In this last chapter we face, to some extent, a final reckoning—and we can barely do justice to it in the space that remains. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are by far the best documented and probably the most grimly fascinating of all the centuries embraced by the history of personal cleansing. They are probably also the most interesting period for us as individuals, as well as recalling many of our parents’ (and grandparents’) own personal experiences. The sense of déjà vu is enormous. We can see older habits and customs persisting in domestic housing, cosmetic care, health education, therapeutics, and general self-care—but the scale is utterly different. It is global, again. The tried and tested hygienic ‘middle-class’ lifestyle of the Western industrial urban classes for the first time became feasible for a much larger proportion of the world population, beneficiaries of scientific medicine and a booming global economy. The economic equation between personal cleansing and domestic income is inescapable in these last centuries, as it was in every other era. But behaviourism also still plays a vital part in our responses. Purificatory ideologies also went global: anti-pollution ecology became an international crusade, pollution fears have brought major world food industries to their knees, and, tragically, purity rules have also inspired mass ‘ethnic cleansing’.
The twentieth century itself was probably the most hygienic and cleansing-conscious era on record in all industrialized countries. It was punctuated by two world wars, both leading to periods of significant social transition. The whole period 1945–2006 has often been portrayed as one of extreme materialism and fully secularized personal hygiene—a new form of highly individualistic narcissism. But this may just be a trick of the light—many more people obviously embraced by economic consumerism, while the health objectives remained the same. The period 1900–39 was also individualistic and narcissistic, and saw a huge rise in health consumerism and the ideology of the fit and beautiful body. Personal hygiene had now reached the stage of a general consensus.
Among advanced industrialized nations, public hygiene had gradually turned into an international crusade. Following a series of International Sanitary Conferences, the north-south Pan-American Sanitary Bureau was founded in 1902; and the first European Office International d’Hygiène Publique was founded in Rome in 1907, later becoming the League of Nations Health Organization Committee. Both bodies were replaced in 1948 by the World Health Organization. The nineteenth century had shown decisively that investing in public hygiene—not only in housing and drains but in personal hygiene as well—made sound economic sense. Andrew Carnegie, Johns Hopkins, Henry Wellcome, and John D. Rockefeller were only some of dozens of global industrialists in the first half of the twentieth century who threw unprecedented amounts of money at international (and national) public health scientific research programmes, for profitable as well as philanthropic ends. Revolutionary twentieth-century communist governments likewise put personal and public hygiene at the top of their agenda for building fit nations.1 But the century had also opened with another optimistic liberal welfare initiative designed to ‘do something for the people’, as Lloyd George put it—state and private medical insurance, which took off like a rocket throughout Europe and the United States.
Medical insurance was a new form of commercial medicine—medical care at a discounted, cut-rate ‘group’ price; the idea came from the old working-class self-help burial clubs and cooperative saving schemes. By paying small regular amounts into a general fund, insurance brought the right to enjoy a far freer access to hospital medical services, and almost everywhere in Europe and the United States voluntary hospital admissions doubled, specialist treatment and convalescent clinics multiplied, and a large group of new middling classes—lower-middle-class office workers, managers, and skilled craftsmen—were brought into the professional medical orbit.2 At the heart of this newly confident medical service industry were the laboratories, slowly but inexorably unlocking the chemistry of disease through effective vaccines, and the constant search for ‘magic bullets’ (the effective ‘sulpha’ drugs and antibiotics that finally arrived in the 1940s and 1950s).
The professional pride of the inter-war period is shown in the contents page of C. E. A. Winslow’s student textbook of 1923: ‘I. The Dark Ages of Public Health. II. The Great Sanitary Awakening. III. Pasteur and the Scientific bases of Prevention. IV. The Golden Age of Bacteriology. V. The New Public Health’. The New Public Health concentrated less on drains than on bacteria, and was inspired by the new discipline of scientific behaviourism, sociology, which drew on the experience of public health workers, measured observable trends, and refocused social policy towards the actual bodies and the life cycles of welfare recipients, inside their domestic surroundings, and within their local environment. Major preventive domestic health campaigns focused on hospital medical insurance cover, maternity and child health services, handwashing, venereal diseases, food hygiene, and milk supplies with much publicity from semi-public bodies such as the Health and Cleanliness Council (1928–46) in Britain, and the Cleanliness Institute (1926– ) in the United States, run by the American soap industry.3 But life was still a lottery for most people in the inter-war years. There was no welfare safety net, no magic bullets, and the economic ‘boom-bust’ cycle was very sharp—new industries boomed as old industries slumped. All the luxuries of modern housing and health insurance disappeared overnight if you were unemployed; and health insurance was generally too expensive to cover women and children.
During the early years of the century it became evident that certain pockets of relative deprivation were very marked indeed, with inner cities, older industrial cities, and agricultural districts suffering most; they were ‘the submerged tenth’ described by Charles Booth as still existing ‘like a hidden sore, poor, dirty, and crude in its habits, an intolerable and degrading burden to decent people forced by poverty to neighbour with it’. At the beginning of the First World War, the very poorest in Britain were apparently not even fit enough to defend the state, which immediately rang alarm bells among the ruling classes. Pessimism about the state of the nation’s health reached an all-time low in the famous 1904 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, which led to the foundation of the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, followed by the highly influential Eugenics Review in 1909.4
Eugenicists in Europe and North America came from many existing schools of vitalist doctrines of racial genetics and biological holism, physiological reform, and physical puritanism, and understood each other well. They leant heavily on Herbert Spencer’s well-known philosophy of Social Darwinism, or the survival of the fittest, which annexed Darwin’s theory of human evolution and physiological modification, and created eugenics as a form of social hygiene. As the British eugenicist Havelock Ellis put it in 1912:
all social hygiene, in its fullest sense, is but an increasingly complex and extended method of purification—the purification of the conditions of life… the purification of our own minds… the purification of our hearts… and the purification of the race itself by enlightened eugenics, consciously aiding Nature in her manifest effort to embody new ideals of life.5
Eugenicists considered preventive medicine to be thwarting their aims by artificially prolonging the lives of the unfittest; they also wanted to eliminate prostitution, control alien immigration, sterilize ‘mental degenerates’ and segregate them in mental asylums; and they often raised the issue of racial physical degeneration through bad housing—which the sanitarians roundly rejected.6 When the First World War was over many eugenicists in Europe and the United States joined the growing naturopathic ‘physical culture’ movement, such as the eugenics-inspired People’s Health League, founded in 1917.7
The social surveys tacitly supported the sanitarians by showing that some of the worst hygienic conditions prevailed in rural areas where the housing infrastructure had remained untouched for centuries—earth floors, communal sleeping rooms accessed by stepladders, outdoor taps, outdoor toilets, barely any heating, and no baths. (In some parts of rural Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s there were no toilets at all—‘under a bush as often as not, using a dockleaf’—and only on Sundays would children ‘wash our face and neck, our hands up to our elbows, and our feet up to our knees… relatives [said] how our congregation stank—of cow dung, I suppose’.) In most of these homes the only hot-water source was the kettle on the fire; but the very high population densities of the inner cities made personal hygiene equally difficult. In Shoreditch in London in 1938, only 14 per cent of families had baths: ‘Some had a footbath or small tub, but as it was awkward to use … it was frequently reserved for the children, whilst the parents went out to the public baths or else never bathed.’ In many tenements or small apartments lack of space meant the coal really did go in the bath:
A bathroom in the house is not necessarily a great advantage as far as cleanliness goes—it strikes the more thrifty as a convenient coalcellar… Baths are only found in about a dozen houses inhabited by working class families in this area. Out of these twelve, it is known that at least nine are used for storage purposes, and not as baths … The expense of heating the water…and lack of privacy… are great drawbacks.
