The Romans had excellent sanitation systems, with fresh water aqueducts and public bath houses free to everybody. But the Christian church associated these bath houses with orgies and debauchery, and for idealogical reasons took a step backward.
The ancient greeks drank wine diluted with water (1:5), and almost every other ancient civilisation I can think of either drank boiled water or alcoholic drink mixed with water, because water on its own was unsafe to drink.
Now, if your water might be infected with bacteria, because you don’t have yet the technical knowledge to build a sewage plant, and using water upstream while dumping sewage downstream doesn’t work on a long river with lots of cities, then washing yourself rarely is a good strategy. In southern countries, where the danger of salmonella or diahorrea-bacteria in normal water is higher, tourists are still advised to buy a bottle of cheap mineral water for things like brushing teeth, because every drop of water could lead to infection.
If you don’t know about invisible germs causing bacteria, you still notice that bad air = malaira causes sickness, so you keep your windows closed. (Today, we dry out the puddles where the moskitoes breed which transport the bacteria and viruses, but people couldn’t know that). Similar, you noticed that rats were connected to the Black Plague, you couldn’t know that the fleas on the rats carried the germs, and you couldn’t keep all rats out of wooden buildings before concrete or steel was easily available.
My mother bought a cookbook from the 19th century from the North Sea coast of Germany on vacation, and the eating habits were quite different then. People drank small beer (low alcohol content) and hardly ever ate veggies, unless boiled to mush, because veggies might cause illness (through germs), Milk could be infected with TB or other illness from the cow, but that was impossible to see at that time, so better cook it (no vitamins then, though). Meat is of course always cooked thoroughly.
As for the plastic gloves - I don’t think that’s because of hygiene, I think it’s from the custom of wrapping things in paper and similar, which doesn’t protect from germs, but keeps things looking nice.
Besides, studies have shown that these plastic gloves are actually worse for hygiene than bare hands washed regularly (that’s why my organic supermarket did away with them).
So in general, it was lack of knowledge combined with ideology (against bare bodies and similar) and necessity (if people live in a big city, but don’t have the technology for a modern sewage system, you have problems).
When the Europeans met the Native Americans the first time, who bathed daily in rivers, took regular steam baths for spiritual and bodily cleansing and lived in small groups without the chance for disease to spread far, the Europeans considered them uncivilised because they didn’t wear perfume. That perfume served not only to cover the smell of unwashed bodies (because, as said above, water was dangerous in Europe), but also partly as disnfectant - see todays use of aromatic oils with the right ingredients and concentration.
How many Americans today live in fact healthy and hygienic? Because the natural smell of sweat is so abhorrent, people prefer once again to use deoderant to mask or suppress normal smells, or they overreact and wash too much, damaging the skin. But they rarely take saunas (because of prudish reasons), they don’t walk in the open air, driving a car instead, and live in big cities out of necessity (while using drinking water reservoirs as boating lakes). Not much difference perhaps.