Bathing before plumbing: daily pitcher washes, rare baths

Miqo editors · 2 sources

Hot water was manual labor

A bucket of water weighs about 10 kilograms and had to be carried from a well or river. To wash your whole body, an adult needed several such buckets, and each had to be heated on a stove with firewood that someone also had to chop and carry. One wash took hours of someone else's labor, most often a woman's.

That is why washing split into 2 separate tasks. Daily washing - the face, neck, hands, and feet - was done from a pitcher over a basin and used many times less water. Full-body washing became an event: it was planned in advance and did not happen every week.

Pitcher and basin let water be poured over the hands from above: the dirty water ran into the basin, so no one washed in water already used.
Ash lye was made by pouring boiling water over wood ash, creating an alkaline solution that breaks down grease. It was used for laundry and hair washing; soap existed too, but it was saved.
A change of shirt absorbed sweat, and washing it was easier than heating water for the whole family.
A shared tub was used in turn: by the last person, the water had cooled and turned cloudy.

A clean shirt mattered more than clean skin

In 16th-18th-century Europe, water came under suspicion. After epidemics, public bathhouses were closed, and doctors repeated that hot water opened the pores and let infection in. Cleanliness moved to underwear: a white shirt changed often was seen as proof of good grooming. This is where the attention to collars and cuffs came from - the only parts of a shirt visible beneath a dress.

Where the steam bath survived - Russian and Finnish ones - washing kept its weekly rhythm. It was sustained not by a rule but by the stove: heating it for 1 person was wasteful, so everyone washed one after another on the same day. In Japan, baths were heated more often, but the water was not changed either: before getting in, everyone washed outside the tub.

MoTuWeThFrSaSu

Not a measurement, but a household schedule: a pitcher was enough on weekdays, and the bathhouse was heated for everyone on Saturday.

That day was most often Saturday, before Sunday service. But the rhythm was not a law: in cities with public bathhouses, people went to wash when they could, while in a house with servants, a basin of hot water could appear in the bedroom on any day of the week.

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Sources

Georges Vigarello, The Clean and the Dirty (1985) - a history of ideas about bodily cleanliness
Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirty on Clean (2007)