Moonspeaker Outage

The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Not a Coincidence (2026-05-11)

Some time ago good fortune led me to pick up and read Katherine Ashenburg's 2007 book, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. It is an excellent example of popular history done right. Ashenburg never talks down to the reader while presenting her material in a good-humoured, crisp prose that makes the book tricky to put down. The book designer had a romp through victorian and edwardian era black line artwork of various sanitation-related devices and products, and the particular hard cover I read was printed on sensible paper so that the photographs were legible. There are all manner of interesting tidbits (e.g. origins of the obnoxious phrase "the great unwashed") as well as serious material in the book – among other things, it is a thoughtful meditation on the management and mismanagement of water, and how cleanliness was constructed into a telltale marker of socio-economic class (but for the "black Irish" see Theodore Allen). There are a few things Ashenburg did not follow up on too much, which is on one hand too bad, on the other likely to do with space constraints. For instance, linen is genuinely resistant to stains, and so a person who wears linen underwear and shirt can indeed get quite clean by changing their linen, that is stripping off their dirty linen, sponge bathing, and then putting on fresh linen. Of course, the challenge remaining is to adequately clean and dry the dirty linen. But since Ashenburg is focussed on people washing themselves, this is not the book to look for details on laundries and household or institutional cleaning. For those topics, Judith Flanders and Ruth Goodman are the better sources. Still, my point here is not to review Ashenburg's book as such. Instead, I am going to discuss a startlingly apropos paragraph reflecting on early twentieth century culture in the united states.

When it came to rendering the world as clean and odourless as possible, the 1920s were a watershed decade. As cities expanded, and people worked close to one another in crowded offices and factories, they grew unhappily aware of the smells produced by their own bodies and those of others. The arrival of women in the work world accelerated this new sensitivity. The fastidiousness that had first surfaced, tentatively, in late-eighteenth century Europe was becoming an American obsession. At the same time, prosperity was at an all-time high. People could afford products that would enable them to live in a smell-less zone, a safe place where they would neither "offend" nor be "offended." (243-244)

There is, to put it mildly, a lot going on in this quote. Setting aside the absurdity of the third sentence, and it is absurd, because women have always been in the work world, in both its unwaged and waged regions, let's pause a moment on the point that the time period is the 1920s. If we think back to what had just preceded that telltale decade of glamour and excess, we smack immediately into the first world war. A war in which the fighting was characterized by stasis, trenches, and endless days of mud and muck because the irrigation and drainage structures were among the first destroyed. That war is the one from which most accounts of twentieth century trench foot, constant wet clothes, problematic latrines, endless lice, and infectious disease carried by those same lice and such unasked for companions as rats and their fleas. All this was quite apart from infectious diseases that spread directly between people. Antibiotics were non-existent, making the risk of infected wounds all the more appalling. Check out the photographs and paintings by people not engaged in trying to recruit fresh cannon fodder, and it is hard to miss the ever-present mud and evidence the soldiers were managing with often poorly fitted and generally inadequate uniforms and boots. They often look dirty and unkempt, even when relatively spruced up. It would not be unreasonable to expect something of a mania for personal cleanliness to develop, especially considering the first world war overlapped with the spanish flu epidemic. Add to this how the 1920s was the first era of serious advertising, and savvy salesmen knew the best products to sell would always be the ones that must by nature always be replaced, all the better if people could be persuaded they needed their own portions. The united states was already famous for its hucksters, fads, and hyperconsciousness about class markers. Once people were convinced they had to not just look clean but smell it, and the smell was defined as functionally "not like a living person," then they were more than primed for the new "American obsession."

I suspect it was in this era that the wry statement attributed to an apocryphal european found its way into the world as europeans defined it: "In America the men smell like women and the women smell like drug stores." The european must be apocryphal, considering the most common term for a place to buy medicines and basic hygiene items in the early twentieth century in europe looks to be "the chemist."

But now, let's step back and take closer note of the last clause in the quote, "a safe place where they would neither 'offend' nor be 'offended.' I find this last part especially interesting because in the past ten to fifteen years, a great many bullies have attempted to redefine what offends them as crimes to be punished, and to define for themselves an arbitrary "right" not to be offended. Those bullies are not referring in any way to bodily scent of course, they are referring to ideas and questions they don't like. To be sure, this is just one example of the broader tactic of such individuals, most often men, manipulating the ambiguities of language as part of an effort to coerce others. They conveniently deny the reality of context and connotations when it is useful for browbeating others or worse, as in suddenly insisting "offense" must mean only something which could be against the law, as opposed to something that merely "causes a person to feel upset, annoyed, or resentful," to paraphrase the OED. The thing joining these two notions of "offending" and "being offended" is an effort to control the thoughts and feelings of others. It is no coincidence that notions of social cleanliness and personal cleanliness have such troubling ties.

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