Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Hoy, Suellen M.

Title Chasing dirt : the American pursuit of cleanliness / Suellen Hoy
Published New York : Oxford University Press, 1995

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xiv, 258 pages) : illustrations
Contents Introduction: Cleanliness First -- Ch. 1. Dreadfully Dirty. John Wesley, Benjamin Franklin, and Reality. The Filthy Farmstead. Towns and Cities, Dirty -- and Dangerous. The Domestic Woman, Agent of Cleanliness. Preceptress of Reform: Catharine Beecher. Cleanliness, Health, and Virtue: Graham and Alcott. Cleanliness as Public Policy: Griscom and Shattuck. Sanitary Reform on the Eve of War -- Ch. 2. A Wider War. Florence Nightingale's Good Example. The First Women Volunteers. Creating the Sanitary Commission. Olmsted Starts Inspecting. "A Woman's War" The South and the Freedpeople. Bringing Cleanliness Home from the War -- Ch. 3. City Cleansing. The Sanitary Lessons of the War. Epidemics and the Urgency of Water and Sewers. George Waring and the Sewering of America. Women as Municipal Housekeepers. Ada Sweet and a Cleaner Chicago. Waring Cleans Up New York City. Caroline Bartlett Crane Tests the Waring Model in Kalamazoo. Public and Private Cleanliness in the Progressive Era
Summary Americans in the early 19th century were, as one foreign traveller bluntly put it, "filthy, bordering on the beastly"--Perfectly at home in dirty, bug-infested, malodorous surroundings. Many a home swarmed with flies, barnyard animals, dust, and dirt; clothes were seldom washed; men hardly ever shaved or bathed. Yet gradually all this changed, and today Americans are known worldwide for their obsession with cleanliness - for their sophisticated plumbing, daily bathing, shiny hair and teeth, and spotless clothes. In Chasing Dirt, Suellen Hoy provides a colorful history of this remarkable transformation from "dreadfully dirty" to "cleaner than clean," ranging from the pre-Civil War era to the 1950s, when America's obsession with cleanliness reached its peak
Hoy offers here a fascinating narrative, filled with vivid portraits of the men and especially the women who helped America come clean. She examines the work of early promoters of cleanliness, such as Catharine Beecher and Sylvester Graham; and describes how the Civil War marked a turning point in our attitudes toward cleanliness, discussing the work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and revealing how the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War inspired American women - such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and Louisa May Alcott - to volunteer as nurses during the war. We also read of the postwar efforts of George E. Waring, Jr., a sanitary engineer who constructed sewer systems around the nation and who, as head of New York City's street-cleaning department, transformed the city from the nation's dirtiest to the nation's cleanest in three years
Hoy details the efforts to convince African-Americans and immigrants of the importance of cleanliness, examining the efforts of Booker T. Washington (who preached the "gospel of the toothbrush"), Jane Addams at Hull House, and Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement House. Indeed, we see how cleanliness gradually shifted from a way to prevent disease to a way to assimilate, to become American. And as the book enters the modern era, we learn how advertising for soaps, mouthwashes, toothpastes, and deodorants in mass-circulation magazines showed working men and women how to cleanse themselves and become part of the increasingly sweatless, odorless, and successful middle class. Shower for success!
. By illuminating the historical roots of America's shift from "dreadfully dirty" to "squeaky clean," Chasing Dirt adds a new dimension to our understanding of our national culture. And along the way, it provides colorful and often amusing social history as well as insight into what makes Americans the way we are today
Analysis Hygiene History
United States
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-243) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Print version record
Subject Hygiene -- United States -- History
Public health -- United States -- History
Hygiene -- history
Sanitation -- history
Social Change -- history
44.10 public health service: general.
HEALTH & FITNESS -- Healthy Living.
Hygiene
Public health
Hygiene
Geschichte
Schoonmaken.
Hygiƫne.
Culturele aspecten.
Preventieve gezondheidszorg.
SUBJECT United States
Subject United States
USA
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 1429400161
9781429400169
128052927X
9781280529276
9780199854011
0199854017