Despite this, one East End mother of thirteen children with only a cold tap in the yard still managed to run a house that was spotless, with sheets starched ‘white as snow’.8 But many of the children of these inter-war urban poor, when evacuated in 1940, arrived in rags or, like several children from the slums of northern England, ‘sewn into a piece of calico with a coat on top and no other clothes at all’; and were often found to be dirty, verminous, suffering from scabies, impetigo, and other skin diseases, incontinent day and night, ‘ill-clad and ill-shod, [with] never a change of underwear or any night clothes and had been used to sleep on the floor’. A 1915 national survey of public baths provision had come to a sober verdict: most public baths were well used by only about a third of the population in their surrounding areas, they had cost over £2 million to build, and were consistently unprofitable: ‘It is worthy of note [that] their income is less than 50 per cent of their expenditure. Whether a relatively high percentage under this heading is to be regarded as a measure of success or failure will depend largely on whether the baths are considered as a trading concern or as a department of Public Health.’9
If you were lucky, and had a job, you probably aspired to live in a spacious suburban settlement, infilling the big arterial roads lined or dotted with factories, bringing a stream of modern consumables into the cities. Most towns and cities in Britain (and elsewhere) acquired an outer ring of housing in this period, and outer-suburb growth was phenomenal; at its peak in London in the 1930s when mortgage restrictions were eased, detached or semi-detached houses were built at the rate of 1,500 houses a week. Their owners came from the older inner cities, young couples on their way up, out of the slums and rented lodgings. Suburbanites were dedicated above all others to personal hygienic health care. They came for the bathrooms with the hot water (‘first thing, you went into the bathroom, and turned on the hot taps’), the indoor water closets (‘we actually had a toilet on the first floor’), the clean electricity supply (‘such an excitement—fantastic!’), the floor-length French windows, sun terraces, and balconies; the garden flowers, the nearby fields and fresh air; and the tennis, croquet, bowling, and golf clubs. The kitchens were small and convenient (‘everything within easy reach—it was a special feature’), and their shops were built into the new ‘parade’ nearby.10
Very high standards of hygiene and presentation were expected in these pest-free, fully sanitized homes. The new servantless lady wife did most of the light domestic work, with some ‘help’ with the heavier chores, using an increasing range of ‘labour-saving’ cellophane-packed foods, cleaning agents, and mechanical equipment. The suburban husband’s domestic role was simply to eat, relax, and look after the new garden.11 His income paid for the modern electrical machines and sleekly designed streamline metal and bakelite gadgetry that rapidly appeared, promoted by photographic advertising that played heavily on the dangers of germs and dirt: the early electric radios, fires, fridges, water heaters, early washing machines, kettles, and irons; also the improved gas cookers, lights, and fires, the tiling, the parquet, and the latest easy-clean rubber linoleum. Hygienic plastic goods, such as Tupperware, came in during the second half of the century (along with wash spinners, dishwashers, and freezers). The only domestic dirt source often left largely unreformed (in Britain at least) in the inter-war years was the traditional open coal or wood fire in the comfortable modern ‘lounge’ or ‘sitting room’; but for the rest of the house, modern electricity provided ‘clean’ heat and ‘clean’ lighting, and revolutionized domestic cooking, cleaning, and laundering.12 The British electricity industry mounted a huge publicity campaign during the 1920s and 1930s, aimed squarely at the upper classes and middle-class suburbanites:
USE THE ELECTRIC METHOD to clean your house this Spring, and keep it healthy all year round …
With the help of Electricity you can do the housework without making more work and clean the Home without making yourself dirty.
Banish dust, dirt, and disease by using an ELECTRIC SUCTION CLEANER which lifts all the dirt direct into a sealed bag without a particle escaping.
ELECTRICITY is the cleanest, hardest working, most willing and cheapest servant under the sun. Always on duty, ready for instant service, day and night at the touch of a switch.
But electricity was expensive and more than a bit dangerous (1928 was ‘a particularly bad year’ for fatalities); even by 1931, less than 30 per cent of homes were wired, and less than one in a thousand was all-electric. Mass provision only got going after a boom in 1936, while in many industrial regions the working class remained loyal to coal and gas, and sceptical towards electricity, until the campaigns and Clean Air legislation of the 1950s and 1960s. One very obvious reason for this was that coal was a third of the price of gas or electricity, and that homes had to be laboriously and expensively adapted for a new ‘clean fuel’ supply.13 It was similar to the introduction of domestic plumbing during the eighteenth century; all of these new domestic conveniences were acquired, as they had always been in the consumer surges of the past, on a sliding scale of income—which meant that most people at this stage could not yet afford them, and continued to clean up dust, grime, and soot in the old back-breaking ways: dustpans and brushes, soap and water (now with a dash of Jeyes’ Fluid added). Large numbers of isolated rural cottages and farms in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere did not get piped water or electricity until well into the second half of the century, and continued to use wood, paraffin, or oil lamps, and local springs and wells.
Life in the suburbs followed an almost clockwork sanitary regime. Housework was ideally followed by an afternoon of genteel activities such as shopping (at nearby town department stores, which were also booming), or going to the local hairdressing and beauty ‘salons’ (sprung up to serve those without personal maids, and bristling with modern electrical beauty equipment) to get a fixed-wave ‘perm’ for the new shorter hairstyles. Electrical technology was a boon for the personal toilette; and better evening lighting clearly extended the hours of grooming preparation, and display, and possibly enforced higher standards as well. Essential preparations included an early evening heated bath in the new tiled and glittering bathroom with WC (featured heavily in estate promotional literature), next door to the well-lit bedroom, with its large-mirrored Art Deco dressing table and toilet sets, displaying quantities of face powder, ‘scents’, and deep-red lipstick and nail varnish. Heavy cosmetic painting came back with a vengeance from the 1920s, much influenced by the stage make-up used by the new film industry, and cleverly exploited by the Hollywood entrepreneur Max Factor. But the leaders of fashion in the 1920s had already started to abandon the ancien régime of the milky-white complexion in favour of the natural all-over healthy body tan—first defiantly displayed by the fashion designer Coco Chanel after a long holiday on board a friend’s yacht.14 A respectable state of cosmetic undress was paraded in flamboyant female dressing gowns, with a new range of flimsy, sheath-like, underwear (favourite colour flesh pink). Convenient disposable sanitary goods had also been developed, such as paper tissues (originally for tuberculosis patients), paper toilet rolls, and commercially made sanitary pads, specifically designed for the busy and active ‘New Woman’.15 For women, hygienic dress reform had brought shorter hemlines and looser clothing without corsets; but sports hygiene had meanwhile exploded into sportswear. Sportswear fashions accentuated comfort and lightness: lighter (and artificial) fabrics, new stretch woollens, light colours, liberating trousers, bare arms, necks, and backs, legs bared in ‘shorts’, and feet bared in sandals and beach mules. It was entirely possible that the local dress shop could run up (or order) the latest line in Schiaparelli woollens, Jaeger tennis and walking outfits; or stock elasticated Jantzen or Hermès beach wear, with beach pyjamas, beach robes, American playsuits, sun and swim hats, and satin-ruched (‘aqua-satin’), halter-neck, bare-back, bathing costumes.16
19 The fashion model Renée, photographed in 1938 in a sportive modernist style (ribbed cotton athletic vest, heavy exotic jewellery, and dark varnished nails) that is equally chic today.
