Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (review)

In what she calls the “first general history of cleanliness in the United States,” Suellen Hoy recounts how a people once described by European travelers as “dreadfully dirty” became a nation obsessed with keeping clean (p. xiv.) The book begins in the early 1800s, when the average American citizen lived in an appalling state of personal and household filthiness, described vividly in the first chapter. Although antebellum reformers scolded them for their untidy state, it was not until the Civil War—and more specifically, the work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission—that, Hoy believes, Americans began to shed their complacency about dirt.

Subsequent chapters look at how concerns about disease coupled with mass immigration gave rise to the great Progressive Era “city-cleansing” crusades and sanitary “Americanization” programs aimed at Southern freedmen and recent immigrants. In the 1910s and 1920s, schools and workplaces institutionalized higher hygiene standards, with the assistance of soap manufacturers and others who profited from the “business of cleanliness” (p. 140). Hoy concludes that the “American pursuit of cleanliness . . . reached its peak in the years following World War II,” and began to decline in the 1960s, as baby boomers rebelled against “bourgeois” standards of cleanliness and as working women had less and less time to clean house (p. 151).

Hoy does a remarkable job of synthesis, treating an important topic with the seriousness it deserves and at the same time managing to be entertaining. Throughout the book, she conveys the importance of class, ethnicity, race, and gender in shaping the American pursuit of cleanliness. She does an especially good job of assessing the “critical role of women as agents of cleanliness” (p. xiv), in their capacity both as housewives and mothers, and as professionals in fields such as home economics, visiting nursing, child health education, and social work (p. xiv).

Chasing Dirt would be an excellent choice for undergraduate and general readers, but its broad sweep and modest length may leave specialists in medical history more dissatisfied. While emphasizing the importance of disease concerns in fueling the campaign for improved hygiene standards, Hoy deals only briefly with the changing scientific and medical rationales underlying the cleanliness revolution. Social and cultural historians used to a darker perspective on body disciplines and expert knowledge may also find Hoy’s perspective a bit Whiggish. While stressing the ways in which poverty and prejudice constrained the pursuit of cleanliness, she views the pursuit itself as an unambiguous good, leaving the reader little doubt that on balance “it is certainly better to be clean than dirty” (p. xiv).

Finally, Hoy assumes a kind of American exceptionalism that non-U.S. historians may find annoying. Beyond a few anecdotes about European plumbing, and a reference to the fact that Americans use more water and build more bathrooms than any other Western nation, she provides no comparative evidence to back up her assertion that Americans are peculiarly obsessed about dirt. Given that the cleanliness revolution was not exclusive to the United States, it would have been useful if Hoy had made a little more effort to assess how and why the American experience differed from its European and New World counterparts. Do Canadians and Australians, who also have a history of mass immigration, share similar concerns about dirt?

Still, Chasing Dirt is a thoughtful, entertaining account of American attitudes toward dirt. It will be a great asset in the classroom.