I can remember my Granny saying something like: As kids, we had a bath once a week, the other 6 days we washed ourselves at the sink. (1920ish Germany)
Any reader of Pepys diaries, and especially of Claire Tomalin’s biography of him, will know just how dirty London and Londoners were in the mid 17th century. There is no reason to suppose that fifty or a hundred years later, it would be much improved.
In 1653, John Evelyn wrote in his diary that he was going to experiment with “an annual hairwash”. Tomalin says that *“Every house had its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed. A rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking and whatever food was lying about, dirty linen waiting for the monthly wash and chamber pots waiting to be emptied into the street.” *
Similar in the US. Bathing was a Saturday thing for rural kids during the Great Depression. Dunno about the 18th century.
Wiki has some info: Bathing in the modern era.
You might want to check out Dr. Johnson’s London by Liza Picard. She covers topics like this in several centuries (Restoration London covers the 1660s); her writing style is conversational and amusing.
It’s not difficult to clean your hair using just hot water – and it would be even easier if you didn’t have modern “product” in it. But – speaking as someone who lives in New England, and whose hair is nearly waist-length, I can tell you that the washing part isn’t what would be tough in the winter. The DRYING part would suck. I can’t imagine having all that wet hair stuck to my back and head with only a fire and time to dry it.
How did people manage the itch from not washing your hair? I have experimented with this from long term camping trips and after a while, a couple weeks, it is not the oil that bothers you but the itch, your hair and scalp become very itchy, possibly from dust mites or maybe from the oil in your hair turning rancid. It is enough to drive you crazy, I don’t see how people could have gone for more then a month without washing their hair.
They brushed it a lot more, with thick scratchy boar or horse hair brushes. This distributes the oil better, as well as giving your head a nice scritch twice a day. Even when my mother was a girl, and shampoo was something that happened once or twice a week, women were told to brush 100 strokes morning and night. I don’t know about you, but I can brush my hair thoroughly in about 12. The other 88 aren’t about detangling, they’re about oil distribution and absorbing some of that excess oil into the bristles.
Plus, people just itched in general. Lice - head, pubic and body - were common. Rough wool and cotton itched. Feathers and goat hairs from the animals living in your main room in the winter itched. Really, The Olden Days sucked. Count your blessings and your shampoo bottles.
Brushing your your doesn’t help the itch, after a couple weeks the oil saturates all of the hair, it is evenly distributed.
Legend?
I heard once that Boston and/or Massachusetts once had a law prohibiting bathing without a Doctor’s order.
I suspect this was (or was alleged to have been) about Puritanical notions of nudity and Sin - you are going to touch yourself where?!.
Any confirmation besides “Dumb Laws” sites?
Reported.
Regards,
Shodan