If there were children in the suburban household, the afternoon and early evening feeding and grooming routines centred on them—until their father came home, when they were promptly sent to bed to have their good long healthy sleep. Many ‘modern’ mothers in the 1920s and 1930s carried on late nineteenth-century trends in child hygiene and followed the advice book author Dr Truby King’s famously strict (and thoroughly vitalist) hygienic recommendations to the letter—a heavily disciplined training process which started directly after birth with time-regulated feeding and evacuations (potty training) and which in the hands of a conscientious or germ-obsessed mother could become a nightmare.17 Powerful smells, plus elbow grease and kitchen cabinet staples, and possibly a few of the new aspirin tablets (acetyl salicylic powder was synthesized in 1896), were still the family’s front-line defence against sickness. But nylon toothbrushes and hairbrushes, superior dental powders and pastes, cheaper soaps and heavily antiseptic-smelling, dandruff-clearing liquid hair shampoos (Sebbix, Vosene) were making basic grooming a little easier and more effective; and supported a vigorous campaign in schools and homes to combat the continuing problems of children’s body odours, head lice, and bad teeth. Progressive dentists recommended (in books, magazines, but now also over the radio) a preventive oral hygiene regime of a wholesome diet, plus twice-daily brushing and a biannual checkup: ‘the intelligent and steadfast practice of the means indicated in these rules would result in far fewer teeth being lost’. Championed by Army dentists during the Second World War, the oral or dental hygiene movement took off in post-war private dental practice, heavily influenced (in Britain and elsewhere) by high standards of cosmetic dentistry in the United States. Since being available at a subsidized price on the National Health Service in Britain as an auxiliary service for dentists, oral hygiene has greatly reduced the number of teeth being pulled and the number of fillings done, compared with pre-war days.18
When their children grew up and went to the local school, quite a lot of parents might have been lucky enough to find that the local council had already adapted to the modern style of educational architecture, with plenty of large, low windows, open verandas, grass lawns, sandpits, paddling pools, kitchens, showers, toys, and Montessori reading and numeracy aids. Madame Montessori’s infant school movement started in 1912 (as a successor to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s and Friedrich Froebel’s ‘kindergartens’) was a modern educational milestone; it emphasized the need to catch and train the ‘human animal’ when young. It trained through educating the senses, Rousseau-style, and put children into a relaxed but intensive hygienic regime of feeding, sleeping, correct dress, play, and exercise, thrusting the infants and toddlers out into the sunlight and fresh air whenever possible, to get tanned and hardened—a belief that had only been strengthened by the tuberculosis sanatorium movement and naturism. Photographs show ranks of cots placed outside in gardens, and orderly groups of toddlers in white aprons blinking uncertainly into the sunlight behind the camera. By all accounts they often transformed the lives of those poorer children lucky enough to attend them, as well as slowly transforming primary school educational philosophy.19
Inter-war babies were bathed as ferociously in fresh air and sunlight as their eighteenth-century predecessors had been in cold water. Doctors, teachers, and parents were at one on the importance of the Lockean outdoor life for children. In the 1930s the journalist John Gale (himself a notably ‘clean young Englishman’ brought up barefoot and athletic in the early 1920s) and his wife were extraordinarily determined to do the right thing for their newborn child:
Because the flat was so small and had neither garden nor balcony, we decided to keep Joanna in a cage outside the window. It was an exaggerated parrot cage, made of what is known as elephant wire…. An expert, a man in a small brown hat, came to fix it up. He assembled it in a few easy movements, and screwed it onto the window-sill, adding a couple of metal supports for good measure … Certainly the cage was extraordinarily secure…. at last, holding our breath, we picked up the basket containing Joanna, then less than a month old, and thrust her into space. Simultaneously, a number of startled and elderly female faces appeared from behind lace curtains in the windows opposite. Although they became familiar with the sight of the caged baby, the faces never altogether lost their look of shocked surprise… Yet, whatever the psychological risks of the cage, Joanna did well enough. She was nicely sunburnt; she became apparently immune to frost, instantly pulling off any glove or woollen boot and dropping it at the feet of the milkman; she watched traffic; she was a fine imitator of dogs and rag and bone men and a passionate admirer of the Salvation Army… When there was snow or an east wind, Jill zipped her up in a sort of sack with armholes, made from a wornout blanket; even in this she humped around quite actively, abusing people in the street below, and getting more opportunity for exercise than could be provided by the largest pram… [After a year old] she grew out of it altogether. But it gave her an admirable start.20
Swimming facilities had become the norm for many British city children—like Angela Rodaway’s young sisters, who ‘went about in the summer wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks. Many children did this. I could not help comparing it with the flannel petticoats in which I had been dressed.’ To get a swim, suburbanite families could take a trip to the vast new local open-air lidos built by towns and boroughs from 1929 onwards, with their aerating fountains, lawns, Imperial-sized pools, and terraced cafés. Some towns, starting recreational parks from scratch, added public tennis courts, bowling greens, infant paddling pools, and play areas. In 1935 the massive Jubilee Lido, jutting out into the sea at Penzance, was opened; and Cheltenham Lido had 100,000 visitors in its first opening season—with 10,000 cars.21 Outdoor lidos were a substitute for going to the seaside; but of course many people now went there for a week or so on holiday, as well. The inter-war years were a holiday boom time for car, caravan, coach, and rail trips to coastal resorts, beach huts, and holiday camps; two-thirds of all British holidays were taken by the seaside.22 Cycling and hiking were especially popular among young workers; and the Youth Hostels Association (YHA), copied from the German youth Wandervogel movement, was founded for hikers in 1930, with almost 300 hostels by 1940 providing over half a million overnight stops—the YHA found that its initials were popularly translated by young women as ‘Your Husband Assured’. There was more than a fair chance that they would meet up with a handsome young socialist, or young professional, well away from inquisitive family eyes—just as upper-class girls were courting on the golf course, the swimming pools, car race tracks, or tennis courts.
20 The Tinside Lido jutting out into the sea at Plymouth, built in 1935 at the height of the swimming boom, now fully restored and in use during a heatwave in 2006.
The new suburban lifestyle was strongly supported by the ethos of ‘modernism’. Modernism is usually associated with reforms in art, architecture, and design, but also incorporated a whole raft of politically Progressive hygienic beliefs centring on social democracy, individual freedom of conscience, sexual politics, and of course naturism.23 Naturism won steady converts during the first half of the century. Many committed naturist individuals—and indeed whole families—drew on a rich and ancient mixture of health beliefs absorbed and formed over generations. The disappearance of the last clothing layer, revealing once again the primitive naked skin of the animal body—bare arms, legs, torso, feet, and uncovered loose hair—was to a large extent continually spurred on by naturism and naturopathy among the more adventurous, or wealthier, classes of western Europe and America.24 Turn-of-the-century naturopathy flourished in luxurious, exclusive health resorts such as Lust’s famous Yungborn retreat in America, opened in 1896 in New Jersey, with others opened by leading lights Henry Lindlahr and Bernarr Macfadden. Macfadden opened his first ‘Health Home’ in Britain in 1907, and one of his managers, Stanley Lief (editor of the long-running magazine Health for All, later called Here’s Health), opened the still-existing ‘health farm’ at Champneys, Hertfordshire, in 1925. Naturopathy was set firmly in Protestant medical traditions, spurning the use of any artificial drugs (and vaccines), and was thus just as eclectic and empirical as its predecessors, drawing on all the old physical therapies and adding many other modern (or revived) techniques such as body massage, ‘radiant heat’ or ‘artificial sunlight’, yoga and breath control, the Alexander method of vocal exercises, and the Bates method of eye exercises—all of which became well known to the select few.
Because of the general exodus of patients to other health-seeking sites, many of the old British inland spas languished in the inter-war years, sustained only as convalescent centres for the elderly or war-wounded, although in Europe professional hydropathy was kept alive in the larger spas of Germany, France, Italy, and Hungary.25 In 1993 cold-water hydrotherapy in Britain was somewhat naively relaunched as a brand new ‘thermo-regulatory hydrotherapy training’ for boosting the immune system. ‘It is very interesting to read that this discovery has been made in England and I am extremely excited about the findings… similar findings were borne out at the turn of the century by our own scientists,’ politely commented the director of the Kneipp Hydrotherapy Centre at Bad Wörishofen in Germany, opened by Kneipp in 1889 (now with two research departments and 160,000 members of over 600 Kneipp clubs worldwide, and growing).
Naturopathy remained securely fixed in its transcendentalism. In food reform circles Dr Max Bircher-Benner was a charismatic figure. In 1906 he had founded his Force de Vie Privat-Klinik outside Zurich, having been snubbed by Zurich Medical Society for giving a paper in which he quoted the second law of thermodynamics and described fruit and vegetables as ‘living matter’—‘living food’—with a Life Force of their own which was completely destroyed by cooking. His patients went on a ‘Detoxication’ nature cure consisting of exercise, elemental bathing, three days of raw fruit and vegetables, one day fasting, and two days of the Bircher-Benner diet. This was the famous Birchermuesli, made of porridge oats, milk (or yoghurt), honey, nuts, and raw fruits, which, in true empiric fashion, he had once shared and enjoyed with a peasant in the mountains (just as he had once eaten a raw apple which made him well). Bircher-Benner’s regime inspired other naturopathic clinics in Europe and America, and the ‘macrobiotic’ diet, and ‘vitamin’ salads, emphasizing the principle of ‘holistic’ raw and unrefined foods, became an intriguing new addition to the vegetarian cuisine. During the 1920s nutritional science had gradually isolated the essential nutrient ‘vitamins’ (A, B, C, D, E) found in raw foods, and seemed at last able to establish a scientific basis for vegetarianism; ironically, by the 1930s synthetic vitamin supplements had become major profit-earners for the big pharmaceutical companies.26
For the true naturist, however, the real action had already gone elsewhere—to sun worship and the ‘Joy of Light’.
