it’s hard for me to remember where I first got an idea for an article or book. But in the case of The Dirt on Clean, I can pinpoint it exactly. In the spring of 2003, Toronto (where I live) was the city outside Asia that was hardest hit by SARS. I was washing my hands 10 times more than usual and ruminating about the connection between washing and disease. At the same time, I happened to visit the 18th century rooms in the Royal Ontario Museum. A painting of a crowd was captioned, “The aristocrats in this picture are just as dirty as the peasants.” I don’t usually listen to audiotapes in museums, but I pressed the button and listened to a short tape on the subject.

What I learned was that the medieval Crusaders brought back the custom of bathhouses from the Near East. Medieval folk bathed together in communal baths, until the plagues frightened them into believing that sickness entered the skin through water. Most of the bathhouses closed by the 15th century and for the next couple of centuries, Europeans shunned water, wiping hands and faces without soap, and leaving the rest untouched. Wearing white linen, or “the linen that washes,” as it was called, substituted for real washing.

Listening to this, the proverbial lightbulb went on. By its light I saw a book title: Clean: The History of a Notion. The title evolved. But my sense of an intriguing subject, centred on the body but with connections to sexuality, disease, religion and other “big” ideas, remained pretty constant. I owe the ROM a thank you.