American Cultures and Politics Lecture - Kathleen Brown
"Civilizing Bodies in the Early Atlantic and Antebellum United States"
Monday, May 19, 2008 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
For nearly three centuries, many ordinary Europeans and Euro-Americans regarded bathing with suspicion, as an unhealthy and immoral practice. This reluctance to bathe emerged despite longstanding
Judeo-Christian traditions that equated bodily cleanliness with spiritual purity and a vibrant medieval culture of bathing in public bath houses, private baths, and mineral springs. What happened to
turn people against the bath? How and why did they become convinced, several centuries later, that bathing was not only not dangerous, but a key to good health and moral virtue?
This talk addresses these major shifts in the history of the body, with special attention to the role of cultures in contact in the early Atlantic and the subsequent transformation in women’s
reputations for bodily cleanliness. By the middle of the nineteenth century, bathing had been reinstalled as a cornerstone of good health and hygiene. Middle-class women were newly defined by their
responsibility for enforcing standards of cleanliness in their homes and for spreading this ethos to the homes of people too poor to claim the protections of privacy. Like practices of body care, the
ideals for health that emerged in the nineteenth century reflected the new realities of urban life and a demanding, volatile, capitalist economy.
Kathleen Brown received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial
Virginia (1996) and Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2008). She teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania.