A healthy brown body beside the blue lake, in the green of the forest, on the mountain tops: nothing is more splendid… All who have seen it, seen with their whole souls, know why human beings are not born with clothes on—they know that man is a creature of light … Gaze into the clear joyous eyes of young people accustomed to the light, and you will behold a new radiant purity—something that no merely ‘civilised’ person can even guess at.27
Werner Zimmerman’s glowing description of his Joy of Light colony on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel was one of the inspirations for the Swiss League of Light, founded a year later, in 1928. Its members believed in sunlight, cooperation, pacifism, free love, vegetarianism, the elimination of stimulant drugs—and the power of the naked body: ‘A new humanity shall come out of nakedness; the nakedness that courageously stands up for the “new spirit” in the face of a corrupt world.’ Naked sunbathing caught the public imagination like nothing had done since cold bathing. Nudity broke through the Christian taboos that had accumulated around the naked body in Europe, and its beauty and muscularity was now celebrated and exposed for the first time since the fall of Rome. With the rediscovery of pagan Greek ideals also came renewed demands for sexual freedom and sexual equality, and freedom from the burden of Christian sin, guilt, and shame. For women in particular, pureminded healthy nakedness was an astounding bodily liberation, while feminist ‘free love’ theory (and birth control reform) was intended to release them from the old ascetic bonds of virginity and celibacy.
Because of its vitalist traditions and its nineteenth-century Natural Healing Movement, Germany was the leader in what now became known as the ‘free body culture’ (Freikorperkultur). The cult of nudity (Nacktkultur) was well advanced in Germany by the 1900s, and the first public mixed sunbathing area, the Free Light Park (Freilichtpark), which opened in Berlin in 1903, drew many thousands of bathers. The first-ever sunbathing club, the Friends of the Rising Light, was formed in 1906. A series of outdoor lodges around Berlin led to the forming of the Nude Airbathing Association of Berlin, where the first international Congress of Nudity and Education took place in 1921. The old German youth hiking movement, the Wandervogel, had been stripping off for years; and Major Hans Suren, chief of the German Army School for Physical Exercise between 1919 and 1924, raised a whole generation of soldier cadets who trained naked in all weathers. By the early 1930s there were an estimated 3 million nudists in Germany.28 In England nude sun- and air bathing had also been practised informally for decades, but in 1923 the classically named English Gymnosophist Society opened a sunbathing lodge in Upper Norwood, followed by the more obvious Sunbathing Society in 1927; French and Scandinavian naturist lodges were opened in the 1930s. In the United States the American Sunbathing Association was formed in 1923 with lodges in Cleveland and New York State, while Bernarr Macfadden’s American League for Physical Culture was started in 1929, with its own sunbathing lodge at Sky Farm, New Jersey.29 Macfadden was a vocal supporter of ‘physical culture’ and the freikorperkultur (‘free-body’) movement in America, and promoted the accompanying eugenic-Aryan ideals of physical beauty and fitness for men and women as progenitors of a fit race: ‘Strength through Joy… Weakness is a Crime’.
The rise of physical culture and body-building magazines complemented the commercial sports of boxing and wrestling, encouraged all other athletic feats of strength and endurance, and brought on a new generation of brawny record-breakers in tennis, yachting, cricket, athletics, cycling, and all other sports—especially swimming.30 In its heyday in the inter-war years, swimming was considered to be the most physical and most beautiful of all outdoor sports; and was a gift to the new media of photography. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, especially after 1875, when Captain Matthew Webb swam the English Channel and became an international hero, endurance and ‘display’ swimmers had become popular celebrities. During the 1920s and 1930s competition diving and synchronized swimming were developed, and the new Australian overarm racing crawl developed ever-faster leg-beats and competition times. Local rivers and pools (‘swimming holes’) were developed, and ardent swimmers travelled long distances to find secluded, classically inspired, or challenging sheets of water all over the world, with their cameras in their packs. Cameras and film also brought the first pictures of night-swimming parties, common since Byronic days among gilded youth, now often lit by low electric lights around the nouveau riche private pool, set near the house.31
21 The ultimate test of naturist hardiness (and its love affair with photography): naked air-bathing in the European Alps in 1930.
By the 1930s Joy of Light pure naturism had gone far beyond the remit of medical therapeutics and had become increasingly enmeshed in socialist and fascist body-politics. For dedicated political radicals, naturist nude swimming and sunbathing in large mixed groups was absolutely de rigueur. At Progressive League summer schools in Britain (and Fabian Society summer retreats), the rambles, picnics, swimming, sunbathing, and barefoot early-morning country dancing that accompanied the political discussions were strong bonding occasions. In America, Progressives went into summer seclusion to Asheville in North Carolina, or to the island of Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod in Massachusetts.32 But the dark cloud of eugenics was fast approaching in Europe. Socialist ramblers on German mountainsides were harried by the emerging right-wing naturheil Nazi Youth organizations; and groups such as the pacifist and anti-racist radical Christian Bruderhof communes were forced to emigrate in the early 1930s—at about the same time that Jews were being banned from German gymnastic clubs.33 In 1933 Hitler banned nudism in Germany—more for its ‘freethinking’ philosophy than for reasons of morality, since the Nazis also laid full claim to physical culture, nature worship, and hygienic public health, including vegetarianism, naturopathy, anti-smoking campaigns, and cancer screening. The details of Heinrich Himmler’s carefully constructed neo-pagan Nazi religious cult are now very well known: the shrines, the Ark, the myths, the purificatory rules and initiations, the physically perfect specimens, the marriage laws, the naturism and pure diet, the flags, the songs. Hitler took on additional sacred authority as the Master, or Führer, of this patriotic and purist nature cult; and his sober personal habits and vegetarianism were an integral part of Nazi propaganda.34 In the longer term, Nazi eugenics and appropriation of the term ‘social hygiene’ undoubtedly brought the (previously unquestioned) morality of hygiene into disrepute, and so played a considerable role in the intellectual avoidance, or downgrading, of the word ‘hygiene’ in the post-war era.
The visual image of the 1950s is that of an exceptionally sanitized decade. Post-1945 was above all the era of a new americaine, which exported—largely through film and television—the hygienic ideals of the affluent American suburbs, including a fervent nouveau riche obsession with domestic and personal cleanliness. New colour film not only emphasized the toilette of the stars but threw light into domestic interiors that had never been so glamorized before. A huge American consumer market developed the all-electric ‘white goods’ sector, and a booming advertising industry sold housework as effortless, even chic. Women consumers, advertisers, and manufacturing suppliers colluded in a fragrant revolution. The first ever television advert was for soap; and laundry in the 1950s was made ‘whiter than white’ with ‘blues’ and bleaches, with its ‘fresh’ smell always heavily emphasized. Well-packaged cleansing products such as liquid detergents, spray polish, bathroom cleaners, air fresheners, liquid soaps, and shower gels began to fill the post-war house with perfume—a stunning array, compared to the 1900s house. Scenting its quarry accurately, household advertising abandoned the medical hard sell of the inter-war years and went over to pastel-coloured soft sell from the 1970s; the old ‘antiseptic’ scents were slowly replaced by floral essences and (latterly) by a new range of powerful herbal, spice, and fruit scents.35 Household cleaners are not quite the staple of TV advertising budgets that they were, and it is noticeable that cosmetic adverts (including even menstrual products) have largely taken over their slot.
22 The glamorous, energetic, ‘fizzing’ 1950s housewife. A playing-card advertising a bowel-releasing laxative for ‘inner cleanliness’—a lasting survival of popular humoralism.
Wartime austerity had created a pent-up urge to spend money on beautification. In the post-war period, ‘glamour’ was in, and cosmetic sales rocketed. From America came the concept of ‘BO’ (body odour) and the use of underarm deodorants, spread through a large advertising campaign in the 1950s—and which accompanied the American habit of showering. The history of twentieth-century personal hygiene could easily be written as the rise of the cheap and convenient domestic shower, and the small efficient domestic washing machine, which made the laundering of underlinen easier than ever before and banished the now unwelcome smell of bacterial decomposition. The male toilette generally was given a fresh start in the 1950s with hair creams, electric and safety razors, and ruggedly perfumed aftershave (notably the US world brand leader Old Spice). The cosmetics historian Jim Obelkevich has suggested that it was largely women who transformed the male toilette: ‘It was women, not ads, who got men to change … Women bought aftershave, gave it to their husbands and boyfriends, kept after them to use it, complimented them when they did, bought more when it ran out—and so on, year after year. Fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, cousins, uncles, in-laws—no male relative was spared.’36 For all men, bodily ‘self-presentation’ was an additional selling point in an increasingly competitive labour market, whose main twentieth-century feature had been the arrival of women—strongly encouraged by the continuing spread of progressive, free-body philosophies.
