According to the American Cleaning Institute (yeah, I wasn’t aware there was one either) ‘Nearly 9 in 10 Americans (87%) feel their best, both mentally and physically, when they have a clean home.’ If we’re talking the language of America, that sweet, sweet green; the cleaning product industries are projected to make $379.76 billion by 2032. The US cleaning services industry is expected to make $147.65 billion by 2030. Although in comparison to the rest of the world we do not necessarily put more emphasis on cleaning than our global counterparts, we clearly put high value on having a clean home. This was not always the case though.

So, to learn the history of our modern obsession with cleanliness we have to take it back to those crazy Victorian times. Let’s take it back to the 1860’s where we find the origins of germ theory. Up to this point the general population informed by popular science believed in miasma and zymotic theory. Miasmas being airborne emanations from rotting animal or plant matter. 

Zymotic diseases were associated with fermentation, which could generate what were sometimes called “organic poisons”—tiny bits of animal or vegetable matter that could transmit disease through personal contact.

Bad smells associated with filth and decay were considered to be an essential part of their infectiousness, so eliminating the source of a bad smell could also be associated with removing a source of disease. So could you imagine what Victorians would make of our love of kombucha and fermented foods.

In general though, Americans before the Civil War were pretty filthy. According to the book The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, by Katherine Ashenburg the Union convinced citizens that good hygiene helped control disease. Fun fact, Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect famous for designing New York’s central park and the grounds for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago headed the Sanitary Commission— a group initiated by women who wanted to contribute to the war effort that helped create a hygiene standard for the Union Army. More soap and water and less hacking at wounded soldier’s limbs without it. Seems to me on some level folks knew that cleanliness cut down on mortality even if they didn’t know what caused the mortality. The US army headed the campaign for soap and water and planted the seed for cleanliness to be seen as patriotic, progressive and distinctly American. It was also a great cultural marker that could delineate between rich and poor, immigrant and native. Outside of the influence of the North in the Civil War, what was driving American culture to cleanliness and disinfection? Fear.

During the Civil War death was common for young men but by 1900, ‘approximately one in five American children died before their fifth birthday’. Infant mortality, specifically, was very high, with rates reaching 100 or even 165 deaths per 1,000 live births in some areas. People at the time were dying of diseases that we don’t even think about, pneumonia, tuberculosis, cholera, even the flu could be a killer. People lived for a significantly shorter period of time in 1900, the average U.S. newborn could expect to live to 47.3 years of age. Death was an all too common fixture of pre-industrial America.

Prior to the turn of the century, the 1860s were a time of experimentation in science. Science was a popular topic with the public (most assuredly the middle class and up) would flock to concert halls to hear seminars on the latest theories by those individuals who were exploring new scientific territory. It’s during this era that the formulation of germ theory as we know it today is credited to Louis Pasteur, the guy most of us remember from 7th grade science class as having created the principle of pasteurization. Even less well known is Robert Koch, Pasteur’s predecessor who loved to play with dyes and slides all day long. This experimentation allowed him to identify separate bacteria responsible for specific diseases, specifically anthrax.  His research created a gold standard for microbiology and paved the way for Louis Pasteur to develop vaccines.

The funny thing is, even after this incredible body of work was delivered to science, ‘established’ science pushed back hard and rejected it. They were sticking to zymotic theory from 1865-1895. Western medicine underwent its own civil war between these two theories. The general public began to take to germ theory way before science did (remember those concert hall science talks?) which is why women’s hemlines went up. Think about how drastic that was in sexually repressed Victorian times . Table legs could be considered scandalous. Hemlines went up so women were no longer dragging their skirts in the mud and horse manure and for fear of contaminating their homes with germs. The technology of window screens also was invented to keep flies out of the home and women did double time making doilies for everything so any errant flies that did make it inside, wouldn’t contaminate food and surfaces with tuberculosis germs. 

With the ‘lessons learned’ from the Civil War, new standards of hygiene were incorporated into medicine, architecture and everyday life of America. With the advances of the industrial age coupled with advocacy for human rights, a new standard of living, dying and cleaning was created.