Half a century later the importance of personal cleanliness had become widely accepted, a truth beyond questioning. The new cleanliness had become a mass phenomenon. As much as the bathroom fostered cleanliness, the new hygiene promoted the diffusion of the bathroom by creating a demand for its advantages. The daily bath is more likely to be a feminine ritual — 12 women in every 100 bathe daily compared with only one man in 100. Leaving aside the discrepancies between this and earlier studies, the importance of the comment lay in how the newspaper defined cleanliness.

Source: thestar December 01, 2019 12:00 UTC