There was a distinctly pagan, non-Western approach to the good life in the last third of the century, that was not nearly so puritanical and clean-cut as it was even in the 1930s or 1950s. For this, multiculturalism was largely responsible. Many radical activists of the 1960s and 1970s spent their formative years living in what they saw as the ‘alternative society’ to worldwide consumer capitalism, and their political and social networks were as intense (and as internationalist) as those of the 1790s, 1840s, 1890s, or 1930s. Some activists found to their great surprise that, although their grandparents or parents could not actually become ‘hippies’, they were more than capable of becoming ‘Greens’ or tree-savers, or protesting against world war, apartheid, or nuclear power. It was the ecological puritans of the 1960s who were the first to point out that there was a global environmental pollution problem. Their bible was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which not only exposed the extent of the man-made chemical contamination of the environment, but warned of possible long-term consequences for human genetic mutation and destruction of chromosomes. At the same time the ecology-inspired principle of ‘intermediate technology’ and the ‘Gaia’ philosophy of a self-sustaining planet, originally proposed by James Lovelock, was being developed within the alternative ‘green’ student movements of the 1960s and 1970s; ten years later it had moved into international aid organizations and colonized university academic departments. Ecology conquered the United Nations and ‘greened’ many global economists in the 1980s–1990s.37
Another hidden link with older radicals was through pure food movements, and the campaign for ‘real’ and organic foods. Alternative food reform was accompanied by ‘purist’ cookery using authentic recipes and ingredients from the world’s peasant cuisines (also peasant or traditional beauty receipts), and took over the marketing of naturopathic macrobiotic foods in a surge of small ‘health food’ producers and cooperative outlets selling yoghurt, muesli, lentils, wholemeal bread, brown rice, organic vegetables, and natural cosmetics—older naturopathic outlets were often saved from extinction.38 Starting in the 1980s, ethnic cuisines, organic products, and an unprecedented array of fresh vegetables and fruit have been successfully mass marketed by globalized supermarket chains, feeding growing numbers of healthy-lifestyle consumers.
It was pre-1945 naturopaths who had begun to experiment with yoga, meditation, acupuncture, and other forms of multicultural medicine. Their moral stand against orthodox medicine had never slackened, and was quietly picked up by activists from the 1960s onwards. ‘Flower power’, ‘ethnic’, or non-Christian multicultural moral philosophies and therapies played a large part in the late-century surge of holistic health care—an ‘alternative’ (or ‘fringe’) medicine that included many things that Granny might have tried, while sharing the same rooted distrust of doctors.
During the 1950s, when scientific hospital-based medicine became widely accessible (and freely used the new wonderdrug penicillin and a whole range of new antibiotics), many people had thrown out their array of home remedies with apparent relief.39 After 1945 in Britain and elsewhere, what had remained of the old medical categories of the ‘Institutes of Hygiene’ were split administratively between scores of different government and university departments and sciences. Public health problems were now largely tracked by epidemiologists and social welfare analysts; welfare agencies were hived off into separate departments of Social Services; and layers of hospital-based regional and district health authorities were put into place. Other so-called ‘ancillary’ body services such as dentistry, chiropody, ophthalmology, midwifery, diet and nutrition, psychology, and physical and occupational therapy, slowly reorganized their professions and expanded their publicly funded work in separate niches within the hospital system.40
But by the 1970s patients were starting to vote with their feet again, in both Europe and the United States. The complaint voiced by 1970s radical authors such as Ivan Illich, Fritjof Capra, and René Dubos was that orthodox medicine was still too uncaring and ‘invasive’, too narrow and mechanistic, and still far too drug-based. It was failing to cope with chronic disease, and it was certainly failing to deal with the ‘whole person’: the six- to seven-minute average consultation time was a particular complaint. At the same time women’s liberation groups were pioneering medical ‘self-help’ through feminist medical advice books, self-help videos, classes, and communal group analysis; which all proved very effective in launching the widespread natural birth movement (which included the use of massage and warm-water birthing pools, a throwback to ancient Methodist techniques).41 Progressive doctors responded quickly to these critiques. In the United States a pressure group of doctors working within the profession, the American Holistic Medicine Association, was set up in 1978; the British Holistic Medical Association followed in 1981 (its motto: ‘Physician heal thyself’). Fringe medicine was often now more gracefully called ‘complementary medicine’, with the idea that it should work alongside orthodox medicine—or better still, change it. In Britain consultation rates with ‘lay’ holistic practitioners rose steadily during the 1970s at a rate of 10–15 per cent per year: by 1983 there were an estimated 28,000 self-trained therapists of hypnosis, herbalism, homoeopathy, manipulation, yoga, acupuncture, and other alternative therapies, in addition to 2,000 or so associate-trained therapists. This was in total almost as many as Britain’s 29,000 general practitioners combined (and in one sample no less than 80 per cent of GPs wanted to learn their techniques). These consultation rates certainly increased during the 1980s–2000s.42
The grass-roots revival of self-help strategies attracted the attention of late twentieth-century sociologists, and gradually forced a revision of state health policies. In Britain the fragmentation of public medical services came under criticism, and was to some extent reversed in new multidisciplinary departments of ‘health policy, biology, and environmental science’. Moreover, the old sociological model of overlapping medical ‘sectors’ radiating out from a professional ‘hub’ was found inadequate to describe the real, anthropological parameters of welfare: localized, decentralized, professionally based, cross-disciplinary ‘primary care’ became the new buzzword in health administration. So little was known about the history of domestic medical care generally that it came as something of a surprise for medical sociologists to discover that professional medical help is normally only sought for roughly 1 in 10 medical episodes—or even less (for depression 1 in 74; for headache 1 in 60; backache 1 in 38; sleeplessness 1 in 31; muscle and joint aches 1 in 18; cold or flu 1 in 12; a sore throat 1 in 9). By the 1990s popular medical self-help groups covered almost every condition and ailment, meeting and communicating and sharing common experiences of self-diagnosis, new techniques, and remedies, a process made even easier by the Internet. With medical self-help groups apparently becoming a permanent feature of the medical scene, patient power moved up the political agenda and entered government health policies on both sides of the Atlantic; helping citizens to help themselves is now thought to be very cost-effective. In Britain the small Health Education Council (originating in the 1920s) became the much larger Health Development Agency, with a brief to raise health awareness, change health ‘risk’ behaviour, and ameliorate health inequalities.43 New Internet technology was also used to set up a new government diagnostic and advice service, and the first page of NHS Direct online (one of the last in our long list of health advice texts) opens thus:
• Want to find out more?—our health encyclopaedia covers a wide range of topics.
• Not feeling well?—try our self-help guide for advice.
• Want to stay healthy?—we have advice in the healthy section.44
The healthy section, of course, contains most of the old positive precepts of hygienic care, but never uses the word ‘hygiene’. But a modern terminology of need has slowly been devised. We find that while industrial executives, advertisers, health administrators—and the public—may know nothing about the philosophy of hygiene, they know all about the new ‘well-being sector’. The well-being sector (organic products, vitamins and minerals, spas, beauty salons, and gymnastic products and services) is a recognized late twentieth-century market phenomenon.
