Have you ever wondered about the bathroom history? How did we end up with a universally standardized version of what should and shouldn’t be in the bathroom? Well, we wonder about the origin story of the bathroom and other parts of the home. So if you are like us, you’ll want to read The Bathroom: A Social History of Cleanliness and the Body.
Here’s what you need to know about this book.
“A place of contradictions, the smallest room in the house it is one of the most expensive; named for its cleaning function, it is used for more than its toilet; and the most private space in the house is also the most dependent on public infrastructure.”
About Bathroom History
“And yet, they crapped in buckets and dumped them in the gutter.”
My wife Theresa has a unique–and entirely correct–observation she trots out sometimes when we’re watching a show about some wonder of humanity. Pick one: The Pyramids, Notre Dame, homes of the Gilded Age, the Duomo, DaVinci. And she observes that nestled among all this achievement, the high flight of the human mind, the mastery of math, science and art that “they were pooping in buckets and bedpans and tossing it out the window.”
Waste of all kinds, in general, is part of what builds the stories of archeological sites. The sites survived and what’s IN them–animal bones and poop and pottery. They survived along with them because ancient–and not-so-ancient–people dropped what they didn’t need anymore at their feet, then waded through it.
One evolution of the man’s hat and he should walk on the street-side of the sidewalk. It isn’t because he could chivalrously take the splash from the road. It was because the arc of the pee-poop sluice hurled out the window was more likely to hit him than his comely companion.
Bathroom History in My Life
I was born in 1968. I grew up in the modern 1½-bath suburban home. My mother, on the other hand, remembered when indoor plumbing was installed into her house as a child. She also remembered that a bath was a weekly event. And the still her father built in it needed to be removed.
The notion of the 3-piece, plumbed, vented, sanitary bathroom is remarkably new in the human experience.
On the other hand, what needs to come in needs to leave.
Human Bathroom History
Humans have been pooping and dropping a squat, basically, where they need to do it for 300,000 years of our species existence. The timber framers and masons slapping up Notre Dame…poop in a bucket or wherever. Gilded Age magnates literally inventing the modern world crapped in a can. And they had their bathwater brought up to them by an army of servants.
My own mother remembered the bathroom being brought indoors in the Massachusetts company town she was born into.
Book Review of The Bathroom: A Social History of Cleanliness and the Body
The Bathroom: A Social History of Cleanliness and the Body is way more interesting, personal and eye-opening about the most recent room in the modern home. While it delves into exquisite detail, it selects super relevant ones it doesn’t take an expert to unravel or appreciate.
The Trap
The “trap”, for example (they’re the squiggly S-shaped pipe under every kitchen sink we strain to store our paper towels and dish soap around) was invented in 1775. Ivory soap was the first “brand”, i.e. product not named for what it does. The grocer sold soap in long bars (or billets). He cut the soap with a wire knife and sectioned off for individual sale.
Bathroom Advertising
It touches on something we obsess over annually during the Super Bowl: Advertising. Massive swaths of advertising were built around cleanliness and consuming as many products as possible throughout the day to achieve a socially acceptable status.
And all of this around the most hyper-personal, inevitable activities in a religious environment that didn’t (and still doesn’t) like bodily functions like sex.
Easy to Read
The prose is smart and accessible. My brain hates textbooks and technical writing. The Bathroom: A Social History of Cleanliness and the Body reads more like a conversation than a lecture and should be a TED Talk on bathroom history and the history of cleanliness.
I don’t have to race around to take notes or remember how the 38-mile-long paragraph started. And considering the breadth this book covers–medical history and disease, infrastructure, morays, social and more trends, business and building codes to name a few–that is a serious achievement.
Technical Achievements
The author also identifies themes around getting rid of our poop that come up again and again, building a through-line to a room all of us visit every day and that inventors and industry and government have managed to make a process so automatic that we only think about it in an emergency–when it doesn’t work!
History of Cleanliness
One theme–and this pre-dates Germ Theory in the early 1900s–is the Sanitarian movement in especially in cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.
Back then, there were wells for drinking water and there were outhouses not far away. There were roaming hoards of pigs. When a horse died, it died in the street or not far from it.
Our offal was everywhere.
The first municipal water system went on-line–steam-powered–in 1801.
Final Thoughts about this Bathroom Book
The research is astounding. And the layout pf The Bathroom: A Social History of Cleanliness and the Body is text-booky, but only in the most awesome ways. I love the timeline at the beginning and the best line of the book is the last line and why I hope you read it.
“A place of contradictions, the smallest room in the house it is one of the most expensive; named for its cleaning function, it is used for more than its toilet; and the most private space in the house is also the most dependent on public infrastructure.”
Find this book in our Amazon store.
We read a lot. Here are some of the books we’ve loved the most that are related to home design and home improvement.
You can find book reviews of most of these titles on this website. And if you’ve read another bathroom history book or a gem of a home-related book that isn’t on our list, please let us know about it.