In the 1960s and 1970s naturism and wealth coincided on the warm and sunny Pacific coast of California, and produced a luxurious ‘New Age’ theology of body culture that ultimately became the ‘well-being sector’. ‘Hippie’ teenagers who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s formed the core group of affluent health enthusiasts who rediscovered multicultural medicine in the 1980s and 1990s; and in the United States, where personal health insurance was expensive or simply not affordable, and individual preventive health care strategies were even more essential, New Age holism was rapidly adopted and massmarketed as a new moral ‘wellness’ crusade: ‘Your health is your responsibility… don’t just sit there, do something,’ as one American best-seller energetically put it.45
Therapeutically speaking, modern holistic medicine is a revival of ancient humoralism, and starts from the premiss of a holistic physical interconnection between mind, body, and the universe, derived from both eastern Asian and Western classical-vitalist cosmologies. It pays close attention to the action of primary elements (earth, air, fire, water, metal, and wood), and to the old existential or environmental categories such as air, food and drink, exercise, sleep and work, the evacuations, and passions of the mind. The body is seen as existing in a biological envelope through which the cosmic physical forces of ‘bio-energy’ (or ying and yang) flow with a transcendent psychic energy that can be either harmful or benign. There is a particular interest in the tonic therapeutic actions and reactions of the five senses (acting not only through the nose, but through the eyes, the hands, the ears, and the voice) and in psychosomatic medicine generally; the term favoured by progressive holistic GPs is ‘biopsychosocial medicine’.46 The techniques used to control bio-energy are mainly those preserved and developed in the ancient practical-medicine traditions of eastern Asia, such as reflexology, aromatherapy, aerobics, Shiatsu, astrology, colour therapy, crystal dowsing, hot-stone massage, laughter therapy, and, more recently, Reiki, Shen Qi, Tui-Na, Feng Shui, and Qi Gong.47 Aromatherapy, deep breathing and meditation, and massage are considered particularly good for easing psychic blocks of energy flow, and overworked or ‘stressed-out’ individuals (rather like Roman citizens) are urged to cool down, ‘chill out’, lie back, unwind, relax. The famous cleansing or purging ‘detox’ regime starts with full ‘colonic irrigation’ of the bowels, followed by fasting and a planned dietary programme of pure foods and liquids, gentle exercises, meditation, aromatherapy, massage, and skin-cleansing, taken straight from the naturopathic textbooks. The much-desired ‘state of relaxation and health’ that these therapies enshrined also eventually led to a re-examination of the old non-natural category of ‘work and rest’—now popularly called ‘work-life balance’. But any references to ancient Western medical therapeutics are rare.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, humoral medicine itself has developed and moved on, but in harmony with ancient traditions. The dual Western-Eastern medical policy of Chinese state medicine is well known. Japanese engineers, on the other hand, have taken several ancient diagnostic procedures to their ultimate conclusion with their technical redesign of the toilet. Japanese electronic toilets are famous for their water-washing and air-drying facilities; less well known perhaps is the so-called ‘smart toilet’, which not only weighs you, but analyses your stools. Based on these readings, it can tell you whether or not you have had too much alcohol, too much protein, or too much of anything harmful, and can inform and act as your doctor. It can prescribe a special diet, order it from the supermarket, and have it delivered to your home, ready to be microwaved.48
Beauty care has made a big comeback. Glowingly healthy, attractive self-presentation knows no social or geographical boundaries. The beautiful people who flit through the pages of late-century health texts are self-empowered, strong, and pure, inside and out. A ‘Gaia philosophy’ advice book from 1995 told its readers:
In a state of relaxation and health, the body is perfectly designed to be self-cleansing, self-regulating and self-healing. But the toxic overload in the air we breathe, the water we drink, our food, our work places, and our homes undermines our health and immunity… Body Tonic is a practical handbook for everybody in our polluted world. It features unique questionnaires to assess your own level of toxicity, and suggests appropriate programmes of diet, exercise, cleansing and meditation for detoxification and long-term well-being.49
Diet, exercise, and a good spiritual attitude are essential for producing the holistically perfect beautiful body, which lives in spotlessly clean, white, natural, and minimalist surroundings (not unlike a virgin’s or monk’s cell). The virginal theme reappears in a new ethic of intensive grooming. Total cleansing and a purist attitude towards cosmetic care has replaced the ‘killer glamour look’ in certain elite circles: skin moisturizers instead of foundation paint, tinted lashes instead of mascara, expensively pedicured feet and manicured hands, organically treated glossy hair, scrupulous depilation, and a understated dress code that is modest, even severe, yet wildly expensive. As one fashion stylist put it, ‘My clothes are quite minimal…the main attention goes on body maintenance—facials, saunas, nail upkeep. I don’t drink and I try to keep a balanced diet. Virtuous? Maybe, but it’s not until I’ve done my exercise that I feel balanced and clean.’50
These higher standards of personal hygiene seem in fact to have come about incrementally in the wider population, in the last fifty years. In 2001 British cosmetic and toiletry sales totalled £4,115 million (up 18 per cent over four years)—a sharp contrast to 1949, when the total was £120 million, with an average personal ‘spend’ of 3s. 10d. a month. In 1949 British women apparently did a hair-wash ‘on average between once a week and once a fortnight’.51 By 1965 over half were using underarm deodorants daily, and shaving their underarms; and recently it was found that ‘more than four-fifths of the population change their underwear every day…One in 10 women carries a spare pair of knickers everywhere. Almost all of them change every day. More than half shower daily.’ Shaving, waxing, plucking, and moisturizing the body became a general habit during the 1980s, while full-body depilation (beyond the ‘bikini line’) is an old ganika art that re-emerged as a fashion accessory in the 1990s, to complement the all-over tan; tanning machines (and fake tanning lotions) are available in every high street or shopping mall.
Retail analyst figures provide some graphic insights into the modern history of cosmetics and toiletries, on a global scale. The ‘well-being’ industries have soared faster than any other retail sector; private gyms and health clubs took off in the 1980s; artificial ‘spa bathing’ has undergone a parallel economic resurgence (up 25 per cent in the United States) and the world’s natural spas have recently become elite holiday destinations.52 Meanwhile, global cosmetics retailers are already charting their course for years ahead. The so-called ‘mature’ markets in the United States and Europe have been heavily ‘segmented’ into niche markets by age, gender, and income, but are apparently showing signs of market saturation; while the ‘undeveloped’ markets in Asia–Pacific, South America, and central Europe, on the other hand, are filled with new potential and contributed largely to the 9 per cent growth in the world market in 2004. As global urbanization continues and increasing numbers of women enter paid work, these regions are being targeted through direct ‘home selling’ (Avon, Oriflame), the Internet, local celebrity endorsement, sustained television campaigns, and buyouts of local or national companies. America and France are still the global market leaders—the United States with Procter & Gamble-Gillette, France with L’Oréal—and over the last ten years they and other companies have poured research and development into three new sectors: high-income older women, men’s cosmetics, and the teenage market.53
Women still dominate the cosmetics market in all countries, buying mostly skin care and hair care products, followed by fragrances and colour cosmetics; but women in developed markets now prefer high-end ‘value-added’ goods. Organic and natural products showed the biggest (11 per cent) increase in the US and French markets, selling ‘wellness products’ that make an explicit connection between beauty products, diet, and vitamins—or ‘cosmeceuticals’, as they are now known in the trade. In the United States this ‘cross-over’ also spread into expensive organic baby care products, as women ‘baby boomers’ from the 1960s and 1970s had their children at a later age. Any sharp distinction between the male and female toilette has been blurred by the recent phenomenal rise of commercial cosmetic surgery for both sexes, correcting supposed bodily imperfections and signs of ageing, at middle-class prices.54 It was mainly older women (and ‘metrosexual’ men) in Europe and the United States who brought about the boom in anti-ageing dermatological products marketed by cosmetic surgeons and global companies—like Elizabeth Arden’s half-strength botox Prevage Anti-Ageing Treatment and L’Oréal’s vitamin C skin-serum ‘skinceuticals’. Another potentially lucrative market has opened up with high-end ‘ethnic’ cosmetics scientifically developed to suit the different skin types and demands of black, Hispanic, and Chinese women (and men), especially after it was noticed that although African Americans made up 12 per cent of the US population, they accounted for 25 per cent of the total spend on cosmetics and toiletries.
The sales of men’s cosmetics have shot up everywhere in Europe and the United States, kick-started in France, where male skin care products showed an extraordinary 67 per cent rise between 2000 and 2005; sales also clearly show there is an untapped market among men elsewhere in the world. Men may eventually start buying toiletries en masse, like women, but retail surveys of their current grooming habits suggest that there are many hurdles to overcome—not least the superconfident ‘Retrosexual Groomer’ (the majority, 57 per cent), whose body is adequately showered and washed, but whose grooming routine takes a swift ten minutes—twenty at most—and who refuses to use fragrances or expensive extras of any kind. Researchers have managed to find some groups of slightly more fastidious ‘Practical Groomers’, who will at least use deodorants; and some groups of older ‘Natural Groomers’, who use fragrances, skin care, and anti-ageing products, and who, like their younger counterparts, the ‘Metrosexual Groomers’, are ‘clearly in no hurry to leave the bathroom’, spending well over half an hour a day on a full range of grooming routines. Narcissus, of course, was a male god; and the cosmetics industry has faithfully mirrored the rise of the well-groomed, affluent, gay male economy, and the power of the so-called ‘pink’ pound/dollar/euro/yen. But the proportion of intensive male groomers is small (15 per cent) and studies show that boys, unlike girls, are generally ‘taught to believe that what they do is more important than how they look or smell’; fathers still pass on the traditional male right to perspire without embarrassment: ‘sweat is a sign of hard work, nothing to be ashamed of, a fact of life’. In one deodorant survey it was often the more socially confident boys (or young men) who actually washed and groomed themselves less—alpha males in the making—which may explain why another survey found that it was frequently ‘the bosses who are smellier, with manual workers and the unemployed changing their underwear more frequently: 82 per cent wear clean smalls every day, compared with 78 per cent of the middle classes’.55
23 Le Beau Male—masculine narcissism (c.2006). The French cosmetic and fashion industries worked together in developing the current niche market revival of male beauty products.
But things may change in the future. Affluent young teenagers have become an ever larger part of the late-century personal hygiene market. The ‘Afro’ haircut of the 1960s was one of the first symbols of Western youth’s liberation from its own culture. It was part of a youth fashion rebellion against everything that Western bourgeois hygiene represented, in youth groups ranging from the ‘Beats’, Hell’s Angels, and hard-rockers, through to punk, ‘grunge’, and Green ‘crusties’. Since the 1960s virtually all the ancient ethnic body-arts (nail art, hair art, face-painting, ring-piercing, tattooing, pomades, foot jewellery, thongs, etc.) have been rediscovered by young multiculturalists, and have lodged firmly in European and US teenage bedrooms. But today’s teenage boys, by and large, prefer to wear American global brands or styles of sportswear that emancipate them from their past and/or connect them to their peers around the world, with a casual, pristine, ‘locker-room look’ that also requires that they use quantities of deodorants (Lynx, Axe), shower frequently, change their underwear, and care very deeply about the cleanliness of their face, breath, feet, and hair. Boys will never catch up on the girls, though. Between the ages of 7 and 10, girls are already treating grooming as a fun play activity—‘dressing up’—complete with cheap and cheerful body sprays, flavoured lipsticks, and glitter nail varnish; between 11 and 14 they go in for more sophisticated fragrances, deodorants, heavy showering, skin moisturizers, complex hairstyling, and a broader repertoire of make-up. By ages 15 to 19 girls already have established grooming routines, at a time when boys are just beginning to grapple with shaving. As a group, however, modern teenagers fully realize that smelliness is now socially unacceptable (you can even lose your job) and that personal cleanliness is a required norm. But the old primate grooming display urges lie close beneath the surface. In one 1980s teenage survey, ‘wanting to have friends and to attract the opposite sex were cited as the main reasons for concentration on hygiene. All agreed that it gives you more confidence knowing that you are clean.’56
It is what the retail analysts say about the consumer lifestyles of their target ‘undeveloped’ rural markets that really brings the history home—the places where the old and ancient ways are still fully operational, and which so closely resemble the relatively recent past in Europe and the United States. So it is with a thrill of recognition that we read that rural classes in India prefer to use bar soap for ‘head-to-toe body washing’ (the strip wash); that many ‘even use home preparations’—or purchase local ‘generic products’; or that there is a large trade in smuggled high-class cosmetics from overseas, as well as cheap local ‘counterfeit’ copies; or that ‘rural consumers typically visit an outdoor barber’ for shaving and haircuts—which is what most British men also did in 1949 (only the local barber was of course indoors), while many of them also bought all their toilet necessities there as well. (The majority still go out for a haircut, but shaving has been made easier at home, and supermarkets provide most of the products.) The consumer lifestyle in Turkmenistan is equally revealing. Turkmenistan is still a predominantly rural peasant economy (53.9 per cent) with very few ‘premium outlets’, and most of its population use traditional means of grooming.57 The men are always crisply turned out, even though all laundering is done by hand, without washing machines; the women use home preparations such as olive oil and locally produced fragrances to dress their hair, but generally do not use beauty products at all ‘except on special occasions’. However, even in Turkmenistan things are changing, and these changes are illuminating. One key event has been that ‘love marriages’ were made legal in 2000: sales of cosmetic depilatories immediately shot up by a staggering 1,408 per cent, and cosmetic sales rose by over 200 per cent. Another (universal) trend is that many young Turkmenistan men and women are now moving into office work, where good daily grooming is essential. The message from the retail analysts is clear and very familiar: it is the new urban and suburban classes that are forcing cosmetic demand worldwide; and these upwardly mobile people are driven by personal ambition and the need to succeed in an expanded global marketplace.
The search for the body beautiful is truly relentless. Narcissism (the ‘tendency to self-worship, absorption in one’s own physical perfections’) seems to occur among privileged groups during every period of prosperity; and the mind inevitably drifts to Ovid, and to all those exquisite gallants of courtly life, male and female, clothed or semi-clothed, and all those other keen gymnasts and self-improvers, throughout the centuries. The human body has undoubtedly been caught up in the twentieth-century celebration of godless technical materialism—this beauty is skin deep, and proud of it—but the twentieth- and twenty-first-century evidence gives us just a hint of what a powerful social force beauty is and always has been.58 If love, luxury, and leisure are the key determinants of successful health and beauty care, then rising global affluence has done the most of all to promote it. It requires only a few well-known changes in habits and manners for social aspirants to gentrify now within a single generation. At this point in time in advanced industrial countries, decades of increased personal hygiene and cosmetic awareness have finally paid off. Teeth are better, feet are rarely deformed, and gross skin diseases, and particularly gross facial deformities, have become almost non-existent; as one cosmetic surgeon put it, ‘we catch them all much earlier now’. There are, quite literally, many more beautiful and unblemished people around.
There is a little bit of this whole history in all of us. We are, when all is said and done, merely biological animals with a special tendency to sensuous pursuits such as sex, beautification, and pleasure—all of which roused such contrary human passions, and ascetic forms of self-control. Greek hygiene is still with us, transformed into a global industry (or rather, many industries). We still adore Roman-style bathing and pampering—and we still like to do it in crowds, like medieval communities. Early modern puritans continued the religious healing mission, and transformed our attitudes to personal and public hygiene; a process which was facilitated by the long and steady rise in disposable income, throughout the nouveau riche eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The health crusaders of the nineteenth century helped cope with a crisis and built the world as we know it; and the continuing affluence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has preserved these gains, and greatly extended human longevity. Yet still we are worried about the future. We always are worried—it seems to be a necessary part of the human condition. It is how we adapt and survive. There are two complementary themes in this book: the material empiricism of ‘personal hygiene’, and the immaterial imagination of ‘purity’. We are still worried on both fronts—but especially now about global environmental pollution.
We are slowly realizing that urban civilization is a very thin veneer, and that longevity and luxury are fragile commodities. When Greenpeace and various other ecological protest movements merged under the ‘green’ umbrella, stung into action by a whole series of rusty oil tanker disasters, global pollution became global news. A scenario unfolded which exposed the growing pollution of the earth, air, and water through human activity and its various by-products and ‘evacuations’, and set in motion the long-term scientific analysis of the phenomenon of global warming. Like the nineteenth-century sanitarians before them, the international ecologists and their scientific supporters found that they could only warn and influence, and that the process of reform took much longer than anticipated.
Clean water for urbanites had been a steady policy throughout the twentieth century, but it came at a price. Domestic water demand for bathing and cleaning is at an all-time high, and large water-borne sewage systems are in place; but we find we have polluted seas and coastlines with our liquid evacuations, while the building of dams, reservoirs, and embankments along major rivers has destroyed ancient habitats and flood plains, and aggravated the politics of water rights. Clean air has been another twentieth-century hygienic fetish, and Clean Air legislation was successfully introduced in the 1970s. Coal smoke was banished at low atmospheric levels, but not the chemical fumes or ‘plumes’ from industrial products that went into the upper atmosphere; the existence of the ‘ozone layer’—and its decay—has only recently been observed. Toxic residues from industrial smoke stacks continue to destroy tree cover downwind for thousands of miles with acid rain; and the old sanitary belief in trees as the ‘lungs’ of the city is now projected in global terms, as satellite photography shows how commercial logging has decimated the world’s oxygenating virgin forests. Clean fuels are now a hotly debated topic. The worldwide nuclear industry was hailed in the 1960s as a new source of clean electrical energy replacing the dirty coal-run power stations; but has proved to be the source of virtually indestructible contamination. ‘Clean’ oil reserves are finite, and have passed their peak. ‘Clean’ fuel from low-tech sustainable energy technology—wave, wind, and solar power, and biomass fuels—was put on the back burner for over fifty years, but is now beginning to attract ‘ethical’ private investment and state support. Meanwhile, we attend to our health by buying ‘pure’ bottled mineral water in vast quantities, and drink it out of oil-based plastic containers. By inventing new trouble-free materials, new cleaning machines, and layers of extra wrappings, we banished many germs—and efficiently swept, buried, burned, or shipped our discarded refuse clean out of sight. Or so we thought until recently, when the vast piles of indestructible rubbish mounting annually in the world’s largest conurbations suddenly became a visible problem, and the scavenging or recycling industry was reborn.
We are still especially careful of what we put into our mouths—and it must be clean and pure food. Our primitive disgust responses are still very much alive. A few years ago BSE (mad cow disease) emerged on British farms, and by a short but unsuspected route (cattle feed) infected European and other herds, and entered the human food chain. Within a few weeks of BSE being discovered, a significant proportion of consumers of all classes worldwide had stopped buying and eating beef—though others ‘took a risk’ and limited themselves to ‘organic’ beef certified as untainted. The political and economic fallout was immediate: Britain was called ‘the leper of Europe’, the ‘dirty man of Europe’, ‘an island of sick animals’, ‘the whore of an England’, and probably many other unprintable things, for having generated these poxes. It certainly did not go unnoticed either, during the later foot and mouth epidemic of 2001, that the horrific piles of burning carcasses, the mattresses soaked with disinfectant washes, the specially clothed operatives, the closing of footpaths and public parks, and the enforced incarceration of farmers and their families on their land and within their houses, resembled nothing so much as a seventeenth-century plague scene.59 Meanwhile, the public image of meat butchery declines still further, and yet more children lean towards ethical vegetarianism and green politics.
There was another sharp shock for ‘agri-business’ in the 1990s when the European public was alerted by an international public campaign on the Internet, and rose up in moral indignation against the genetic pollution of the world’s natural food stocks through genetically modified (GM) crops (not to mention a corporate plan for ‘introducing’ sterile GM seeds to the world’s farmers) and refused to buy genetically modified foods. ‘Green’, or pro-nature, agricultural reformers now call for the deglobalization of agricultural trading by shortening the international food supply chains, and returning to local, mixed, traditional organic farming without chemicals—a move strongly supported by chefs, animal welfare campaigners, and industrialized farmers trying desperately to ‘clean up their act’, many of whom have turned both organic and ‘humane’. But so long as global air transport is economic, ‘ethical development’ will have to live with modern technology. And so it has. To green, multicultural food reformers, small is beautiful wherever it exists. The ‘ethical consumer’ who will charitably pay extra cash to small Third World farmers (or indeed even their own small farmers) directly, through buying organic ‘fair trade’ products, is the latest green bombshell in food retailing. Along with all this is the rise of the Rousseauian ‘ethical mother’. Organic reform has touched many areas where women are in control, not only in personal cosmetic regimes, but in family food-shopping and children’s diet. In 2004–5 the young chef Jamie Oliver shook the British public with his exposé of the heavily processed food (and health effects) contained in cheap school dinners; while Morgan Spurlock’s film Super Size Me caused a market crash in McDonald’s ‘fast food’ meals (and a prompt corporate revision of nutritional content and portions).
Children’s health has led to another future worry—the so-called ‘hygiene hypothesis’, which suggests we have possibly all become too clean for our own good; and that this may be the cause of the disturbing rise in allergic and auto-immune diseases (hay fever, asthma, and nut and other food allergies) in industrialized urban societies with high standards of hygiene. The sneezing and wheezing diseases were always thought to come from polluted air; but the ‘hygienic’ immune phenomenon was first noticed in Germany, when an asthma study of East German and West German families found that the children in the dirtier and less hygienic East had significantly fewer cases of asthma than children from the cleaner and more modern West. The hypothesis was further tested; it was found that country children, or indeed children who have been around animals from an early age, or even those who had attended crowded day care centres, or who had larger families, had a stronger immune system response than children in towns who lived in clean and disinfected homes and streets. The immune system had been challenged at an early age, and stimulated into action. The same contrasts can be found in the immune systems of ‘dirty’ wild and ‘clean’ captive animals, such as rats. The problem, if the hypothesis stands up, is what to do about it. Unfortunately, our bodies need only the right kind of dirt: feces-contaminated dirt, or chemically contaminated dirt, can be fatal. It has got to be wholesome dirt. Meanwhile, it may be best to play safe and hold off from the 700 new antibacterial cleansing products that apparently hit the market between 1992 and 1998.60
Further problems have arisen over the last thirty years in connection with the many man-made chemicals or biological weapons used in or around the human body, as broadly predicted in Silent Spring. The very rapid fraying of the microbiological medical safety net, however, was not predicted. Antibiotics have already been redeveloped many times, as resistant strains have endlessly mutated. The most recent problem has been the rapid biological development of penicillin-resistant MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus) in many different forms. In the United Kingdom, MRSA-related deaths rose from thirteen in 1993 to over 1,600 in 2004; and cross-infection is only controlled through strict and old-fashioned hygienic measures: thorough hospital ward cleaning, hand-washing, asepsis, and quarantine.61 Meanwhile, other potential physiological problems (for example, the problem of sperm count decline), possibly due to ingesting man-made chemical trace elements in food and water supplies, packaging materials, or cleaning materials, still lie in the future.
‘Puritanism’ in all its forms, good or bad, has to be considered a deep-seated part of our physiological and psychological makeup, and a major historical continuity. Globally, the darker side of the psychology of puritanism has also been very much in evidence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On every continent warring groups have used the language of the political purge, and ‘ethnic cleansing’ genocides have been distressingly common. Extreme religious puritanism is currently being used worldwide as a political instrument by a new wave of evangelical ascetics, whose extremely conservative world-view abhors the gleaming façade of modern urban materialism. Like the ancient Jews and Christians, for people who feel they lack everything in the present world, religious millenarianism and perfection in a future world still holds a real significance.62 As one historian of technology points out (with a little exaggeration), even in the twentieth century, ‘we have never been modern … the modern world permits scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of societies, minuscule increases in the number of actors, small modifications of old beliefs’.63 Perhaps Hegel was right, and there is a semi-closed system at work: the environmental, social, and biologically determined limitations imposed on the body often make it seem so.
But the past continues to exist on many polytemporal levels. We all have our Neolithic moments, although (when adults) we are often reluctant to acknowledge them. The idea of the simultaneity of time-frames in our everyday existence is a theory almost without the possibility of proof; but one particularly poignant final story seems to illustrate something very like it. The story comes from the Holocaust and involves a puzzled male doctor and a consignment of red lipsticks arriving in Belsen concentration camp immediately after the Second World War. The internees were people surviving like trapped animals, whose bio-hygienic clocks and human grooming codes had been almost—but not quite—totally destroyed:
piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them … men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap from a tank in which the remains of a child floated…
To the doctor’s astonishment, they clung with extraordinary ferocity to a single talisman of their former human lives:
I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.64
In extreme conditions humans still revert to their old animal survival skills, and we should perhaps take some comfort from the continued survival of our ancient coping mechanisms. Many of these are socially trained; but the most innate live continually inside us. We are probably ‘right’ to let instinct guide us when confronting the microbiological world that we cannot normally see. But as one immunologist recently pointed out, what is really astounding is how few micro-organisms actually cause human disease, and how peacefully they have coexisted with the very recent species Homo sapiens sapiens. A world without bacteria, says Gerald Callahan, would be a poorer world:
This is not a war, as it has often been described, even though we have mustered an impressive array of weapons—bactericidal cribs and mattresses, toilet cleaners and counter tops, blankets, deodorants, shampoos, hand soap, mouthwashes, toothpastes. This is not a war at all. If it were, we would have lost long ago, overpowered by sheer numbers and evolutionary speed. This is something else, something like a lichen, something like a waltz. This waltz will last for all of human history. We must hold our partners carefully, and dance well.
What cannot change either, in the near or far future, is the strong human need for being touched and groomed and generally cleansed and cared for in a close physical sense. The holistic issues surrounding health inequalities and social ‘well-being’ are steadily turning into a future political conundrum. Social inequalities and the sense of ‘unfairness’ (a lack of love or respect) can create great stress and anxiety in the human animal; and too much stress and thankless labour can eventually kill as surely as poor diet or poisoned water or air. In today’s world it is apparently the more egalitarian societies, with fairer income distribution, that have the highest life expectancies and ‘happiness levels’—not the richest ones.65 Despite the great edifices of modern medicine, classic technology, ancient religion, and modern capitalism, perhaps the core image that might be taken away from this history is of compact family and kin groups quietly and mindlessly grooming, feeding, and otherwise looking after themselves, in their own homes and shelters, for their own purposes, day after day, year after year, generation after generation. ‘Well-being’ is ultimately neither a fad nor a luxury, but a necessary mental and physical state.
